Renee Geyer LIVE at the Eureka Hotel ’79 and the Tivoli ’82

Greatest Voice
When Renée Geyer passed away in Melbourne in January 2023, Bonnie Raitt applauded her “as one of the greatest voices in the world”.

Marcia Hines’ defined her as “A game changer. A soul diva. My sister in song.”

Added Kate Ceberano, “Renée the powerful, the diva, the brutal, the original, the temperamental, the stellar, the shapeshifter, the original, the unforgettable, the irreplaceable Renée!”

Australia had noticed Geyer’s pipes since she was 16 and working around Sydney’s wine bars fronting a number of jazz fusion bands.

“I just live to perform,” she once declared. “There’s something exciting about the spotlight hitting you on the stage, and having that thrill of seeing the people who had come to see you.

“I wanted to be a singer as long as I could remember. I never married, I never had children, I never had a house. I simply was a nomad because that was the lifestyle I chose.”

Just weeks before her passing, Renée was playing to a full house and had been looking forward to another year of touring.

Four years before, she made a surprise appearance at the Australian Women In Music Awards in Brisbane that accentuated how no one else could match her.

She’d been awarded a Lifetime Achievement gong the year before but couldn’t attend. But she promised to perform the year after, and kept her word.

“No one knew she was coming on,” recounts her manager and confidante of 20 years, Kathy Nolan.

“She went on to finish the night, and the place went crazy when she came on!

“She wiped the floor with everyone. She did ‘It’s A Man’s World’ and got two young First Nations rappers to come on with her, and blew the place apart.

“It was goose bumps time for everyone there, and that appearance is remembered as iconic.”

Nolan recalls Geyer’s mid-90s shows at the Basement club in Sydney were “off the charts. The voice was next level, hitting notes that I didn’t think she was capable of.”

Black Man
The singer once described herself as “a white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama.”

As Renée Geyer Live shows, that voice could step from the elegance of Nina Simone’s “Do I Move You” and blues/jazz standards as “The Thrill Is Gone”, to being joyful on her hit version of Eddy Grant’s “Say I Love You” to steely yet vulnerable soul on “Baby I’m Missing You” and “On My Way”, and rough and ready on the up-tempo “Great Balls Of Fire” and “News For You.”

The bands were on fine form especially on “That Did It Babe”, moving effortlessly from crisp blues licks on “Set Me Free” to jazz passages of “Look What You Done” and whipping it up on “Shakin’ All Over” and “Chickaboom”.

The sound on the Eureka show, which she played with the Kevin Borich Express, was by Gerry Georgettis, generally regarded among the great sound engineers to emerge from Australia.

Starting in the ‘70s, the quiet, calm and strong Georgettis worked with the La De Das as their solo crew member, then Cold Chisel where he had an influence on a teenage Jimmy Barnes.

“He was the coolest guy I ever knew,” the singer said. “He exposed me to great music and great musicians, and I would not be the singer or the person I am now without his influence.”

Georgettis moved to England in 1980 and worked for Brit Row (Production company owned by Pink Floyd) and then relocated to the US, working on the Lollapalooza Festival and with Red Hot Chili Peppers. He ran a theatre in Miami, and took his own life on board a United Airlines flight from Washington to Los Angeles, aged 56.

Gerry Georgettis

Some of the tracks on Renée Geyer Live are from the Eureka Hotel in Geelong, 90 minutes from Melbourne, and with a band room that could fit in 250 fans. The Eureka was run by Ian Lovell.

“It was the rock centre of Geelong in the late ‘70s and 1980s,” remembers Kevin Bishop, whose company DB Concert Sound (with the late Bill Dart) supplied extra speakers for the venue at the Geyer show.

“It was a sweaty rock and roll, people loved it. Tuesdays was its big night, when major touring bands would play there on their way to a week in Melbourne.”

Born in the UK where he played in bands and DJ’d, Bishop moved to Geelong and worked with Redhouse and Sherbet before DB supplied gear to early bands such as Goanna and Little Heroes.

Mark Williams is the sole survivor of the crew that worked on the Tivoli Sydney set.

He joined the Renee Geyer national tour while Russell Morris was off the road for six weeks.

The rest of the 1982 crew were Bill “Cookie” Cook (stage), Grant Jennings (lights) and Geoff Wheadon (sound).

Williams recalls, “It was a baptism of fire driving with Cookie, learning to drive a 12-ton truck like a sports car.

“In Armadale, a fight started in front of Renée and Vanessa. Cookie jumped off the stage, wrapped his arms around both the brawlers and literally bulldozed them off the dancefloor and outside the door!”

At 20, Williams worked in a “shit job in a factory” to pay his way through School of Audio Engineering. A few months later his lecturer alerted him to a job going with a band touring Queensland for two weeks.

After he returned, he quit the factory, and worked with Fingerprint, Claude (or Clawed) Rains, and Morris. After that it was Troy Balance and tours with Mi Sex, Berlin, Party Boys (with Joe Walsh), Eurogliders and Redgum. Mark was the engineer on the Redgum desk tape release from 1985 in Holland.

When he started a family in 1990, he went off the road and joined Haycom as an audio engineer.

The Tivoli show was opened by Austen Tayshus. Richard Clapton was to get up and sing a couple of songs with Renée but got stuck into the backstage rider and couldn’t make it up.

“Renée was just amazing that night. The band was incredible, as were all her bands. That had a lot to do with Mal Logan, her music director.”

Difficult Woman
Renée titled her autobiography, co-written with late journalist Ed Nimmervoll, Confessions Of A Difficult Woman (2000).

She could be temperamental and hard to handle.

That included slapping “Molly” Meldrum on the set of Countdown, ending an argument with the promoter at the Canberra show of the It’s A Long Way To The Top tour with a well-delivered punch.

She angrily rang up the editor of the famous Juke magazine at 4 am at his home to berate him over what she considered a disrespectful review.

She had feuds with everyone from Kate Ceberano to Colin Hay (all of whom forgave her because they were in awe of her talent), and had a passionate affair with Dragon’s Marc Hunter.

She paid out on a punter throughout a club show for turning up in a suit and tie, and could be a nightmare to airline crews at those at her record company and booking agency.

According to Deborah Conway, “I was on the receiving end of her abundance of personality plenty of times.

“The first time we met, she tried to punch me out. She missed; she never apologised!

“Renée literally never held back, didn’t know the meaning of it. She made me laugh, she pissed me off, but she was never, ever boring and she made my life the richer for knowing her.”

It was left to long-time manager Kathy Nolan to smooth things over.

“Yes, Renée could be a handful. But she and I got on really well. We could yell and scream and I probably got sacked once a year, but we always got over it.

“I told her, just focus on singing and doing what you do, and I’ll do everything else. Relax, and know that I always have your best interest at heart.

“It worked so well, she trusted me. She knew I’d take a bullet for her, and she probably would have taken a bullet for me.”

America
Renée Geyer lived her life where she had no regrets. The exception was over the album cover of her first US release.

It was her fourth Australian studio album Moving Along, retitled Renee Geyer, which included a re-recorded version of her hit “Heading In The Right Direction” and some tracks featuring Stevie Wonder’s band and produced by legendary Motown producer Frank Wilson.

The powerful black radio stations started to play advance copies of “Heading In The Right Direction” and “Stares And Whispers”.

The album was surely going to break her in America. But her (black) producer Wilson and US label Polydor advised her that the radio interest was only because they thought she was black.

They suggested they release the album without her photo.

Renée absolutely refused. When the record came out with “my big pink huge face” on the cover, black radio stopped playing it, and the album failed to chart despite great acclaim.

Years later the singer admitted to radio station Double J, “I should have gone along with it actually. I was just stupid in those days. I should have just played the game like they were gonna do.

“I know what they were talking about. It would have been good to sort of play along with it a little bit. I just didn’t have that sense of humour about it in those days.

“I should have looked at it as a publicity thing and not been so precious about it. I look back and know that I would have done it different now but that’s the way you learn as you come along.”

Despite that hiccup, Renée found admirers among superstars. Bonnie Raitt and she shared a band, and Renée sometimes stayed in her house.

Joe Cocker adored her, got her to duet on his 1987 album Unchain My Heart and took her on tour through Europe.

She also did sessions with Neil Diamond, Julio Iglesias, Buddy Guy, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs, Men at Work and Trouble Funk.

She was standing outside a Los Angeles club after her show. A man with an English accent came out. “Was that you singing in there? You were ****** fantastic!” It was Ringo Starr.

Another time when she was in a club with Kevin Borich and bassist Harry Brus, Ronnie Wood invited them back to his house, and they jammed in his basement on Rolling Stones classics for the rest of the night.

She appeared on Sting’s single “We’ll Be Together” from 1987’s …Nothing Like The Sun, his second solo album.

At the session, there were just some of his singers. After while they left but Renée stayed through the night, overdubbing her voice six times and coming up with the line “let’s get together right now”

“That line took the song to another level, Nolan says. “In my opinion, it makes that song.”

“We’ll Be Together” charted in ten countries, including #7 in America and #13 in Australia.

At a function attended by Sting, Geyer was introduced to him as, “This is Renée, she did the backing vocal on the single.”

He looked at her and, dismissively responded, “I have so many people doing backing vocals, I can’t keep track of them.”

The next morning “someone” posted a photo of Sting on a pre-social media channel with one word, “TOSSER”.

Taskmaster
It was no secret among crews and musicians that Renée Geyer could be a hard taskmaster with high expectations.

She seldom rehearsed. It was not enough for band members to be note-perfect. Before the show, she’d go through the setlist with the band, just the beginnings and endings, she imitating each instrument.

They had to have their own style, and they had to watch her all the time, because she would change the setlist or go off into a tangent mid-number.

If they didn’t, she’d tear strips off them.

For all that, she adored and respected her band and crew. “They make me look good!” she’d say. She was awed about the technical prowess of her crew and thought them wizards.

Kathy Nolan is setting up a scheme where ongoing royalties go to musicians and crew who had fallen on financial and medical hard times through the Renée Geyer Foundation.

She was an admirer of ARCA’s Desk Tape Series and her estate was very supportive in the release of Renée Geyer Live. Renee will be missed.