After spending her childhood days in cold Montreal, Canada, and late teen years in steamy LA Wendy Matthews moved to Australia equipped with an in-bred warmth and a certain sense of cool.  That and an indelible singing voice that has managed to strike a chord in a million music listener's minds.

Wendy Matthews looks calm and relaxed behind her dark sunglasses; her ebony locks cascading down the back of her strong neck; her short black dress, light, airy and sleeveless so that it accentuates her long, lithe limbs.  Once she takes off the sunglasses, her eyes bewitch and her azure confidence is clarified.  She gives a dazzling smile, then takes in the whole room with her gaze so that she is at once comfortable and at ease.

She could fool you into thinking she was a movie star this spellbinding woman, but then she lets out that husky voice and there is no doubt she is a singer: one of the most ingenious female singers, well recognised and respected in this country (count seven ARIA awards).

The darkness of Matthews' shades and the sheen of her dress today suggest an air of sadness about her.  She doesn't mention her demons directly but if you listen intensely you can almost hear them: of her friend Michael Hutchence who would be buried the next day after his tragic suicide a week prior; of her break up with fellow musician, friend and lover Sean Kelly.

As we chat, a hair stylist is busy taming her locks, getting Wendy ready for her Cream photographic session.  The singer lights up a cigarette, and I chastise her, pointing out that smoking could ruin her voice.  Then I remember the huskiness of it, and wonder if this is a result of the habit, but she stubs out the suggestion with a flick of ash.  "I got it from being with someone who was a heavy smoker."

Although she doesn't mention Kelly directly, there are clear signs in conversation and throughout her latest album Ghosts that he is regularly in her thoughts.  Matthews describes the album as being "about relationships, relationships and um, relationships."

Actually it is an album which courses along almost like an abridged version of Matthews' life so far.  There are remnants of her childhood and references to the rites of passage ("So much of our early years are indelibly tattooed on our chromosomes, you know.  I'm trying to explore a little bit of that now"); reminiscence of young love through to adult life along with all its heartbreak, hope and salvation. Matthews' views these memories as ghosts; hence the title of the album.  "I've noticed especially over the last few years that there are all these patterns in all aspects of your life.  You keep repeating them, obviously unless you change them.  Things will come out to haunt you until you get them right. These are some of my ghosts...".

Matthews is on a break from touring her current album and has been pleased with the way in which the tour is shaping.  "I'm very much enjoying the live stuff these days," she says with enthusiasm.  "Everything else is kind of bull***t but I'm really having a good time with the live stuff.  We've been playing little theatres absolutely everywhere".

It is clear that this tour marks a departure for Matthews.  She is no longer the medium for someone else's words.  The lyrics she sings now are the words wrenched from inside her heart and mind, and when she sings them, she is confiding in the audience something she herself has experienced.  Indeed, these days, the gospel really is according to Matthews.  "It's getting a little bit easier [opening up] than when we first started touring, but you just have to think: this is what I do.  You have to get to another place...and if you want to be someone with some integrity you have to say what you feel, even if it is a little bit tricky..."

It was not a conscious decision on Wendy's part to make this, her fourth solo album, her most personal to date.  "I did want to write most of this record which makes it more personal but being more personal wasn't really the intent.  I've got a songwriting partner in London and we get together once a year and come up with things and really we were waiting for the right, [she pauses looking for the write word] home.  So some of the songs are very new and some were written before I started the previous record.  I think the first track on the album, 'Break The Girl', we wrote six years ago."

The songwriting partnership she speaks of is with Englishman Glenn Skinner (they co-wrote nine of the 13 tracks on the album).  "He was great," Matthews says, "when we first met we just clicked.  It's a rare and nice thing to find somebody you can write with like that."  Over the years, between the cycles of recording and touring either Wendy would go over to England, or Skinner would visit Australia and they would write intensely for five weeks at a time.  Skinner also co-produced the album, and together they dealt with the several pressures in developing it.
"You live in each other's pockets and you eat together and fall into your own beds at night but basically first thing in the morning you're there together again.  But it's fantastic."

Matthews' seven ARIAs "live" on the cactus shelves in her Bondi home.  "They seem to be weathering well," she says.  She doesn't hold them up as trophies to success; as barometers of how far she has come in her adopted country, just as, well, cactus shelf company.
Matthews' isn't one to dwell on the nature of her popularity and fame.  She doesn't have any conception as to how she fits into the Australian music scheme of things.  "I think a lot of us [fellow Australian artists] are just so busy doing whatever we're doing that we don't, or I don't, see the objectivity of it all.  That's really one of those questions when I have to turn to the person next to me and say, "I don't know!".  Even to people that say 'What sort of music do you do?', [I say] I don't know."

What she does know, and this is transparently clear, is that she loves to make music.  She adores singing.  She was always meant to sing, and she didn't care in which capacity.  Even today, you'd sense she'd be content in the shadows, singing backup for some other soul.  Perhaps the earliest sign that Matthews would forge a career as a singer was at the age of four, when she performed on Sesame Street, the long running Canadian children's television show.  

"It was no career move, believe me," she shrugs with a deep laugh.  "My mother knew some people in the Canadian film board and they needed this little voice to sing the songs about a letter, you know, the song for the letter 'O', so I did some of those...I don't even remember it really.  There was something about a goat going over a hill...it was a while back now.  I hope they've got some new young kid to redo the song..."

Matthews was sixteen when she decided to leave her home in Montreal to go busking with friends.  "My mother was very supportive and very lenient.  I don't know if I could have been so lenient with a sixteen year old girl".  She and her friends travelled around Canada and the US, as far south as a little town in Mexico, then settled in Los Angeles for seven years.

The city of silicon hyper-realism indeed left an indelible mark on Matthews.  "I was well and truly ensconced [in Los Angeles].  It's a place that if you stay there for more than two years, there's something there that grabs you.  And it's the kind of best and worst of everything.  I don't mean to completely trash it because there's a lot of magic there, but really, it's just the epitome of crap.  Living there, you eventually forget that there is anything beyond."

She escaped the pseudo-seductive lifestyle of LA after being offered a tour to Australia.  It was only supposed to last for six months, but she ended up staying and has called this home twelve years since.

The final track on "Ghosts" was written by another classic Australian chanteuse, Deborah Conway.  "I really admire her lyric writing," says Matthews, defining the track "Mountains" as "the simplicity of that universal feeling that once you take that first step, something that was completely insurmountable, now seems to be just a little bit easier to get through.  And the mountains turn into mounds of clay, hopefully."

On the back of the CD sleeve is a copy of a mosaic tile which Matthews made herself.  It was one of the first mosaic pieces she created (the art is now a great hobby of hers).  She did a course and found the experience fun and therapeutic.   "It's something about mixing up bits and pieces and putting them back together again that's really therapeutic," she explains.  "Just getting into the cement and pushing it around and doing a bit of rendering."  

The image of the hand seems to be reaching out saying, "Head up! Head up! This mountain needs climbing..." It's an invitation by Matthews, extended to her listeners.  Maybe then the mountains might seem a lot smaller, like mounds of clay.

Craig Jacobs - Cream Magazine - Autumn 1998
Helen White  - Cream Studio Photoshoot