March 18, 2026 — 12:00pm
Save
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.
Save this article for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.
Got it
AAA
The “devil’s television” was banned from Sheridan Harbridge’s childhood home, so the wickedness had to wait until Mum was asleep. On one such night, when Divinyls’ I Touch Myself flickered to life on Rage, “I just actually kind of short-circuited,” she says.
“I didn’t know what I was watching or what this woman was telling me to do. But I knew it was excellent. And I knew that suddenly I had an image of womanhood in front of me that I found absolutely mesmerising.”
Sheridan Harbridge in the stage show Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett.Jade Ellis
That thrill is where the combustible writer-performer (Prima Facie, Calamity Jane) begins her latest stage adventure. In Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett, Harbridge plays herself, but in a state of becoming something stronger.
“I really see in Chrissy a fellow actor,” she says. “I could see that character she made, the monster of a schoolgirl, and how she gradually built that character. The fringe in front of the eyes is the armouring part of it but the uniform, even the vocal mannerisms, it all comes together to make this wild little beast on stage.”
Related Article
Chrissy Amphlett died, to the rock world’s lasting grief, in the New York spring of 2013. She had breast cancer, complicated by multiple sclerosis. More than a decade on, her creative afterlife is proving stubborn.
Harbridge’s one-woman stage show returns to Melbourne this week after premiering last year at the Rising festival. It has since had runs in Brisbane, Sydney, Ballarat and Amphlett’s home town of Geelong, and will return to Sydney next month for a stint at the Seymour Centre.
It will be followed later this year by the release of a cache of unheard songs, unconnected with Amplified, curated by Amphlett’s husband Charley Drayton.
“There were already some ideas for her to tell her own story,” says Drayton, the former bassist for Keith Richards and drummer for the B-52’s and Divinyls, who joined Cold Chisel in 2011. “Chrissy did some development in New York in 2009/2010 with a band in a studio and a producer, and I have some recordings of her working on her ideas…
“She was always searching for who she could become. And of course, when life strikes you with not one but two hardcore diseases, your perspective changes greatly.”
Drayton says he has six completed Chrissy Amphlett songs, written in collaboration with different songwriters, ready to meet the world this year. He’s guarded about details for now, but he intends to begin releasing them in June.
Chrissy Amphlett and Charley Drayton in 2006.Getty Images
“I watched Chrissy write in her journals daily. She enjoyed collaborating. From the late ’90s through the end of her time with us, she wrote music. My plan was to release two songs at the beginning of 2020, but unfortunately COVID struck.”
Amplified has also had a long and complex gestation. Amphlett and Drayton’s writer friend Simon Morley, best known for co-creating Puppetry of the Penis, says he encouraged her to pare her songs back for an intimate stage show she was devising in her final years.
“I was in New York; Chrissy was living there with Charley, she was looking for something and I said, ‘Strip it back. You know, your words are beautiful. You’re funny. People don’t know how funny you are. People are quite terrified of you’,” says Morley.
“We started developing this thing and we got close and then, because she got ill … we just never quite got there. So there’s been this lingering thing with Charley and I. We’d love to see this thing happen, a stripped-back version of Chrissy. But of course, no one can play Chrissy.”
Chrissy Amphlett with husband Charley Drayton.Courtesy Charley Drayton
The impasse began to melt when Australian theatre director Sarah Goodes (Julia, The Children) introduced them to Harbridge, who had her own ideas for telling Amphlett’s story, and the kind of stage presence that would never settle for imitation.
“Charley and I decided, once we had Sarah on board, that the only way that this was going to work was if we open the gates and gave special people in Chrissy’s life the go ahead to open up. Everyone’s been quite closed and haven’t shared much.”
Related Article
Drayton has been protective of Amphlett’s legacy. When Divinyls guitarist Mark McEntee announced plans to tour the band’s catalogue with a new singer in 2019, Drayton went public with his misgivings. The tour was cancelled.
“Charley has sanctioned this project,” Morley says of Amplified. “But for this to work, Sheridan especially needed an insight. She needed to go deep. And thankfully that’s what’s happened.”
Deep might be an understatement. In writing Amplified, Harbridge drew first on Amphlett’s extraordinary memoir of 2005, Pleasure and Pain, and the songs that seemed so often to echo that sustained tension in her life.
Her lyrics, she says, “just locked into that glorious wound … and I think it drips from the pages of Chrissy’s book: the pleasure and pain of her ambition, her successes, her failures. She’s a very mercurial creature in that way. I really used the book. If this is how she wants us to remember her, I’m going to honour that.”
With Drayton’s blessing, the stories she gathered from friends who had remained respectfully silent took her insight to surreal depths.
“One thing that stuck was someone telling me in passing that Chrissy had wanted to do the show as a crow. I’m like, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, she tried to do it as a cat, and then she tried to do it as a crow’…
“Simon told me he saw it as Chrissy trying to get out of being herself up there, because she really struggled to be vulnerable on stage. She no longer had the character of the Divinyls’ frontwoman, so she was looking for a mask.”
Around six months later, Harbridge says, “I realised that’s the gift I can give her. I know how to do it as a crow. So much of the aural soundscape of the Divinyls’ music lives in that space of mythic storytelling, so the crow amongst that just makes perfect sense somehow.
“There’s a lot of layers,” she says with a laugh.
Related Article
No kidding. Amphlett remains best known for the hell raising rock’n’roll frontwoman she created for Divinyls in the 1980s, but she also earned high critical praise for her musical theatre work in the decades that followed.
Her performances in Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers with the young Russell Crowe, and as Judy Garland in The Boy From Ozdrew on rigorous stage discipline that began with an early devotion to ballet as a small girl in 1960s Geelong.
Drayton knows “there’s people now that are still curious about who Chrissy was. I don’t think Australia had the opportunity to have some closure with Chrissy and I think that from where the book finished in 2005, there was more to share.
“With Amplified, whenever Simon and I are having any creative discussion about it, there’s always a space for Chrissy being spiritually in the conversation and we listen. That allows us to take a risk. Put the book down. Take a risk. Let’s speak about where she was: truly an artist, truly loved.”
Her voice and her expression were clearly unique, “but I think her connection to people was more valuable than anything,” Drayton says. “You can’t please everyone doing this, creatively, but finding this team was a way forward. Sarah, of course; but without Sheridan I can’t see how this would have been possible.”
For her part, Harbridge says, “I really dug into her intent, which was she wanted her audience to meet her in a new way. And she wanted them to hear her songs in a new way. So we really pull apart the music to let the lyrics live at the front.”
Sheridan Harbridge on stage with the band in Amplified.Jade Ellis
The intimacy needs to stand aside when the band, led by Glenn Moorhouse (Hedwig), kicks into Boys In Town. “That thing has to strip the paint off the walls,” Harbridge says. But beyond the themes of small-town escape and righteous rage, underscoring what Amphlett’s story means for modern audiences is key.
“To be an artist taken seriously in her era, Chrissy had to sacrifice so much. She had to never let down her armour. As an artist myself, now, I get to make with abandon. No one stops me. If I want to make something, I make it, and I get taken seriously.
“In this show, I let every woman in the audience know that they all sacrificed so I could stand here and do this thing. I think it’s really honouring all of the women in the era who came to see her and went, ‘Oh my God, look at her working with such abandon, up there doing what we’re told a woman shouldn’t do’.
“I think it’s important we remember how hard people like Chrissy worked so we could be here. And I want us to enjoy Chrissy’s third act that she didn’t get to have. I feel like the show’s doing that, and it makes me really happy.”
Amplified is at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre, March 19-22 and Sydney’s Seymour Centre from April 15-25.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
Save
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.
From our partners