What was left, and what comes next, for Clare Bowditch

TWENTY years ago, Melbourne’s pop indie darling Clare Bowditch surprised her own parents by scooping the ARIA for Best Female Artist with her breakthrough album What Was Left.

Recorded in a cobbled back shed with her then boyfriend, producer and drummer, and now husband, Marty Brown, a year after they had their first child, the album was profoundly intimate, and in equal measure, cheeky, rebellious, and heartbreaking.

Bowditch is excited by the tour to celebrate the anniversary.

“It was the album that brought us to the Australian people and let us find our audience,” she said.

“It was a surprise for us to write this little homespun album in a shed about grief and love, and then to win an ARIA.

“My manager and family were like ‘It’s great to be nominated’ but winning that sort of stuff didn’t happen to people like us.

“We didn’t have radio play, but it was this beautiful creeper album, and people seem to treasure it still.”

In a 20-year career as an artist and storyteller, actor, broadcaster, community advocate and author, Bowditch reckons she was mostly ‘just raising kids and pets and trying not to f*** it up’.

Now reworking her breakout album and armed with a swag of new material, she is preparing to re-enter the fly zone.

“It’s long overdue. I never stopped writing songs. I’ve written hundreds of songs over the last decade, but I haven’t released any,” Bowditch said.

 

“I love the process of writing, but each time we came to getting a collection of songs together and recording it, I just wasn’t ready to start putting stuff out in the world again.

“But these shows are an extended date night, really,” the artist said.

“I’ll be with Marty, my producer and long-term band mate, who happens to be the father of our three children.

“Our eldest is 22 now, they’ve grown up, and it’s amazing to hit the road again.”

The singer-songwriter agrees that a certain amount of retrospective wisdom comes with reworking older songs.

“Very few last the test of time, but there are a couple that have stuck with me,” she said.

“The songs are buddies, and songwriting is a relationship that you either foster, or you don’t, and sometimes, like life, it’s just swings and roundabouts.”

Bowditch plays the Citadel in Murwillumbah on September 26.

For tickets, visit events.humanitix.com/clare-bowditch