Singer-songwriter Lucie Thorne courts an unlikely international fan base.
Lucie Thorne is big in Transylvania.
And I don't just mean the review on a Romanian website that declared of her 2009 album, Black Across the Field: ''You can't just listen to this album while you cook an omelet.'' Though, admittedly, the egg-dish rating system has something going for it.
As silly as it may sound for the singer-songwriter daughter of a Tasmanian poet, they love her in the Carpathians, down by the Black Sea, along the lower Danube and quite possibly a few more places where they pay with the Romanian leu.
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''It's a slightly unusual place to have established a fan base, but it's one of the beautiful surprises you get,'' Thorne says, amused as much as amazed.
Two tours there have given her not just ''a soft spot for that part of the world'', but a taste for its varied delights, from sausage and liver to more liquid refreshments. Speaking of which, what do they drink in Bucharest? ''Kind of anything actually, but there's a lot of beer drinking going on in Romania in general.''
And what does one eat as a visitor to Romania? ''Mostly beer.''
''Maybe I just made the wrong, or the right, friends, I don't know,'' she says. ''I fell in with a crew of young punk blokes who seemed to live on beer and cigarettes, but I went back there last year and did a bunch more shows in Bucharest and Transylvania and I did find myself supporting an array of amazing local talent, all somewhere in the punk and metal spectrum.''
How does a rootsy, hushed-voiced Australian woman who often performs in Australia with musicians as likely to play jazz as country, find herself among hard-edged blokes in a scene dominated almost entirely by young men?
''Part of it was just their incredible eagerness to be hospitable. [They'd say] 'You're our international guest star' so they wanted me to headline all these shows,'' she says with a laugh. ''I walked into the first gig to hear the other band soundchecking and I thought, it's crazy enough to be on the same bill as these guys but if they want me to go on stage after them, I think I might be killed or something.''
She managed to talk her way back down the bill to somewhere in the middle and then, though she readily admits ''shock and confusion was primary among the audience'' at the start, the response at the end was extraordinary.
''Pretty much the first question everyone asked me when I got off stage was, 'What the f--- are you doing here?' but people had never seen anything quite like me and they really dug it,'' she says.
Clearly intense songs about dramatic love and sex translate easily, irrespective of the language. Even more so when sung by someone like Thorne who specialises in need, desire and the bits that follow. It seems they get her in Transylvania in a way more emotionally repressed Australians can't without the help of a few beers and a quiet sob under the doona.
Romanians and Australians could be forgiven for thinking that, for Thorne, on the evidence of her albums so far, love is dramatic or it isn't there at all. Of course Thorne makes the reasonable point that not all the songs are autobiographical, although she lets slip that the past year or two has been more challenging than most: ''I'll spare you the details, but I have found myself laughing again recently.''
However, the emotional impetus behind the songs, whether they are character songs or autobiographical, are never unclear. The writer behind these songs does not squib when it comes to just how hot lust is, just how terrifyingly exciting love is and just how breathtakingly awful losing it can be.
''The passion drives me along,'' she says. ''It's definitely dangerous and gets me into all sorts of trouble. But that same kind of passion is at the centre of pretty much everything, my writing and making music. It's kind of a compulsion as much as anything else, it's in the middle of me. Maybe that's not a smart way to live. But what can you do? That's my lot.''
Would she have it any other way?
''No, no,'' she says, then pauses. ''Well, maybe I'd change a few things. But not much. There's a lot of joy kicking around.''
Lucie Thorne plays the Camelot Lounge, in Marrickville, on Friday.
Source : http://www.smh.com.au/
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