Clare Bowditch and her curious career

It’s mid afternoon and Clare Bowditch exudes a playful down-to-earthness and raw honesty of someone who’s confronted all manner of anxiety and ills, both her own and others’. 

It’s the same warmth and energy that has moved through her soulful sounds and evocative written words for the past two decades.

When the ARIA award winning musician and prized author walks into a room there’s a high likelihood an ageing chihuahua, its little tongue hanging out, is lazing in a corner. What’s remarkable about this conspicuous sight is it’s only visible to her.

She knows him as Frank, the embodiment of her critical inner voice. For many years it was his bold and brash yapping that pained and distracted her in daily life.

“I’ve had a lot of terror about ‘not good enough’. But I just have better ways of not killing myself with that fear,” she says. 

“And realising that actually, and it’s probably important, for, you know, useful, actually, it’s okay to bide our time and pace ourselves and just accept that, at certain times of life, we’re going to be able to give more energy to those fears. 

“And other times, we really have to just reserve them for the domestic tasks of raising children or caring for loved ones and no regrets.”

“The point of going for it really only began when I became a mother.”

Nowadays, Bowditch’s relationship with Frank has quietened.

“It’s been very difficult to satisfy that voice because a lot of my agency in my work was taken with COVID and so on. The truth is that that’s okay, actually, because the point of learning to live with lifelong chronic anxiety is that you do learn to live with it,” she says.

“You do clock up those years and decades and what was once a feeling of anger and a ‘f*** off Frank’ approach is now lighter and sweeter, like ‘ah, Hi, Frank’.

This changed relationship has also allowed for Bowditch to return to music. 

Bowditch was a shy twenty-something with stamps in her well-worn passport when she formed her first band, Red Raku, in Melbourne in the late 1990s. 

Within the space of a few years the band released two albums, she met her future husband, drummer and producer, Marty Brown, and welcomed their first child. She did all this while living with anxiety from an undiagnosed mental breakdown.

“I found it hard to imagine there would be a place for the kind of songs that I wrote anywhere. They weren’t indie cool enough for this area, they weren’t commercial enough for this area. So I never really… I was sort of pottering around with my career,” the You Make Me Happy singer says.

“Then Marty and I found out that we were having this baby, and that is the point at which I had to overcome my shyness and my fear of having my face on posters and my worry about, you know, what you’d have to do in order to make a career, which meant you had to be known, so you had to court some degree of fame. I just wasn’t comfortable with any of that.”

Bowditch, now in her forties, recalls pushing past her insecurities and backing herself as a singer. She told herself if things didn’t work out she would return to a call centre job, become an academic or retrain as a midwife. She did not need alternate plans. 

Since 1998 she has released seven albums and been nominated for eight ARIA Music Awards, winning Best Female Artist in 2005 for her album What Was Left. She and her bands have toured extensively, performing with the likes of the late Leonard Cohen, Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins, Gotye and John Butler to name but a few.

Bowditch released her first solo album and began touring after giving birth to her eldest daughter, Asha (right). Image credits: Instagram @clarebowditch

“The point of going for it really only began when I became a mother,” Bowditch says. 

“I only released my first solo album, and single and started touring, you know, in that first year of Asha’s life. There were some things in our favour, she was a really great and fun kind of kid, she was up for the adventure.”

As a performer, Bowditch might outwardly appear to be the constant confident frontwoman. Yet, privately this is not the case. It’s not that binary.

“It’s funny the things that drive our careers, the various fears, the financial needs for the things that we want to achieve, they can work as fuel,” she says.

She speaks candidly about having a “bee in my bonnet” at the beginning of her career about being one of the few family touring bands to be given a chance at success in Australia. 

For her, being visible about being a working mum with a family felt important. Yet she admits jostling for your art in such a competitive industry can cannibalise your joy.

“I realised at a certain point that if I was to continue to attempt to compete in a commercial sphere where I didn’t – I really didn’t find the songs that one might write to be attached to mainstream radio at the time, I didn’t find them interesting – I guess that was probably the point at which I stopped imagining that one day I would agree to a compromise and things,” she says. 

“I wrote, you know, hundreds of songs over the last 10 years without releasing very many at all.”

“I sort of just realised, actually, no, the thing of value here is ‘am I doing something that means something to me?’ And how long can I keep doing that when circumstances are so unchanged? I was lucky to be able to direct my own career in a different way.”

This included having the ability to live frugally. 

“A career in the arts, in the creative industries in Australia, means a lack of regular income,” she says. 

“You don’t put money aside for superannuation. You don’t have normal benchmarks. There aren’t promotions, you’re really playing a gambler’s game all the time. But I was lucky to have enough sort of anchoring skills with writing or with radio assignments to do that.”

She is acutely aware she hasn’t released a new album in over a decade, though she now feels ready.

“I wrote, you know, hundreds of songs over the last 10 years without releasing very many at all,” she says. 

“I did them for myself, most of them are absolute pieces of s*** that no one will hear, but they helped me at the time. And now we’re finally at the stage where I have a very patient publishing and recording company who I feel like I could release something now that I like. So we’re in the process of recording and edging our way back into that world now.”

Next for Bowditch is performing at the 2024 FW Leadership Summit.

“I’m so freaking excited to come to this adventure. I can’t wait to be in the room. FW people are some of my favourite people. I think everyone knows that,” she says. 

“There were so many of them that were so lovely and kind and have been so lovely and kind over the years. I can’t wait.” 

To an outsider Bowditch’s career as a recording artist, performer, songwriter, actor, broadcaster and author might appear somewhat curious, at least that’s how she sees it. 

“I think to create a living, working in the quote, unquote, creative industries in a small territory, like Australia, and to do that over several decades without having a traditional hit, usually looks quite unusual and curious,” she says. 

“So it means engaging with lots of different areas of interest perhaps. And to be a touring musician might have suited me at one point of my life, but from the point the kids started school, I had to get a little creative about how I worked in the world, and how I kept enjoying my work in the world. So I guess it is a curious career.”