Why the French love Tina Arena more than Australians "Self-confidence came to me only around 33 or 34, when I began to dig through the layers" ... Tina Arena. Photo: Cybele Malinowski. Styling by Heather Cairns. Hair and make-up by Kimberley Forbes You learn some interesting things in Tina Arena's memoir, Now I Can Dance. You learn that to keep his vocal cords moist, Andrea Bocelli fills his dressing room with steam by running the shower full bore. You learn about the dress code for dinner parties at Buckingham Palace (no toes showing or "leg skin"; gloves "above the elbow if your gown was strapless; to the elbow otherwise.") You also discover that in France, where Arena has spent the past 12 years, cats have seven lives, not the standard nine. But what you mostly learn is that for long periods of her life, Tina Arena hasn't been a big fan of Tina Arena. And we're not talking here about the garden variety self-deprecation which pads out most showbiz memoirs. No, what comes through in Now I Can Dance is more subtle and deeply buried, a lurking sense of injury that borders at times on self-contempt. Arena, who is famously short, refers to herself as a "stunted mushroom"; she talks about how she didn't deserve to be loved, and recounts periods of almost karmic self-flagellation: "I must deserve all this pain for something I've done somewhere in the past," she writes after the collapse of her first marriage. It's all my fault - I'm just a bad person who deserves everything I get. When, on a whim, she buys herself a diamond ring in Paris in 1999, she has to tell herself "to stop being a peasant and thinking I wasn't worth it." The French get me because I'm Latin, I have that feisty thing they totally comprehend. In person, Arena looks nothing like a mushroom and much more like a sparrow - small, busty and full of intent. Right now she's devouring a chicken wrap, standing in a recording suite in Sydney, where she is putting the final touches on her soon to be released album, Reset. Even if you don't like her music or own any of her albums, it's impossible not to be affected by what comes out of Arena's mouth when she sings - rich, empathetic and vulnerable, hers is a voice of glacier-melt purity, a voice that commands your attention. Once she's out of the recording booth, however, it's another matter. Support base ... Tina's parents, Giuseppe and Franca, celebrate their engagement in 1955. Photo: courtesy of Harper Collins Arena might sing like an angel, but she swears like a wharfie and laughs like a barmaid. And, as with many famous people, she cannot resist the opportunity to air her opinions uninterrupted. "I remember when I first moved to Paris," she tells me, "it was in the late 1990s, and the internet was just coming in. Everyone was just ignoring what it would do to the music industry. But I saw it, I saw what would happen, but no one else did. She takes another bite of her chicken wrap, chews like a cement mixer, swallows hard. "It's like the weather," she continues. No one talks about what it's going to be like with global warming. No one is accountable! But musicians are accountable! Musicians are such resilient creatures, they're almost prehistoric. They put themselves in holocaustic positions of change, you know, getting up there, night after night, and just asking to be criticised. We are constantly being challenged and held accountable, you know. But other people aren't. She finishes her wrap and dusts off her hands. She is about to embark on a homily about "passion" ("so lacking in society these days"), when the sound technician suggests they get back to work. Arena agrees. First, however, she bustles off to the toilet. She returns, some time later, visibly relieved. "Thank god for that," she sighs. Felt like I had a f...in' dead dwarf inside me. Don't ask ... with her first husband, Ralph Carr, in 1996. Photo: Picture Media At 45 years of age, Arena is arguably Australia's most accomplished female singer. She has worked on stage, in musicals, in rock operas; she has sung with Stevie Wonder and the Muppets, performed on The Footy Show, at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. She has been a pub rocker, a pop star, and, most lately, a bilingual chanteuse in the Celine Dion/Carla Bruni mould. She is not and never has been "cool," a fact about which she couldn't care less. She has sold eight million records worldwide, and is huge in France. "Tina Arena is one of our best singers ever," Missy Higgins once said. She could sing the balls off anyone, and she's miniature. Reset is her first original album in 12 years. It was written in collaboration with the Swedish songwriting team of Mattias Lindblom and Anders Wollbeck, British producer and songwriter Herbie Crichlow, and a bunch of young Australian pop writers, some barely out of their teens. Arena has in the past nominated Dusty Springfield and Petula Clarke as influences, but Reset is a more contemporary, if typically eclectic, offering, with arrangements ranging from sparse electro rhythms to balladry to big-production club tracks. Reset ... with partner Vincent Mancini in 2007. Photo: Fabien Dufils "This record speaks of many things," she says. Observations, experiences, giving birth, the responsibility of another human being ... managing being a woman, a mother, a lover. The album also signals a re-engagement with the Australian public, with whom Arena has enjoyed a long but contradictory relationship. Despite having sold millions of records here - her 1994 album Don't Ask can be found in one in four Australian homes - her career at home has been notoriously turbulent, a love-hate affair punctuated by long periods of profound indifference from both audiences and industry. "She's had massive ups and downs," says music critic Toby Creswell. She's had lots of false starts, been picked up by record companies and dropped, and had times when no one here wanted to know her. And yet her tenacity, her ability to reinvent herself, is amazing. Young talent time ... son Gabriel jamming with his cousin Sophia, who's said to look like the young Tina. In Paris, where she lives with her partner, Vincent Mancini, and their eight-year-old son, Gabriel, Arena has become part of the furniture. She regularly appears on French television and radio and performs in Les Enfoirés, an annual charity concert that has become something of an institution. For her first appearance, in 2006, she sang AC/DC's Highway to Hell. She has recorded three French-language albums, the first of which, 2005's Un Autre Univers, went platinum. According to her management, she is one of only a handful of foreign artists to sell more than a million albums in France. "The French love to adopt foreign people who make the effort to learn their language and culture, and Tina has done that," says veteran producer Bertrand Lamblot. Indeed, the French have embraced her in a way that Australia never has, which is to say, officially and unconditionally. In 2008, Arena became the first Australian artist to receive France's top civil honour, Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite, joining the likes of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, actress Jane Birkin and former French president Jacques Chirac. Workaholic ... behind the glamorous front, a strong work ethic has been a constant in Arena's life. Photo: Cybele Malinowski The fact that she has never received similar acknowledgment back home has undoubtedly hurt. "Yes, at times, Tina does feel that," says John O'Donnell, head of EMI Music Australia, the company which signed the deal for Reset. Everyone wants to be loved. Asked about it now, during a break in recording, Arena evinces a prickly mix of umbrage and bravado. The difference with Australia is that the Anglo-Saxon culture is not programmed to be ignited by that. Somebody who is passionate and fiery in Australia, they call you pretentious or arrogant or a bit of a diva. But can you tell me what is diva-ish about somebody who is passionate? She pauses to roll a cigarette, then waves it in my very Anglo-Saxon direction. But, hey, you guys can think and feel the way you wanna think. Knock yourselves out. Because, you know, like, I'm fine. It often seems that Arena has packed an unfeasibly large amount into her life, but that's partly because she got started very early. Her first performance was at the age of eight, when she stormed the stage at her cousin Gaetano's wedding at Springvale Town Hall, in Melbourne, grabbing the microphone and performing You're My World, the 1963 ballad covered by Daryl Braithwaite in 1974, in front of 300 guests. "She was a little kid on a mission," Arena's older sister, Nancy, says. She knew what she loved and she went and did it. Her parents Franca and Giuseppe (Joe), both Sicilian immigrants, took her to singing lessons in Brunswick, close to their Moonee Ponds home. Impressed, the teacher organised for Arena, then known as Filippina, or Pina (after her maternal grandmother, Filippa), to audition for Young Talent Time, a television variety show that aired every Saturday at 6.30pm. "I remember she came in a Hiawatha costume with a feather in her hair," says the show's host, Johnny Young. She was singing Macarthur Park really comfortably and casually, then suddenly hit this huge big note which comes in the middle, and we were like, 'Whoaa!' But we didn't like to overdo it with these young kids, so we tried to remain calm and just said, 'That was really nice, Pina, would you like to join the show?'  Tiny Tina Arena, as she became known ("Pina" was deemed inappropriate for TV), stayed for seven years, becoming the Young Talent Team's longest-serving member. The show taught her discipline, and turned her into a "seasoned professional." It also gave her an income (which her mother used to buy her a house, in Brunswick). But a normal upbringing it was not. "It was a full-time job," she says. Twenty hours a week, squeezed around school, Tuesday to Saturday, 11 months a year. Then there was the constant air of scrutiny. "I began to loathe myself," she says. I am European, I am dark. In a very Anglified country, it was a lot of pressure. I was like, 'Okay, I might be able to sing, but I look shithouse.'  She didn't develop a heroin habit or cirrhosis of the liver, but being a child star cast its own shadow, one that made transitioning to an adult career particularly difficult. "Because I'd worked so hard as a kid, there were parts of my psychological make-up that I didn't develop," she says. Self-analysis, discernment, self-confidence, that all came to me only around 33 or 34, when I really began to dig through the layers. Adding to Arena's frustration was the industry's inability to see her as anything other than a child star. It creeped me out a bit. The perception of me was this sweet little girl who didn't need to grow up. I was like, 'Mate, we are not f...in' Peter Pan here.'  After her first single, Turn up the Beat, in 1985, failed to impress, Arena turned to singing jingles and gigging in pubs. In 1990 she recorded her first album, Strong as Steel, the single from which, I Need Your Body, reached No. The video clip for the song featured Arena in a skintight velvet dress, all boobs and pout. While not exactly thrilled with her new image, Arena went along for the ride, pleased with the distance it put between her and Tiny Tina, whose symbolic exorcism had become her chief artistic priority. Indeed, Arena's book makes clear the contempt she reserved for her earlier incarnation. "It was another nail in the coffin for Tiny Tina," she writes of her performance at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1991, where she appeared in a leather corset, brandishing a whip. And it felt great. But replacing Tiny Tina with a dominatrix was never a plausible long-term strategy; naive and directionless, Arena found herself increasingly vulnerable. "It was a pretty hard industry," she says. Not very nurturing. And I didn't have the strength to assert myself. In 1995 Arena married Ralph Carr, her manager since 1992. The two had enjoyed considerable success, producing 1994's Don't Ask album, which sold 800,000 copies in Australia; then came In Deep (1997), which debuted at No. 1, going gold overnight. By emphasising her "natural woman" image, Carr helped turn Arena into the biggest-selling Australian female artist in history, with total sales of five million by the late 1990s, and album and touring receipts worth $80 million. Personally, however, their partnership was disastrous. Arena clearly feels she was exploited by Carr, who, as she writes in her book, had come to regard her as "nothing more than a meal ticket ... I needed someone who could show they loved me for myself and not just my earning capacity. Their divorce, which was finalised in 1999, proved long, messy and extremely painful. They still do not talk. When contacted by Good Weekend, Carr demanded to know who else I was interviewing and what angle I was taking. He ultimately declined to talk. When I tell Arena about this, she smiles wanly. When somebody picks up the phone and just says, 'Listen, mate, thanks very much for the proposition, I wish you all the best for the article', it's somebody whose conscience is very liberated or very peaceful. And that's not the reaction you got. If there's been a constant in Arena's life, it's work. She was working two weeks after the birth of her son, breastfeeding him between interviews. She was working on her 40th birthday in 2007, promoting her Songs of Love & Loss album in Australia. She was working so hard during her first marriage that she didn't have time for a honeymoon. She is constantly "on," either writing, recording, producing or promoting, touring or appearing on stage or TV (she's in the current season of Australia's Dancing with the Stars). This has come at a cost - her childhood, for a start, plus her first marriage and at least two miscarriages. It may also have contributed to Arena's periodic lapses in judgment, such as in 1998, when she called then Australian prime minister John Howard and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson "uneducated peasants," and suggested she would go into politics "to save the souls of Australians." This same interview also featured her claims that Australians were a bunch of "thickheads" whose obsession with sport was contributing to the country's high youth-suicide rates, and that Natalie Imbruglia was a one-hit wonder. Indeed, Arena appears to be an expert at amassing what she readily describes in Now I Can Dance as "baggage." "That was one of the reasons she came to France," says friend Alexis de Gemini, who is one of France's most experienced music and television producers. She wanted to start a new life, and she was not interested in bringing her past with her. Arena's soft-core sound always played well in Europe: In Deep sold almost one million copies in France alone. But her breakthrough came in 1999 with I Want to Spend My Lifetime Loving You, a duet with Marc Anthony which became the theme song for the film, The Mask of Zorro. Next came her first French-language single Aller Plus Haut (which sold one million copies in France), and a cover of the Edith Piaf song Les Trois Cloches, a risky piece of cultural ingratiation that was nevertheless received glowingly. "We loved that she did that," says Bertrand Lamblot. Her next two albums, Un Autre Univers (2005), and the less commercially successful 7 Vies (2008), cemented her place in French popular culture, completing the new identity Arena had always craved. "French people do not have a clue that she was a child star in Australia," says de Gemini. Some of them probably think she is French. Arena describes her life in Paris as being "very bohemian. Vinnie and I are not your generic couple with two kids and a big car. We'd rather go on a sailing trip to Corsica. Their house is a 1932, four-bedroom brick "pavilion" on the outskirts of Paris they bought in 2009 for around $700,000 and have recently renovated using Venetian sconces, 18th century Parisian apartment doors and hand-printed Indian textiles. "It's very light and open," she says. I couldn't live in a rabbit warren, especially in the European winter. The weekends, she says, are "very ritualistic. People drop in for lunch. You get the impression lots of wine gets drunk. Her life in Australia is less salubrious; when I last see her, she is bunking at her parents' place in Moonee Ponds, while Vincent cares for Gabriel in Paris. Moonee Ponds is handy, as it turns out, being just up the road from the Essendon Danse Academy, where Arena is rehearsing for Dancing with the Stars. The morning I visit her, she is practising rumba steps with an instructor called Damien. She doesn't consider herself a natural dancer. "God, I'm like a bloody ostrich, darl," she squawks. She says she is "terrified" of starting the show. I'm totally out of my comfort zone. But I love the challenge. It's like, 'Am I up for this? Can I do this? And it's like, 'Well, shit yeah, I can.'  Besides, says Damien, you don't have to be perfect. Some people want to see the train wreck. That's the beauty of the show. So, I ask, will they be practising their train wreck today? "Oh no!" says Tina, repositioning her tiny feet. We're planning to stay on the rails. Lead-in photography by Cybele Malinowski. Hair and make-up by Kimberley Forbes for O&M and Chanel. Tina wears Max Black dress.