Rebecca O'Connor: “Sex is with one person. When you’re on stage, you’re doing it with thousands!”
PAUL SMITH
It is the late 1970s in County Cork, Ireland. Seven-year-old Rebecca O’Connor is playing in her bedroom. Her adoptive father, Michael, shouts out to her: “Becky, there’s something on the telly you need to see.”
She runs and sits with her father. What she saw in the next three minutes would entirely change the course of her life which, at that point, revolved around becoming the junior national champion of Irish dancing.
“I saw the lips, I saw the legs, I saw the big hair and I heard this voice. I was just a little girl and she was a woman, but I thought, I want to BE that.”
“I was the only black Irish dancer in the world at that time and I was eighth in the country. But I’d never seen anything like Tina Turner’s dancing. She was strutting, kind of like a horse; there was this awkwardness to her, but it was perfect. I’ve studied her ever since.”
It is 2010 in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Tina Turner is watching footage of a singer giving it her all. The lips, the hair, the legs, the voice. Yes, it is Rebecca O’Connor, performing her Tina Turner tribute show in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Turner calls her Australian manager, Roger Davies. “Tell Rebecca she’s so good she’s scary. If I had her energy today I’d still be touring.”
In the present day, O’Connor is still struggling to comprehend that both scenarios are connected; that her pursuit of painstakingly personifying one of the world’s greatest solo female performers has been validated.
She says, a little short of breath: “For the queen of rock herself, who’s sold 180 million albums, solo, to say that about me …” Her voice trails off. “It’s just amazing.”
But plenty of water would pass under the bridge before this tiny dancer could sing Proud Mary to the real thing, even if it was just from Turner’s television.
The major event that propelled O’Connor from her job as a Barcelona-based beauty therapist to becoming the world’s best Turner tribute artist, was her winning the television talent search Stars In Their Eyes a decade ago with a rendition of (Simply) The Best. It scored 89 out of 90. A staggering 33 million viewers watched the-then 27-year-old take out the European title.
“When I was in Irish dancing I used to do a lot of cabaret shows as a kid,” O’Connor says, retracing the journey. “I started introducing the Tina thing into my routine when I was 11 or 12 years old.
“I used to dress up as Tina Turner and I’d mime along to a tape. By 13, I was singing like her, by my mid-20s I looked like her. My mother sent in a tape of me doing Tina to the producers of Stars In Their Eyes. They said, ‘You’re in. You’re through to the last 100.’ They skipped me through all the knockout stages.
“I’m very close to my parents, Anne and Michael O’Connor,” she says. “They adopted me when I was two-and-a-half months old. They’ve always believed in me. Without them, I would never have taken this path.”
What O’Connor saw when she kneeled in front of the telly with her father, just as enthralled, was more than an idol, or a mentor, or a new favourite artist.
Far removed from her Cuban kinfolk in the Caribbean – her biological parents are Cuban and Irish – O’Connor had grown up identifying wholly with Irish culture and “white Irish people”. But looking at Tina was like looking in a mirror for the first time. “I have the same body shape, the same colour skin,” O’Connor says. The profound connection she struck was one linked with identity. “I just thought I was her.”
In her early music videos Turner portrayed herself as a woman out of place, which forged the bond even deeper for O’Connor.
In her breakthrough single Private Dancer, for example, the newly solo Turner strutted her stuff through a hyper-white world of actors and dancers, their faces dusted to a gothic pallor to accentuate her dark skin. “I related to her on every level,” O’Connor says.
“I was the only black girl in the village. Everyone was white. I loved it. It was always positive attention because there was no other black dancer in the world in my experience. I stood out like a sore thumb. Everybody else with their ringlets and me with my afro.”
A couple of things still stand out about the 37-year-old, aside from her glossy black hair, which is closer to ringlets than afro these days. She has a nervous energy that is downright contagious. We’re sitting on a couch in
The Beach, Albert Park, and you can feel it like a forcefield.
And she has rich brown eyes that don’t light on anything for long; if they are a window to her soul, then all the lights are on inside and there’s a party.
Is there any reason she’s a little tense today? “It’s been two months since a show, so I’m sorry if I’m a bit on edge. I need a stage. Give me a stage!” she says.
I suggest, hopefully, that we do a little shot of something from the top shelf, pop on the Turner backing tape she travelled around Europe with for a year and that she do her thing at The Beach, Albert Park.
She considers the idea and then says that she stays off the hard liquor for “figure reasons”.
They’re good reasons indeed. For the obvious fact of the matter, emphasised by a short black dress and toned legs tapering down to appropriately Tina-esque heels, is that O’Connor is fit. Watching footage of her performing live you quickly see a link between superior fitness and imitating a dynamo such as Turner.
Forget triathlon. Try a Tinathlon. One minute O’Connor is singing Nutbush City Limits, strutting with the short, staccato high-steps of a dressage horse, targeting her calves and glutes. The next she’s running from one side of the stage to the other, working her band up to another hectic crescendo in The Best.
Add to these physical demands the fact that as a singer you can never, not even for one little extra puff, sound like you’re out of breath. A marathon coach once told me you should be able to talk while you train, or you’re not fit enough. Try singing Proud Mary while you train. Welcome to O’Connor’s world.
“It’s a physically demanding show,” O’Connor says. “You can’t let that energy drop at all. You have to be at the top of it all the time. We’ve worked really hard on the set list, to get the balance right. I can’t have four or five belters all at once. I do three fast ones into a nice slow one. I sing everything in the same key as her too. When it works it’s the best feeling in the world.”
Better even than sex? “Sex is great, but the stage is just …” O’Connor looks down and visibly darkens, perhaps in anticipation of what’s about to come out of her mouth. “Sex is only with one person. When you’re on stage, you’re doing it with thousands!”
She might be able to sing like Turner, look like Turner and carry off the same sexual energy, but searching for deeper parallels in O’Connor’s life proves fruitless: “I’ve had a fantastic upbringing and a fabulous life,” she says.
“But Tina, she went through so much suffering. It’s part of the reason her music has so much power and pride. Ike took her to hell and back. He discovered her, but he destroyed her as well. She was totally abused all the time. I’ve never had anything like that happen. Tina’s a fighter. She survived it and came out better.
“I have so much respect for her. If I met her, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably just hug her or something. Or I might run away!”
However, there is one vital coincidence. After huge early successes and then a period of languishing – Tina at the bottom of the charts with four successive solo album flops and Rebecca singing along to backing tapes on tiring club tours of Europe – both women had their careers resuscitated by Australian band managers.
For Turner it was Roger Davies, who discovered and managed Sherbet through their halcyon days. His belief and guidance resulted in the album Private Dancer.
O’Connor’s connection was Melburnian Dennis Dunstan, tour manager of Fleetwood Mac for 23 years.
They connected in Brisbane, on O’Connor’s backing tape tour. In O’Connor, Dunstan saw the reincarnation of Turner. He recruited a band of crack Sunshine Coast musos – as tight as much of O’Connor’s wardrobe – and toured her around the country.
Last year she played 46 Australian shows and a handful of sold-out performances in South Africa. Dunstan, who multitasks as her drummer, couldn’t help but show his old mate Mick Fleetwood the footage: “Mesmerising” was his one-word response.
Dunstan’s belief and significant investment in O’Connor has also led her to discover Noosa, a place she describes as “paradise” and where she sees herself settling in years to come: “I’ve lived there for 18 months. I have a place on the river and I have some fabulous friends; it’s just brilliant,” O’Connor says. “I’m on a sponsorship, but I’d love to live here. They’re asking me to sing on Australia Day next year so that will help!”
As for singing her own songs, which she describes as “rock stuff, like Amy Winehouse” in the tradition of her favourite vocalists Chaka Khan, Etta James and Gladys Knight, there will be “a time and a place to do it. I don’t want to release anything until this show has taken off.”
One question remains: how does she “become” Tina?
“It’s the wig,” O’Connor confesses. “As soon as the wig goes on, I’m in character. I’m Tina. The wig changes my whole face, I get an attitude as soon as it’s on. It’s showtime. As soon as I step onto the stage and hear the first song going, which is Steamy Windows, I’m fully in the zone. I feel it, I love it, I breathe it and I miss it terribly when I’m not in it.”
How to sing like Tina
Proud Mary is the kind of song that hurts your throat. To listen to. Yet elite vocal performers such as O’Connor sing it, and two hours’ worth of other larynx-lacerating hits, up to five times a week. So what’s the secret to sounding like Tina, without turning your trachea into toast?
Warm up \ The more you condition your voice, the less it will break down. Fitness levels for your voice have to be at peak to sing Tina.
Milk is a bad choice \ Don’t drink milk or anything that coats your throat.
Sleep as much as possible \ It has an amazingly good effect on your voice.
No alcohol \ When you wake up with that croaky voice after a few drinks, well that kills your chance of singing pretty much all of Tina’s catalogue.
Cigarettes? \ I’d never recommend them, but I do smoke. I limit myself to weekends only.
WIN!
Be prepared to stand in your seats as Rebecca O’Connor delivers her flawless rendition of Tina’s greatest hits. Two lucky TWR readers have the chance to win a double pass each to The Palms at Crown on Friday, March 9, valued at $130/double pass.
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