A Little Bird Told Me by Jeff Apter

Author:Jeff Apter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

10

Baby makes three

Falling into you carries me far enough away

I just hope that the wind doesn’t blow you away.

Lyrics from ‘Falling Into You’

As interest in The Captain gradually built, Kurt and I began to slowly drift apart. That makes it sound as if the two were related but I don’t think they were; though Kurt wasn’t always comfortable in my world, it wasn’t because he was jealous of my success. He came out with me on the road occasionally, and he enjoyed some of the travel that came with my job, but he was always so dreadfully shy, someone who only ever felt at home when he was at home, back on Norfolk Island. Things were different for me, I loved Norfolk too but my life was taking me elsewhere.

One of the sweetest things from this time was that the people on Norfolk were really proud of what we had achieved with The Captain. And I say ‘we’ quite deliberately. Even though it was my name on the cover and me speaking during the interviews, it still felt very much like a family effort. That was vitally important to me, and went to show that all those concerns I’d had about ‘going solo’ were pretty much unfounded. I enjoyed going out on tour just as much as I had during the time of the Ringers, pretty much because my family was still involved with doing the hard stuff – management, merchandising, arranging tours and so on – while all the fun things were my domain. I never felt alone, and had plenty of people to share the good times with.

But my break-up with Kurt was inevitable, and I probably did hasten our split a little more than him. It wasn’t a messy end; there were no hard feelings, and a lot of love and goodwill remained between us. We were together for about three years; it had been the first serious relationship for both of us. But we’d simply run our course and in the long run I think it was our very different personalities that pushed us away from each other.

I guess that on paper one of the biggest moments for me during The Captain period was winning the Best Female ARIA in October 2000. The year before the record had won the Best Country Album ARIA, which, although still a surprise, sort of made more sense – after all, it was a country record. That was when Slim Dusty made his comment about me being totally country, which meant a lot given the resistance to that in some circles. But when it came to the mainstream ARIAs, even getting nominated left me gobsmacked. At first I thought, ‘Were there only five girls with albums this year? Why have they put a country artist like me on the shortlist?’ I only knew half the artists who were at the awards. I was still living in my own little music world, where I was listening to Gillian Welch, not trying to learn about Oz pop.

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