Christa Hughes Is Bored Of Burlesque, So She’s Leading From The Front

She has emerged as one of the most celebrated cabaret/vaudeville acts in the country, and when your crowd can be as raucous as the stage, well, it helps to be able to talk the talk. She reams off stories and observations as though a dam has burst within her chest, and more often than not, my questions are swept away as one insight rapidly segues into the next. She’s charming, but God knows where she gets such energy. Perhaps it runs in the family, for Hughes has spent three decades performing with her jazz pianist father, Dick.

“When I first started singing it was just with my dad,” Hughes recalls, “and we had a residency every Sunday at the Shakespeare in Surry Hills in the very early ’90s. I guess I was around 17. It was so good, because the early ’90s in Sydney, there was so much going on, a very different atmosphere than what’s going on now. And it was free, so you’d just wander in. You’d get these very interesting kinds of people. You’d get the old folks there nice and early, you’d have the housing commission people across the road, you’d have people who’d be coming down from their weekend benders to listen to some jazz as a way to take the edge off things. It was a great combo of people, but we had no amplification. It was just him on the upright piano and me belting out in the corner.”

It was there in that beer-dappled space (and back in the days when you could still smoke inside) where Hughes’ theatrical education began in earnest. For those who have seen Hughes perform before – either in her own right, or during her time as KK Juggy in Machine Gun Fellatio – you can tell that teenage ghost is still in there, reeling folks in off the street, belting out tunes as her father’s hands rattle across the keys.

“You just had to be theatrical to be heard,” she says. “Lucky I have a big voice. But more than that, it’s one thing to be heard, but you don’t want to just be shouting everyone down. You want to hold attention because you’re actually doing something. People ask me if I went to drama school, but no. I sang unplugged in a pub where you had to learn these things to keep people’s interest. And as I got older, and got more involved in rock’n’roll, singing with Vrag, who were the precursor to Machine Gun Fellatio – who were very theatrical in such an irreverent way; crazy costumes, crazy antics, crazy guests – and then went overseas where I kind of fell into cabaret.

“I never sat down and thought, ‘I need to make myself more theatrical.’ It was more by chance, and I found it very, very boring watching bands just in jeans and T-shirts staring at the floor, mumbling into the microphone. There would be no performance.”

Shoegaze sounds about as far as possible from what Hughes has planned for Sydney Fesitval. The show – Oz Rockin’ The Ladies Lounge – is a reinvention of Aussie rock classics; acts like Cold Chisel, AC/DC and Divinyls, all retooled to revel in absurd cab-burlesque glory. But that division between cabaret and burlesque is itself quite a contentious issue. No one seems entirely certain where one ends and the other begins; if they are naughty bedfellows, or bitter rivals eking out a living in nightclubs and dive bars the world over. In Hughes’ eyes, it doesn’t help that the current standard-bearer for burlesque is leaving quite a bit to be desired.

“A lot of people ask if I’m cabaret or burlesque, and well, I do a bit of both. I don’t do straight burlesque. God, one of the worst shows I saw recently was Dita Von Teese, probably the most famous burlesque artist in the world right now. People were loving it, but it would have to be one of the dullest performances I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never seen anything so wooden. She looked pretty enough, she has a great body and everything, but she wasn’t a big mover. Every routine she had was exactly the same but with a slightly different outfit. And I thought this was so bloody boring. ‘Look at my very expensive underwear!’ Which is fine for maybe a couple of minutes, but it gets boring pretty quick. And if people like that, well, good. But when I was a teenager, there were some really out there, wild performances, and you’d always think back then, ‘Where’s this going to go from here?’ And the answer is, it went really tame and lame!” Hughes laughs.

“So whenever I’ve done burlesque, I’ve made sure it’s had more of an edge to it. And I’ve also never done the straight cabaret thing of standing by a piano, American songbook-style. Mainstream burlesque and mainstream cabaret are both very different, and I tend to move away from that. I’ve been involved in more alternative scenes where you can mix things up a bit. I don’t want people sitting there, closing their eyes and tapping their toes. I want them looking around wildly thinking, ‘What next, what next, what next!’”

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