Tina Arena

“It’s important that you zoom out.” That’s the way Tina Arena says she makes sense of her career - but taking an aerial view of a career that’s spanned nearly forty years is no easy task.

For this singer, songwriter and international pop icon, zooming out reveals an extraordinary story that takes in four decades of incredible highs, gut-wrenching lows, numerous hurdles and countless achievements, but it’s also the story of the true force of this amazing performer’s creative spirit. Incredibly, that story’s latest chapter looks to be the most explosive yet: ‘Reset’, Tina Arena’s first original studio album in a decade, has propelled her back to the top of the charts in her native Australia and is on the verge of a full-blown global renaissance.

With 10 million album sales under her belt, the World Music Award and Brit Award nominated singer songwriter was recently voted by her Australian musical peers as the greatest Australian female singer of all time. Hers has been true international success: she’s enjoyed 2o Top 20 hits worldwide, and in France alone has sold 5m records and received that country’s highest cultural honour, a Knighthood of the Order of National Merit – a first for any Australian artist. With six ARIA Awards and two World Music Awards to her name she’s worked with a startlingly diverse array of legends including Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, Nile Rodgers, Tiesto, Desmond Child and Andrea Bocelli. She’s also an acclaimed star of the stage: in the same year that she opened the Sydney Olympics, Arena scored plaudits for her role in the West End production of Notre Dame de Paris, following that with a role in Cabaret in 2002, and Chicago in 2007. 1995’s ‘Don’t Ask’, which included globe-conquering megahit ‘Chains’, remains one of Australia’s Top 10-selling albums of all time, and was owned by 1 in 4 Australian homes within twelve months of its release and is to date 14x Platinum.

But with her current work Tina’s career turn an exciting new corner. In ‘Reset’ she boasts a collection of innovative, fresh-sounding tracks with state-of-the-art production complementing the melodic, intensely personal songwriting style that has made her one of the planet’s most robust recording artists. It’s an album that quickly went platinum in Australia when it was released at the end of 2013, reviving interest in her back catalogue to such an astonishing degree that at one point 7 of her albums - and 8 singles - appeared in the iTunes chart simultaneously.
In the UK, a country Tina called home for many years in the 2000s, it’s proof that Tina’s ability to tell stories that resonate, move and inspire, extends far beyond ‘Chains’, that hit that established her credentials back in 1994. “The circle eventually goes around,” she explains. “It’s been nearly 20 years since ‘Chains’ became a huge hit in the UK, but I absolutely refuse to be somebody known as a one-hit wonder. I just personally refuse to be any part of that.” With a gold album and further hit singles in the UK, including the Andrew Lloyd Webber penned ‘Whistle Down The Wind’, and dance hit ‘Never (Past Tense)’ a one hit wonder she is not.

Tina Arena’s ceaseless overseas impact since ‘Chains’ is testament both to the singer’s reticence to observe creative barriers, and her instinctive demolition of geographical ones. But the latter is in her blood. The daughter of Sicilian immigrants who traveled to Australia on a £10 ticket with branches of the family now scattered around the world - in France, Argentina, New York and beyond. “The Sicilians!” she smiles. “When they left, they really left. There were no foundations: they literally had to build them. That’s where I come from.”

By age seven she was already one of Australia’s most recognised faces, known across the land as Tiny Tina from legendary 70s and 80s TV behemoth Young Talent Time. Ten years later she was touring Australia in a production of Joseph and performing with Lionel Richie while coping, she remembers, with “all the complexities and insecurities of a teenager who lived her life in the spotlight”. The next ten years would be turbulent: at age 23 she’d launched her pop career in earnest, but by 27, with ‘Chains’ blasting from radios around the world, she was in an unhappy relationship and, she says, “completely lost. I had no sense of identity - I was absolutely at the prime of my career, and lost.” Again, ten years can make all the difference: by 2007 she was a mother, and truly in love for the first time in her life. “I’d finally found my happiness as a woman,” she recalls. “I had the human fulfilment that I’d been looking for. The changes in four decades - wow. I mean, I’ve seen absolutely everything, and I actually feel very privileged to have seen all those evolutions.”

A defining moment in Tina’s career had come in the mid-90s when Tommy Motolla, the music exec who’d guided Mariah Carey to stardom, decided he wanted to turn Tina into the next global superstar. It was an uneasy time. “Everybody else’s ego was what it was very clearly all about,” Tina explains. “It was about everybody else. If I had have been prepared to sacrifice everything I believed in at that particular point in time, anything could have been possible.” But she walked away. It should have been a career disaster. Briefly, it was. But from the vantage point of 2014, it was the best decision she ever made. “I think I’ve probably done my greatest growth in times of difficulty,” she reasons. “Both personally and artistically. Through all that, I really grew up. I got a really good kick in the pants, a beautifully brutal revelation, and I came out of it okay.”
It was being taken right to the brink of losing control that forced Tina to grasp the nettle and acknowledge to herself for the first time that for her career to work, it had to be on her own terms, and as a pure reflection of her true passion for music. It was a passion with strong roots: as a kid she’d listen to French and Italian music; early inspiration coming from her next door neighbour, Gisela, who introduced her to Edith Piaf. “She had the biggest vinyl collection, and she had no children,” Tina remembers. “So of course I was this little protégée that she was like, “Sing this, listen to this”. So we’d dance around the house like Ann Bancroft.”

Many years later, during the late 2000s, while making her son some lunch in her kitchen in south London, music was once again responsible for what she would later describe as an epiphany. The planet was in financial meltdown and suddenly, amid the panic and turbulence of the worldwide realisation the modern life was built precarious half-truths, she realised that drawing on truly meaningful memories was the only way to stay sane. “I just started to sense that there wasn’t a great deal of sincerity out there, and that people were scared. And I went, ‘okay, when people are scared, what do they tend to do?’ Well, they tend to go back to familiarity.” As a result, she recorded ‘Songs Of Love And Loss’, the first of two well-received covers albums which earned Tina further multi-platinum awards.
But the path to ‘Reset’ began in 2012 when Tina embarked on an ambitious symphonic tour of Australia, commanding the stage with 85 musicians. Demand for the six show tour exceeded all expectations as the tour ended up being extended to 18 performances; this natural demand, plus the presence of a new management team, gave Tina the confidence to reinvigorate her career. “To start with, I went, ‘I’m getting too old to do pop records’,” she remembers. “Then I realised I was being pathetic. I looked at myself and realised I was falling into that sexist and ageist media thing where people look at you and go, ‘well, you’re too old’. And I looked at myself and though, ‘oh, fuck that’.”

On reflection, there was never any question that Tina would record another album. “Complacency and I aren’t really great mates,” she laughs. “My business is about us trusting my instincts, and then just going for it. Looking back, I was just ready to do something. I had the desire to want to go back in the studio. I had that hunger again.”

She traveled to Sweden to work with respected producers Mattias Lindblom and Anders Wollbeck; early on they created ‘You Set Fire To My Life’ - an encouraging opening volley that became one of ‘Reset’’s defining moments and led to further work with Arnthor Birgisson (Janet Jackson, Enrique) and internationally renowned producers Danton Supple (Coldplay’s ‘X&Y’) and Boy Blue (Pink, Backstreet Boys). But the key to unlocking the magic of ‘Reset’ - a channeling Tina’s renewed energy - was her handpicked selection of fresh new talent: young names like Hunter Nixon, Roberto De Sa, Alex Robotham and Hayley Warner.
Many of the co-writers and producers she chose were, she says, “not even born when ‘Don’t Ask’ came out”. But the result is an album boasting lyrics could only come from Tina’s position of experience, with production touches that could only come creative minds unbothered by the complexities of later life. “A collision of perspectives is beautiful, because there’s a lot to be learnt in those collisions,” she says. “I think that’s such a beautiful exchange of knowledge. It’s collaboration in the very purest sense.”

And while ‘Reset’ is a musical and creative statement about where she is right now, Tina’s lyrics can’t help but draw on the last few decades. In ‘I Can’t Breathe’, for instance, she sings “in this empty space, I’ve found my place, I’ve found my place and my heart can beat, my soul’s at ease” - a direct reference to her experiences at the end of the 1990s when she’d left guaranteed global success - and a miserable marriage. “At the height of my career in the 90s, where my life was so amazing, my personal life was so, so appalling, it was so appalling. It was so malnourished, it was horrible. I’d walked away from a beautiful home, from a materialistic accumulation that was toxic for me,” she explains. “I just walked away from it. So I left this princess lifestyle that was created by somebody else and I realised that’s not what life was about. That song speaks about having walked away from that restriction, getting out into the open world and breathing again.”

With ‘Reset’ storming the charts back home, spending 5 consecutive months in the top 40, and prompting renewed interest in this extraordinary talent from all those other countries whose hearts she first captured two decades ago, Tina Arena’s imminent global reawakening is a beautiful, vindicatory pop moment.

“I’ve never been motivated by anything other than growing and knowing that I have this ability to be able to transport and to pass messages through telling stories and melodies,” she smiles. “There has always been a part of me that questions absolutely everything. It took me a long time to understand that that’s just what an artist is.”

July 2014