Helen Reddy: still roaring at 72 Helen Reddy: ""I am a true gypsy"." It was 2002 when Helen Reddy made it clear the jig was up. No more live performing, thanks, and no greatest hits tours. She didn't, it seemed, want to be another has-been trotting out songs only a few would recall. She wanted to relax, be a grandmother, duck the limelight and develop her new career in hypnotherapy. Part of the hypnotherapist's craft is enabling "past regression" in a patient so they might investigate previous lives, she says on the phone from Los Angeles. Reddy has done that a lot for people during her 10-year second career and she describes herself as psychic: but had she been able to see her future, she might have seen it was premature to announce her stage-singing days were over. When Reddy began her comeback last year (she recently turned 72), it would have been hard for even the most gifted medium to predict the outcome. After all, while Reddy might have been the first Australian to win a Grammy (in 1973 for - of course - I Am Woman) and while she might have a star with her name on it sunk into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the reality is it has been quite a while since her last hit - and most of those were scored in America in the 1970s, where she has spent much of her life (she has dual citizenship). As it turns out, she's doing well with touring and she says she is singing sophisticated, interesting material - the songs she loves. And she has accepted that getting on stage is in her blood and she'll never get over the addiction. When asked if it is still fun, she seems slightly affronted. Fun? Of course it's fun. I love every minute I'm on stage. Her life has certainly had some turns: three marriages and divorces, two children (a decade apart), her own US prime-time TV show, lots of work in theatre, and a successful singing career (more than a dozen top 40 hits in the US). All crowned by I Am Woman. "I never expected it to be what it became," she says. It has been described as an iconic song; I'll go along with that. She was outraged by some of the music of the day when she started writing I Am Woman, which appeared on vinyl in a slighter, far less affecting version before its re-release on her third album in 1972. By then, she had written more words for it and, crucially, it had a more strident musical arrangement with the marching-band sound of trumpets heralding this sassy woman's arrival. It was, she once said, spunkier and more stylish than the first iteration. The music that was out at the time ... well there was Born a Woman, which goes: 'When you're born a woman, you're born to be lied to, cheated on and treated like dirt ... but when your man comes home you're glad it happens that way, because to be his woman - no price is too great to pay'. They were indoctrinating young girls into accepting domestic violence! I took one look at that and thought I've got a job to do here. So she did. The rearranged version was a slow burner but when it finally reached No.1 in December 1972 - an achievement that was eclipsed in the same week by the birth of her son Jordan - it went global. It easily fed into the zeitgeist, more bras were no doubt turned to cinder and Reddy became a warrior for people who had had enough of gender stereotyping. Reddy writes in her 2005 memoir The Woman I Am that when she was asked by Capitol Records to do that third album, she had wanted the songs on it to reflect her evolving consciousness about equal rights thanks to witnessing the effect of protest songs in the 1960s. She searched for lyrics that reflected the pride she felt in being female and being descended from so many strong women. How do we recognise sexism and how do we eliminate it from our lives? Reddy has written that we can choose to use terminology that is inclusive rather than divisive - children rather than boys and girls, spouses instead of wives and husbands. And "Good evening everyone" instead of "Good evening ladies and gentlemen." All evident in the way she expresses herself today. Reddy reckons she became aware of gender inequality very early in life and recalls one incident on stage at Perth's Tivoli when she was four. Born into a showbiz family - father Max Reddy was a writer-producer and mother Stella Lamond was an actor - they were working at the theatre that night when they saw a stage-sketch by a male comic painting at an easel that was facing away from the audience. "The premise was that she [the woman in the painting] was nude and he [the artist] was a dirty old man, and I found that so offensive, I can't tell you," she says. I told my sister but I wasn't able to express myself properly. That she became such a feminist figurehead surprised her. "I would have been too intimidated to write it had I known," she says. After I Am Woman came out, people would stop me or come up to me and say they'd gone to law school as a result of that song. That's pretty amazing. It also enabled her own career to catch fire - audiences loved what she represented - and, after those three divorces, the song has come to symbolise the resolutely independent life she has since lived. "I am a true gypsy," she says. I am never anywhere permanently. This year she took out a 12-month lease to be near her children Traci and Jordan and their families in LA but she spends long periods in Australia, too, often with her sister, the veteran performer Toni Lamond. It was at Lamond's 80th birthday last year when they sang Breezin' Along with the Breeze at a Rose Bay yacht club that she decided she rather liked performing. How had she forgotten? I am at the age where I can just kick back and say what a wonderful life I've had. She reels off her recent touring destinations with her four-piece band, and says while she loves doing theatre, on Broadway for example, actors do the same thing every night. But in your own show, the stage is yours. I have the freedom of that stage and I love it to bits. Clearly, the adulation warms her and the photos in her memoir are full of stars laughing, hugging and appearing alongside her, from Prince Charles and Frank Sinatra, to Sylvester Stallone and George Burns to Ella Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton-John. Even Kermit the Frog has a photo-op with her. "I feel blessed to have had the career I've had, having showbiz parents," she says. People ask if I was nervous the first time I went on stage and I say 'I don't remember the first time I went on stage so I never got a chance to be nervous'. There are no nerves now, either. Helen Reddy is at The Concourse, Chatswood, on April 7 and the Enmore Theatre on April 11. Ma Rainey: Barrel House Blues (1923) The pioneering American blues singer was an outspoken advocate of sexual equality. On Barrel House Blues she sang: "Papa likes his bourbon, mama likes her gin/Papa like his outside women, mama likes her outside men." Kitty Wells: It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels (1952) In 1952, Hank Thompson had a hit with the Wild Side of Life: "I didn't know God made honky tonk angels/I should have known you'd never make a wife." Later that year, Wells put the blame back on masculine shoulders in this song which sold a million copies. Lesley Gore: You Don't Own Me (1964) While Dusty Springfield was telling the ladies of the early 1960s to "wear your hair just for him, cause you won't get him ... wishin' and a hopin"', Lesley Gore was giving hope to teen girls with this declaration of independence. Loretta Lynn: Don't Come Home a Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind (1967) Loretta Lynn's forthright self-penned tunes often caused controversy. Like many others, this song was drawn from her own experience; reportedly based on her husband of the time. Aretha Franklin: Respect (1967) Franklin took Otis Redding's plaintive 1965 soul song and remodelled it as a celebration of womanly defiance. The recording earned her two Grammys in 1968 and became her signature tune. Gabriel Wilder