The Story of How I Became a One-Hit Wonder

An Exercise in Backwards Manifesting

Coming home after driving around Australia was like arriving at a new city on my travels, except instead of visiting the sites and moving on, I had to build a new life from the ground up, without the identity of student to pin on myself.

Yes, I grew up in Melbourne, but I had always lived in the east and southeastern suburbs, and things were a bit different north of the river. Much greater focus on growing organic vegetables and burning the right combination of incense in your home to create the perfect vibe.

I grew up where the red arrows are and the red circle is my where university is. Then I moved north of the river (purple arrow). Very different vibe. Source

Not only that, but I had entered this new phase of life called “grown up”. Gone were the days of simply turning up to timetabled classes and handing in assignments on time.

Now, it was time to build that ephemeral thing called a “career.”

I had had such fun driving around the country, performing and writing songs, that I wanted to do that forever. Minus the driving.

But first, something you should know about me: I have made it my mission to live on each of Earth’s continents bar Antarctica for at least a year.

Why not Antarctica? Lots of people ask me that. Because the point is not to tick places off a map, it’s to experience the wealth of human culture around the world (as well as the planet’s natural beauty, of course). I want to live in different societies to feel what their lives are like from the inside. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to visit Antarctica. But not live there for an extended period of time. Necessarily. I mean, if the opportunity arose….

But I digress. I had already lived in Europe and South America by this stage, and was seriously eyeing Asia for my next adventure. I didn’t know how I’d get there and what I’d do there. Maybe music could serve as a mechanism.

I already had a band. My sister Misha, my new housemate Stella, and I were in a “fock” band called Stoked. Fock is folk rock. The band was named after stoking a cone on a bong. Misha and I both played acoustic guitar and wrote lots of songs. Stella played the djembe and could sing, so we had three part harmonies and a feminine, folky sound.

We could make $15 each an hour by singing on a busy corner of the city on a Friday night. We were invited to the occasional festival and booked ourselves gigs at the venues that peppered the hipster area we lived in.

Of course, $45 a week wasn’t enough to pay the rent, especially since we generally went to a bar afterwards and drank a large portion of it, and even though there were five of us in a 3 bedroom house, the rent and bills were not zero. I needed “real” work.

I found two jobs. One was running my mum’s homeopathics business (I wrote about that here) and the other was as MC in a strip club (I wrote a little bit about that here but I’ll expand more now).

The five people sharing the rundown house were Stella and her boyfriend, their friend Kate and her boyfriend, and me in the smallest bedroom.

Kate almost never went out. She collected unemployment benefits and occasionally sold pot, but more often she just packed cone after cone, passing her bong around and never asking for payment. Whenever buyers or friends came round, she disappeared into her bedroom to paint her eyebrows on; they had either been plucked to obscurity in the no-eyebrow trend of the 90s or she had had an illness. I never figured out which.

Whenever she did go out, not only did she do the eyebrows, but she dressed up like a model and spent at least an hour putting on her face. She and Stella had both come from a dancing background and were looking at options to become pole dance teachers, but in the meantime, she was an obvious choice to help me out to pack the homeopathics and send them to customers.

In return (or just because she was nice), she helped me look the part for my job at the club. Since I smoked instead of eating a lot of the time, I could fit into her clothes and she chose my outfits. In the beginning, she also did my make up for each shift.

When I used to smoke rather than eat.

I loved being almost the only fully dressed woman in the club. There were bar staff but they wore jeans and t-shirts, while I wore platforms and heels as high as the dancers, and tight clothes that still covered everything.

I had a few roles. One was the music and the stage lights. Another was to announce the girls and encourage the punters to put money in the jug for the next performer—there was a 10-15 minute choreographed strip show every hour with themes and props. For example, one girl had puppets that she would walk around on her butt as she bent forwards and split her legs to the side to make a surface with her back to the audience. Girls would come from other clubs and different cities to perform as special guests.

The rest of the time, there were always two or three of the regular girls dancing suggestively on stage and punters would give them tips to take off items of clothing. My other role was therefore to ensure that the space was always occupied, and this was not an easy task. When the girls weren’t onstage, they were either choosing their next g-string or snorting lines in the change rooms, or mingling. If they did that well, they would be paid to give someone a private show, and that’s where the real money was made, not the $5 bills they got for removing a stocking in front of the whole room.

They would share a drink and once the guy was interested, they negotiated the price and went to a private room for a set amount of time to do a lap dance. The punters weren’t allowed to touch them, but the dancer could do whatever she wanted as long as she finished completely naked.

Going from the bar to the change rooms to find the girl who was rostered on the podium was tedious, and they constantly tried to get someone else to do their shift. When one refused, I would simply move to the next one until someone agreed and went onstage. Yep, my first management position is one that I can’t put on my resume.

My final role, and the best one by far, was to sing the occasional song. That’s how I got the job actually—I went in for the interview and after talking to me briefly, the boss said, “OK, show us what you got.” I jumped up and sang Don’t Speak by No Doubt over the top of the song played on the sound system. He gave me the job on the spot.

I loved performing, and would take requests from punters. One guy gave me $10 every time I sang an ABBA song. I learned a few pole moves and danced with whoever was onstage with me.

I only got naked once, and only partially. On my birthday, one of the girls pulled me up and took off my top, then proceeded to pour hot wax on my chest. As I walked down the stairs afterwards, a guy placed a $50 note in my hand.

At home, whenever I wasn’t packing homeopathic pillules into tubes or taking boxes to the post office, I was with my guitar singing songs or practicing with the band.

One of Kate’s friends came to stay on the couch. He was an out of work carpenter and was depressed and needed a place to stay. He was also sweet and had an amazing body. Before long, he was out of the living room and in my bed.

We didn’t have sex though. I was giving him tough love, at least, that’s how I saw it. I never gave him money. I gave him food, shelter, and smoke, and that’s it. And without money, he couldn’t buy condoms. And without condoms, I refused to fuck him. Anything else was fine, but not sex.

A couple of months in, he found a job.

He also started pitching in with the rent and bills and we had a proper relationship. First time I’d lived with a boyfriend.

We had settled into a rhythm, but the band and the music were my true focus and it all needed a kickstart.

Misha and I decided to try out for Australian Idol.

These were the days when you had to go and line up for hours outside a stadium-sized venue (often a stadium) to get your chance to be ridiculed by a panel of celebrities and music industry big-wigs.

Kate helped me choose a flattering, black and sheer top with jeans and an oversized belt and boots, and she bleached my shoulder-length dreadlocks blond and did me a full makeover.

What they don’t show on TV of course, is that most of the people in those giant queues never get to see the TV judges. They see a bunch of executives in a room with no windows, and if they give you a pink card, you’re invited to go and give the exact same performance in the exact same clothes so it looks like it’s all the same day.

The impression I got was that they chose the best and the worst, because part of the appeal was to put some really terrible singers on TV for the public at home to laugh at.

I sang Like a Prayer by Madonna. They weren’t convinced. I sang a Shakira song in Spanish. I could tell they were coming around. I did the bouncing dance Madonna does in the Hung Up video, and that did the trick. I got my ticket!

Me desperately trying to make the judges give me a ticket.

My sister Misha got through too!

The TV auditions were in a fancy studio on the fifth floor overlooking the Yarra River. We had to hang around all day, chatting to the hosts and trying to be consistently at 100% personality and charisma. We still weren’t sure if we fell into the best or worst category, but we figured even if we got on TV to be laughed at, it would be exposure for our little fock band, which had to be a good thing.

Two of the three judges were dismissive to me. One ridiculed my platform shoes, saying if I was really a dancer, I wouldn’t have worn those. I never said I was a dancer—the producers put that on my profile because of the bouncing! The second judge looked down at the desk throughout my songs, but the third one, who was usually the biggest arsehole, seemed intrigued.

He asked me to play one of my originals and I played Where to Now?, the song I had written after returning from my tour round Australia. That pulled them in enough to give me a ticket to the next round and I went screaming out to the others in front of all the cameras.

The rest was a whirlwind. We flew to Sydney and were put up in a nice hotel with a hundred or so other hopefuls. Misha hadn’t gotten through but they were nice to her and encouraged her to come back next year. She flew up anyway to support me and come along for the ride, which turned out to be relatively short lived.

I only performed once on stage before being sent home. It was disappointing at the time, but as it turns out, it was enough to get the name Stoked! on the map. We played as a duo in Sydney to the biggest crowd we’d had so far, and then came back to Melbourne to continue gigging with Stella. We started getting interviews and invites to perform in bigger and bigger venues, and people were actually buying tickets to come and see us!

That was all before our episodes even came out.

After they did, things got even more hectic. A couple of people called offering to manage us and we chose a woman who wore power suits and always had an earpiece in one ear, mostly because she looked the part.

She booked us studio time and we put down a single—one of the songs that I’d written specifically for the band, with overlapping melodies to capitalise on our harmonising.

The song immediately started getting airplay on the indie radio stations and so we went back into the studio to record a professional album made up of some of our old songs and a couple of new ones that we co-wrote with professional songwriters.

It was one of the co-written ones that took off on commercial radio.

Suddenly, we were hearing our voices in shopping centres and while driving in the car. It was surreal.

And maybe it went to our heads a bit.

We hadn’t really slowed down on the drugs and alcohol and we started fighting between ourselves. Misha turned up late to a few gigs and Stella worked hard to produce a film clip that never really went anywhere.

I started questioning what I really wanted.

Travel was calling me. I signed up to do a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course in my spare time, with Asia on my mind.

All year, I kept mentioning my plan to move to China, and that may have contributed to the insecurity in the other band members.

I asked them if they’d be interested in coming and trying to tour in Asia, but no one was really onboard, and our manager said she wouldn’t continue with us if I went that way.

One day, we came together and I said I was satisfied with being a one-hit wonder but that I wanted to travel more, by whatever means. They should carry on.

And so I left.

The band didn’t hold together, but Misha still makes music to this day, although now she does it from Montreal.

Which is where the truth returns to my story.

Some of the last half page was true—the life mission to live on all the continents and the move to Asia, the house, the jobs, and the boyfriend. And pretty much everything that came before the second Idol audition was true too.

I took a left turn for a moment there because I’m doing an exercise in backwards manifestation today. Imagining what might have happened if a closed door had been an open one. What kinds of experiences may have been possible if I wasn’t rejected from Australian Idol at that first TV audition where they made fun of my shoes.

If things had’ve panned out as if I was successfully manifesting them at the time.

I’m wondering if I can change my perception and convince myself that success is within my reach. Initiate a mindset shift.

I’ve not seen this technique before, it’s just something I thought of and decided to try, but I looked it up and it’s pretty similar to the Revision Technique, by Neville Goddard.

According to Goddard, we can clear subconscious blocks and rewire our brains by replacing old, limiting stories with empowering ones.

Are there any episodes in your life that you would like to rewrite?

[As an aside, when I started writing the made up section of this piece, I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu. Not sure what that was about.]

Have you ever heard of or experimented with the revision technique? If so, did you achieve a perception shift that bled into your current reality?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

PS. This week I attended the Australian School of Sexuality (ASS) event, ASSFEST. It was an interesting experience, and I’ll write about my impressions soon. Subscribe to receive.