FROM THE ARCHIVES, APRIL 1999
Frankly, she looks great. All curves and woman. Jet black hair falling off her face. Dangerous, especially her eyes. She swears often, has a sometimes filthy, sometimes impish, sense of humour, is as down to earth as they come. Tough, you’d better believe it. And you’d better also believe she has a heart of gold - because she does.

“I had balls - and a dick as well,” she says and laughs loudly.

Suze DeMarchi is reflecting on her stage self in the now lamented, much adored, Baby Animals. Sprawled across a booth in the Sebel Townhouse, sucking salaciously on a slice of watermelon, DeMarchi is still the queen of rock’n'roll. The only great Australian female rock singer of the past decade.

DeMarchi implicitly understood rock, she pumped it out of her veins, whipped it from her loins, delivered it with a voice that could wail, seduce, whisper, scream and roar. The Baby Animals - Dave Hill (still her guitarist of choice), Eddie Parise (bass), Frank Celenza (drums) and DeMarchi, rewrote the record books with their self-titled album: 350,000-plus sales, five singles, more platinum and gold than King Solomon’s Mines. Overseas tours supporting Van Halen, Robert Plant and more. A not-so-great, far-too-rushed, second album, Shaved And Dangerous, made under the watchful eye of Ed Stasium who didn’t get where DeMarchi and crew were at and then silence.

In 1995, the Baby Animals disappeared in a welter of complicated corporate conflict with their former management and record company. End of story.

Four years later, DeMarchi, now a married (to Nuno Bettencourt, formerly of Extreme) mother of three-year-old Bebe, is back with her first solo set, Telelove. And she’s moved on. Telelove pictures a songwriter and woman coming to terms with massive shifts in her personal life and her career. It’s unashamedly spiritual and metaphysical in places, quietly romantic, yet gritty, imbued with an underlying tough realism DeMarchi has always delivered.

The rock has given way to a broader musical picture, dabblings in different paints and colours. Where her brush strokes were either always bold and dramatic or soft and sensual before, now they are the tool to a cornucopia of designs, most of which work, although, at times, it’s evident she’s also feeling her way.

“I always wanted to be a boy on stage,” she says, defining her old persona. “I never wanted to be a girl.” That’s impossible. “I mean vocally. I never wanted to sing like a girl on stage. It was always like you’ve gotta have balls, you’re in a rock band.”

Now she has songs like the album’s title track, possibly the finest she’s written, an electronic air of great grace and mood, and the gorgeous Colour Of Love, the first song Nuno ever played to her and they sang at their wedding. Neither has balls. Nor do they need them. She’ll perform them live on her forthcoming tour and it will mark a new public face for her. This is all about change and challenge, although she won’t desert her legacy; mixed in with the new songs will be some old Baby Animals favourites and some covers she’s been dying to loosen the reigns on.

Why all this emphasis on live? Simply because DeMarchi’s songs have always taken on new dimensions on stage, and only on stage is DeMarchi true to Suze.

“Put me in a studio and I enjoy it, ” she says, “but I haven’t got an audience. You’ve got to pretend. That’s the performance element for me. If I’m not in front of a crowd I don’t try as hard. Live, you just try harder, you connect with the energy. That’s the hunger, you know.”
Whether she can satisfy her devotees will be interesting. DeMarchi is an icon for hard rockers. She’s cut more great gigs than most and I’ve seen a lot of ‘em. A favourite memory is of the Baby Animals at Fremantle Oval playing for the first time in front of all Suze’s relatives and friends in a most triumphant homecoming. The crowd was 10,000, 15,000 strong and on the edge of the mosh pit, far away enough for safety but close enough to see, stood her mum, her dad, aunts and uncles. And they were all beaming as they watched her bring the house down. In a performance of such power, precision, timing and gut emotion, that hyperbole became irrelevant, she was peerless. Then the Baby Animals were streets ahead of their contemporaries, just peaking and flexing muscles born of confidence and self-respect. Imperious.

Backstage it was a family affair. Little kids, middle-sized kids, big kids, lots of strong Italian features and jet black hair. DeMarchi and the Animals, all a little worn and frayed, relaxed for once. The Baby Animals were stars but there was nothing ostentatious or holier-than-thou. They were the kids who had grown up, struggled and finally done good.

“Can I just say the Baby Animals did a lot of really good things,” she says. “Toured the world a few times, sold a substantial amount of records [Baby Animals is one of the 20 biggest selling albums of the decade in Australia, the second highest selling Australian debut of all time] but we never got past that.

“The second album was a mistake, we went into it far too quickly, and that was one of the things that … to me the joy went from it and it started becoming a job. I want to have fun doing it. I don’t want it to be a job.

“You know, four years later I didn’t really want to do that again. We’d done it all. I didn’t want to make another Baby Animals record. I wanted to make a record that was a little bit different and a good reflection of how I felt as a singer. And people won’t let you do that. They want a Baby Animals album that rocks.”

In other words at least approach Telelove with an open mind. Nothing stays the same for ever. And there’s no reason why it should. DeMarchi doesn’t want to be just a boy on stage anymore. She wants more than balls. The only unanswered question is when she figured it out.
She smiles in her tough girl way, picks up a slice of rock melon and starts chewing on it. “You know, you get tired of band politics sometimes too. A lot of it wasn’t just musical, a lot of it was … Look, now I’m a mum 23 hours a day, that’s what takes up my time. The other one hour in the day I don’t want to be fighting with the band, living everyone else’s life, saying are we going to do this or that. People agreeing with me but not giving me enough validation to do whatever it was.

“If you’re going to do it, you have to be a million miles an hour behind it. You’ve got to be dedicated, you’ve got to want to get up, get on a plane, leave whatever you have there and go and do it.”

The statement begs the obvious: does she want to do it all again? Her answer is blunt and the heart of the DeMarchi past, present and future. “Yes, momentarily, for now. As a mother I decided when I wanted to have baby and that I was going to be a good mum so that is the priority. And if it wasn’t the priority I’d be an arsehole. That’s far more important than being in a band but on the other hand if you’re going to go and do this then you’ve got to be prepared. I’ve been in Australia since September last year. I didn’t necessarily want to stay here that long, away from home [in Boston] but that’s how long it takes.

“I guess in the end I reversed the situation on those guys in the band by saying, ‘I live in Boston now, do you want to do it? Do you want to be there?’ I got a ‘yes’ but I got a really hesitant ‘yes’. In order to make that decision to leave the band, that was the reaction I needed. You see what I mean? There is no place or time for half-decisions, it’s either all or nothing. Now and then.”

And now she’s the boss which she’s always wanted to be, but then again she always really was. The Baby Animals was her band, make no mistake. “I did want that but I didn’t want to have to keep going back to people and saying ‘Is that alright with you’. You have to that in a band because a band’s a democracy. Well I’m not going to do it anymore. Now at the end of the day it’s me. I’m the decision-maker.”

But the Baby Animals wasn’t really a democracy. “It was … as long as they did everything I said.” She nibbles on a strawberry thoughtfully. “Maybe it was just me finding an excuse to leave the band by saying all that.” It wasn’t.

Suze DeMarchi just grew beyond some artificial confines and the restrictive emotional byplay that sometimes overpowers band life. She became a mum and that was simply the biggest riff she’d ever struck in her life. Suze DeMarchi found love and found something that you might call soul.

“There’s definitely that spiritual element,” she says softening. “You can’t avoid that when you’ve given birth to someone. It changes you completely. I had different things to write about.” Fresh [on Telelove] is about the birth of Bebe: “I wasn’t sure/Something like that existed/It wasn’t in anything listed/Kiss me again/You light my subconscious/And I’m moving over/It’s over”. Shock.

“The whole thing was just too weird. Some women don’t get affected that way. We all get affected the same way after you become a mother, dealing with being a mother - it’s the best thing you’ll ever do. The actual birth process though is mind-blowing. I don’t think you ever get over it.

“You don’t think of yourself anymore, much less anyway. Someone else comes first. You never find that love until you have a child because it’s that compete selfless love you get. It’s painful sometimes.

“And even when you find someone you want to marry and you’re in love with them, that just doesn’t even go near the love you have for a child.” She mops up the remaining bits of fruit. “I love being a mum. It’s really rewarding but it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done. But she’s a great, funny little girl. She’s fantastic. Poor little thing she’s got her whole life mapped out for her already.

“I think she’s going to be an actress. She definitely loves the stage, loves commanding attention in a room. Don’t know where she got that from.”

Neither do I. Suze. Neither do I.