radionotes podcast episodes

062 Ange Lavoipierre

by | Mar 29, 2020 | episodes | 0 comments

062 Ange Lavoipierre

Ange Lavoipierre‘s latest – award winning – show is Zealot. Apart from theatre and comedy they also are one of the co-host of the ABC’s daily news podcast The Signal.

While in South Australia for the Adelaide Fringe run of their show, Ange spoke to John Murch of radionotes…

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IMAGE CREDIT: Monica Pronk

Special Thanks to Brick + Mortar Creative for their hospitality and hosting the space to record the chat, at what is likely the busiest time in Adelaide Fringe calendar.

SHOW NOTES: Ange Lavoipierre

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In The Box:

Feature Guest: Ange Lavoipierre – Co-Host of The Signal (ABC), Performer and Comedian

Next Episode: Andrew Farriss (INXS) talks about their debut Solo album

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[Radio Production – notes: ]

CREDITS

Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio   

Web-design/tech: Steve Davis

Voice: Tammy Weller  

You can make direct contact with the podcast – on the Contact Page

TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV team member Steve P – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Ange, welcome to Adelaide and welcome to radionotes.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Thank you so much.

John Murch:
Beautifully you’ve been hosted here at the Adelaide Fringe with two South Australian artists or collectives, we should say. Can we firstly talk about Big Mood, who they are and how you fit into that?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah, absolutely. So this is Laura Desmond and Steph Mitchell. I know them just from Fringe World. I sort of met them over in Edinburgh in the first place, and I guess first knew about them because I knew about Laura as an artist. I thought who better to have on board than two local girls? Because Adelaide’s not at all my natural habitat but I have got to love it. This is my third year here.

John Murch:
What is your vibe about the Adelaide audiences? Let me preface it by saying other comedians have had Adelaide as their first gig, Hannah Gadsby starts their season in Adelaide. So how do you find Adelaide?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I think of Adelaide as a really important audience. It is kind of way… I mean, from an industry perspective. I really liked it. First of all, you just need to split the two sections, right? It’s like people who just come along for a good time to see some comedy. What I like about that part of the audience in Adelaide is that they are up for it because it’s the Fringe and they’re like, “Show me something I’ve never ever seen before.” They’re really up for that.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Then from an industry perspective, it’s really important because it’s the second biggest Fringe in the world, biggest in the southern hemisphere. It’s where you will be seen by people who could make important decisions about yo ur career and so I try to bring something that I’m pretty happy with to Adelaide. I try to do trials in Sydney to friendly home crowd punches in Redfern or something like that.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Back in Sydney, I did a How About Fringe This Year? That was a very wobbly on its legs show back then. But in a fun way, I think I liked the chaos. I had a lot of fun there. But yes, Adelaide, I do try to… Obviously, it’ll develop but I try to bring something that’s pretty well formed.

John Murch:
The Giant Dwarf is moving. What’s your vibe on that? Because I’m sure there are some friendly ghosts within that venue.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Totally, totally. We had our last show there with The Bear Pack, who’s an improv duo that I improvised the cello with, who are incredible in their own right. But that was the first place that I started doing comedy. That was the first place that I went, “Oh, this is possible.” It felt really inaccessible to me at first because if you’ve ever been to the theater, it’s huge, it’s old, it’s heritage-listed, bats everywhere. But the ceilings are enormous. It’s stunning and it’s old world beauty and charm. And to end this, is a huge red velvet curtain and an enormous stage. And you’re like, “This? This is possible for me?” It was a really shocking, almost incendiary idea that you could be on that stage, but then that’s where I ended up starting. So to have it move and there’s no secret that in the arts world that everyone’s being quite open about this, that it’s very unhappy circumstances.

Ange Lavoipierre:
The landlord’s raised the rent, it was not able to be met. No one else was coming in. It was just they went, “You’re not paying us enough. You have to get out.” They are moving up the road to a different venue, which will be smaller and I’m sure will have its own peculiar charms that we’ll come to love over the years, but it was… Yeah, a lot of ghosts in those walls, good, bad, ugly, glorious. All of them.

John Murch:
Let’s take you back to when were you first introduced to the cello?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Went to school in Bathurst called All Saints. My mom used to teach there and I was lucky enough that they had a really great music program. And so you just cycle through in. You’re like eight or 10 or whatever, you just cycle through a bunch of different instruments and see how it goes and I picked up the cello during one of those semesters and I achieved in a day on the cello what I achieved in months on any other instrument, years on the piano. I used to bash away at the piano for years before that and just decided that I was like musical. So they’re like, “We’ll just keep throwing instruments at her until, no literally.”

John Murch:
So under the age of eight it was the piano?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Then I had a horrible work ethic because my parents… I blamed them for this in a light hearted way, they were very supportive, too supportive. I would argue. Really, they were like, “You’re very clever and you can do whatever you want.” I was two years young for my year at school. So I’ve been told from this really young age, “Oh, you’re very bright.” I think it did weird amount of… Damage is maybe a bit of a dramatic way to describe it but it meant that I didn’t work as hard as I could have or should have, and just waited for things to work out for me. I’ve had to get better at that throughout life. But yeah, with the piano, not much progress. Then within hours on the cello, it just made sense. It was like I could just play it much more easily.

John Murch:
Sounds like we have to go even further back to when the piano first appeared in your life.

Ange Lavoipierre:
We had a piano in our house. It was a really old piano. It’s always just that charming little bit out of key, big cracks and structural integrity of this piano. But my mum used to be a very intuitive player. She wasn’t technically perfect or anything like that but she always just had a love of the piano. There were two or three songs that she could play beautifully. Big, rolling, overly elaborate introduction to Piano Man by Billy Joel and Fur Elise and just songs that, they’re not obscure by any stretch of the imagination, but they are very beautiful and that was my earliest memory.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Gosh, I’ve never talked about this. It’s my earliest memory of hearing the piano, of music, is my mum. Of live music is my mum sitting down at the piano and playing these songs and singing them with great gusto and great joy and playing kind of games with us kids. Me and my little brother Mark, looking down at us on the ground and looking back up and yeah, that was the piano. I was her audience, yeah. When she was looking after us, she’d play these and do a real ham up the showmanship of it as well, just go to town, seeing these songs first we thought was the best thing. I guess she must started teaching me little bits and pieces on the piano and then sent me off to music lessons with a woman named Barbara Bruce, who I got a letter out of the blue from actually.

John Murch:
Are you very suspicious of people with two first names?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Always. Yeah, they’re spies. I let her out of the blue at the ABC and sometimes when you get a letter at the ABC from a name that you don’t immediately recognise, always you assume that’s a crank, right? You’re like, “Oh, this is going to be terrible.” This is someone who’s threatening some sort of harm to me or telling me how much they hate me.” Barbara Bruce wrote to me and I opened it up and it was this charming letter and it was sort of, “You probably won’t remember me, but I remember you. You were a student…” The letter went on to say, she was saying nice things like, “I followed your career on the ABC. I’ve heard you over the years on the radio. By the way, I’ve enclosed this extraordinary piece of paper that I’ve kept. It’s a manuscript, this piece of music that you wrote when you were five years old or something.” I was really young.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Here it is. It was called Snowflakes. I remember being blown away at the time. It was this haunting little melody and I remember it. I remember this conversation where’d I come into pianos and I played it, “It’s extraordinary. I’m going to write that down.” (Singing) It’s very simple, but very beautiful and haunting. The truth of the matter was that, that was a song that my cousin had learned it as an exercise in a book. I’d heard it, liked it, memorised it and started playing it. Then as children would sometimes tell me, I didn’t… You don’t have any moral development by the time you’re five, you just kind of…. This teacher sort of looked down at me at this lesson, was like, “Angela, did you write this?” I went, “Yes.” Didn’t think about the consequences. She insists on notating it and sharing it with everyone to the point that I was then being asked to play it for other people.

Ange Lavoipierre:
It was my first experience of being like caught in a lie, consequences of that lie. My mum caught me out eventually, I was caught up because mum made me play it to my auntie Trish who was my cousin’s mother. Then went, “She didn’t make that up. Allison plays that song in the piano.” The eventual inevitable crushing shame that comes with a lie but I haven’t written back to Barbara Bruce, because I feel I can’t reply without addressing the fact that she sent me this piece of music. It feels like a pointless way to disappoint her now that she’s… Her having been impressed with this for 25 odd years and yet, I don’t want to contribute to my own lie, 25 years down the track. Having learned that lesson once already.

John Murch:
Your mother’s there. Basically she’s performing to Billy Joel. Were there any records in your house at the same time?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah, it was Rodriguez, Cold Fact. It was Graceland, Paul Simon. It was a lot of Neil Diamond, Hot August Night weirdly, who I just think is maybe the funniest man in the world. For a while I just was obsessed with him on Twitter and would just retweet a lot of what he did because I just think he’s fundamentally a funny figure and I can’t explain why. Creedence Clearwater Revival.

John Murch:
So basically the James Blunt of the ’70s.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, exactly. That’s the vibe that I get. That’s the kind of wheelhouse that my parents were. That was the influence.

John Murch:
What was your first record?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I won a dance competition at Time Zone in Sydney. Yeah. Whatever the sort of… It was like a big gaming sort of thing down at Darling Harbor, a dance competition and my prize was a B*Witched single. Very, very sort of saccharin, Irish pop girl pop group from the ’90s. I went straight from that flavour to tapes of Limp Bizkit. I went from that to rap rock. I just kind of… I always liked kind of extremity in music. That was something that I was attracted to.

John Murch:
How far did you take that extremity and more importantly, what friendships did you form by sharing that?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I found that it was a bridge to older kids. That was kind of why I liked certain kind of music. Growing up in the country as well. I think growing up in Bathurst, Forbes, but Bathurst by the time I was really getting into this music, Triple J was King. It was in lieu of a personality or an identity when you’re still working out who you are, having alternative culture and counter culture as a reference point, even though you didn’t have the language to talk about it that way at the time was really, really important. It was stimulating in an environment that was otherwise… Country towns exaggerate the monoculture, I think. Because there is this need to fit in because it is such a small community. Instead, I chose to and always wanted to differentiate myself in a way that I’m sure was very painful for my family and for everyone else around me, because I was that annoying kid that was like, “I’m not like you, man. I’m not a conformist.” I was just one of those nightmare teenagers who found their identity that way.

John Murch:
Was music essential to that finding identity?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yes, it was. Yeah, it was like I became inordinately angry and upset, very young as a teenager. That storm that parents wait to break when they have a teenager like, “Oh, they’ll get angry and weird at some point.” Happened quite early for me and I was very unpleasant to be around for many years. Yeah. Music was kind of the comfort, music was the only thing I cared about at that point.

John Murch:
Your current show is called Zealot, which focuses on your time back when you were 10 years of age where a change occurred. Let’s talk about that. How much was religious music part of your life prior to the age of 10?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Only in so far as music heightens experience emotions. I was always a very sensitive kid. I remember I wasn’t allowed to watch Gumby, I think it was for years, because my mum would come back into the room after I’d been watching Gumby and I’d be crying hysterically and she couldn’t work out why? So she just banned me from watching the show. Turns out it was the theme music and I remember being really deeply moved by it. I can’t remember the content of the show, but the music was like… So I was a very, very sensitive kid. So I think if anything, music was a bit of a gateway drug for religion, for me.

John Murch:
Try to get some age on this.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah.

John Murch:
So Pokey and Gumby or Gumby generally.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Three, four, five.

John Murch:
Was religion in your life at that stage?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. But in a sort of nominal ways. Like yes, Jesus is real. Yes, God is real. Yes, Santa is real. And we go to church at Christmas, Easter and funerals and weddings.

John Murch:
So not a Sunday thing?

Ange Lavoipierre:
But still prays before dinner and stuff. So my parents were very committed to this. They still are. They still would call themselves Christians, which is why I try to make it so that show does not… It’s not about denigrating religion. I was raised religiously in a religious Christian household, but not with any of the zealotry that I found when I was 10 and I had this kind of conversion experience.

John Murch:
Right. So let’s talk about that. What music were you listening to at the age of nine, 10?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Probably still-

John Murch:
Because if Gumby’s music was moving you back then.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. I wish I had cooler answers to this question, but I don’t, it’s like around 10, I might’ve been sort of starting to move towards some alternative music that was quite extreme and angry. I struggled to know bands, Limp Bizkit still seems to be coming up rock. I remember my first gig that I went to was Grinspoon’s, very much that Australian alternative world, The Living End, I liked the anger in punk, but I hadn’t had a kind of thorough grounding in punk. You read Rolling Stone, you read Blunt Magazine, you listen to Triple J, those were the three kind of Bibles.

John Murch:
Did you see any of these bands, Grinspoon and the like, live?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Grinspoon came to Bathurst. I remember the sensation and the feeling. I actually went to write about it the other day for the first time. So it’s fresh in my head, showed up to this gig my first ever gig and I was so excited to be there and you get to a gig and you go, “Oh, I have to be closer. This is so exciting. I have to be closer.” I would’ve been 12, I suppose, struggled to place it exactly at a time. That was quite short still. I mean, I have to be closer and it was dark and it was full of these tall sweaty men. Then it sort of got a bit, because I’m like, “I can’t see.” It’s not close enough, the energy, the music, you just want to be closer to it. And so then I got to the very, very front and it was violent, right? It’s scary. Everyone’s twice your size and you’re being jostled around and you can barely move and you’re being crushed up against the barrier. But that just added to it. You just wanted more of that.

Ange Lavoipierre:
The more the scarier and the more risk there was involved, the higher the stakes and the more… It just sort of further elevated the experience of music. Then you get to the very, very front and these guys are probably looking down, going like, “What?” Because it’s like being in a forest, a sweaty forest. “What’s she doing here?” And like, “Are we going to hurt her?” Even that wasn’t enough. It was like the first time I realised it’s like, “Oh, it’s never enough. I’m never going to be happy. Like you can never get far enough to the front.” That feeling when you’re young and you want more, you want to possess the music. It’s not enough to experience it. That was kind of when I noticed that.

John Murch:
Did that inspire you to want to be on stage yourself?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yes. I think I always just wanted to be on stage, but then thought it was maybe hokey or hack or predictable to say that, that’s what you wanted and perhaps unlikely and therefore an embarrassing goal to admit to.

John Murch:
What was happening in the music sphere, when you were full on going religious?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I always had a real tension because I had a strong hedonist strike, but also engage with religion in an intellectual way in so far as that’s possible when you’re a 10, 11, 12, 13, but I always wanted to read a lot and test the logic of what it was that was being told to me. And so it was always a very anguished kind of faith, but where the music came into it, is that I just remember being in these church services. There’s this one church that I kind of insisted we go to, it was sort of like an Anglican evangelical blend-

John Murch:
Let’s be clear. You insisted.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. I was like, “Let’s go to this church.”

John Murch:
You were 10.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. And they were up for it, my family was really just anyway… My poor little brother, he just got swept on all this. It was very, very good natured about the whole thing. I remember it was hard for me. There were certain hymns, it was hard for me to get through without crying because I was so moved by them. I still find that when I listen to some of those hymns, because I was listening to them to putting together this show, I wanted to put some hymns into it as transition music. Ideally, humans that are silly and funny and capable of being laughed at in some way. But I ended up revisiting all these very moving hymns that I grew up listening to and I still find that they sort of… I just get that feeling in my throat, like I might be about to cry. When I was that age and I was listening to them for the first time and really believing in God and believing in everything in that universe as described, I would cry in the middle of the church. I’d find it very, very moving.

John Murch:
Some religions use music as a selling point, a place, very keen to get on the top of the charts. Will send me three or four different emails about the one song and the album being released. They want to be on the charts. They want to engage their audience with music.

Ange Lavoipierre:
That’s right.

John Murch:
Talk to me about that and how you were seeing that across those years of maybe nine through to 14 and to now.

Ange Lavoipierre:
well, it wasn’t… If we’re talking about, say the kind of prosperity gospel, Hillsong Churches, where they’ve really used music as a marketing strategy and a way to position themselves with young people, our church borrowed from that, but it’s a small town. It was families. There weren’t a lot of young people there. I mean, there’s a university in Bathurst, but it wasn’t super easy to get those people in. It was young families and just kind of Bathurstians. So marketing religion is a cool thing that was like, “Look, we’ve got this pop music sensibility and we’re not so culturally remote as churches of the past have been.”

Ange Lavoipierre:
It wasn’t ever going to get too many people through the door. Where it came in was that once you were in the door, it would really hook you because it gave you this strong emotional engagement with the material. Then it was blended with this sort of rigorous intellectual approach to the gospel that was quite… They’ll kind of work in you on two fronts. But it was less of a marketing tool, an answer to your question and the way that you see it used in the megachurches, if you will.

John Murch:
Can we talk about character in the show without giving away too much of the show because it struck me because I’m an Adelaide boy-

Ange Lavoipierre:
Sure.

John Murch:
That for some reason, talking about the Hilltop Hoods is a great pickup line. Who would’ve thunk it?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. It’s hard to sort of know how to talk about this without giving away too much, but-

John Murch:
All right. Well, let me ask this question then.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah.

John Murch:
And people can go and see the show to get the full context of what I’m asking. Were you ever, have you ever been a fan of the Hilltop Hoods? And it’s okay not to be.

Ange Lavoipierre:
No, massively. I remember Nosebleed Section was probably the first time. Although The Herd was the first time that I ever really loved hip hop. Then the Hilltop Hoods too. Definitely. I think it was such a specific tone though, to hit. They were so one culture. I mean The Herd was a little bit different. They was sort of a bit ideological in what they were doing, but that like, “It’s your round.” That kind of way that Hilltop Hoods would talk, for me, it’s been really exciting to see how Australian hip-hop’s really matured and it’s a lot more diverse now than it used to be. But yeah, grew up listening to it, absolutely. And being lectured too about it by some unsavory characters at my church, somewhat taints the memory.

John Murch:
We’re currently speaking to Ange, she is a cellist, what do you get from cello playing? You do a lot of improvising station with the cello. So what is it from the instrument of choice?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I don’t switch my brain off very well. I don’t really know how to… Yeah, I’m not very good at that. And so the cello is good because it’s this skill that I have from a long time ago, which I put the cello down for 10 years. A bout of serious illness when I was in my late teens. Then just put the cello down then, mainly because when I would play it, my mum would just cry. She was worried I wasn’t going to make it. So she’d just cry.

Ange Lavoipierre:
So I was not playing the cello for a bit and then only restarted to play with The Bear Pack in the world’s weirdest niche, apparently, which is a comedy cellist and found straight away that yeah, it was accessing this forgotten part of my brain. And because it’s improvisational, you’re not sitting there and having to focus on the music. I’m sure if you were measuring my brain waves, if you will like representing my brain waves in a visual way, they would change pretty dramatically. I feel like it’s working. I feel like my brain is working in a different way when I do that and it’s a lot less frenetic.

John Murch:
Why do you think it is that you can’t switch off? Is it because you’re so interested in information and making sure you don’t miss something?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. I think I’ve got this like hamster wheel that goes, because my memory is not so great. And so I don’t trust my-

John Murch:
So, it’s that checking back in-

Ange Lavoipierre:
It’s checking, checking, checking. I think I probably have some… And I don’t mean this as a gag. I mean, it’s like in an actual way OCD and yeah, this need to check and check and recheck and recheck, which is good. It’s served me very well. In a lot of ways, it’s made me very organised and driven and goal-oriented person, but it means… I mean, I’ve got my diary right here in front of me. I can’t actually go anywhere without it because I freak out.

John Murch:
Which by the way, I’m completely freaked out. I decided to go paper this year and we’ve got exactly the same diary.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. And the same pen.

John Murch:
Yes.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah, anyway.

John Murch:
Whoa.

Ange Lavoipierre:
But I need these lists and I need to-

John Murch:
I have a feeling I shouldn’t be here. It’s like two Time Lords. So for you-

Ange Lavoipierre:
Externalise everything, so as not to forget it. So I’ve found these little work arounds to try and stop my brain from doing that. But it’s just the way that I’m wired. I have ideas, I get excited easily and then I’m scared that I’m going to forget them.

John Murch:
How do you then keep memories?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I didn’t for a long time and I really regret. I really regret, there’s like 15 years where I only recorded things intermittently and now I obsessively record everything. My notes section on my phone and my Google Docs is just overflowing. I’m working on so many projects that I love and excite me and screenwriting and short stories and all this and performing and doing all this stuff that makes me feel very fulfilled. There was 15 years where I was just kind of… It’s like I was asleep. I think it was partly like a brain thing, it was partly like… Well, more like 10 years actually. But yeah, it just took me longer. So for context, the illness that I’m telling you about is cancer. I think it just took me a lot longer than I thought to kind of recover from that, brain-wise

John Murch:
For you then having that 10 years of wilderness, so to speak, is there a certain music that clicks and brings you back to certain times?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Hugely. Yeah. In fact, I make these monthly playlists on Spotify as a kind of rolling time capsule of that period. Because I’m this sort of person, I don’t know if you’re like this, where if you find a song that you love, you can’t not listen to it. Right now, I have the February playlist this year, and there was a January one. I try not to dive back into them too much until a couple of years has passed.

John Murch:
But they are all available.

Ange Lavoipierre:
They’re all available.

John Murch:
Zan Rowe, for example, and updated one. So it’s like a new one, that’s not kept.

Ange Lavoipierre:
No, no. I keep them all. They’re little discrete time capsules for that time. Mainly for my…. I mean, some people follow them, people are welcome to follow them, but it’s really just so I can time travel back to that moment if I want to and remember how I was feeling at that time. Because I’ll listen to something because it makes me feel something, right? That’s why we listen to anything and that’s how you engage with it. And so it immediately evokes that feeling and everything that was happening in your life at that time. Yeah. It’s like a direct access way. Literally it’s time travel.

John Murch:
So that’s been useful over the years?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Very. Painful at times as well. I started doing that during a difficult period, as a relationship breakdown going on, as a sort of mode of expression. And so it’s taken me years to be able to go back to it, but I wish that I had it. I wish that I had it back to that sort of weird dark ages period that I’m talking about, that 10 years where I just forgot to record anything much at all. I would give anything to be able to choose a month in 2011, go back there. And you can still do it informally. If I can really think hard, despite my rubbish memory about what it was that I was listening to back then and go back and listen to that album, then you can transport back there.

John Murch:
Visceral nature of music. If you’re in a shopping centre and they’re playing a song from 2011, 2012, for example, do you then get a feeling inside that goes, “That song means something.” Then do you try to work that process through?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah, we all know that feeling, right? You’re in Coles and something comes on-

John Murch:
Slightly déjà vu but not déjà vu.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. And it’s like being, if it’s the right song or the wrong song? It’s like a fist in your guts, it’s like someone’s just grabbed you and like twisted something crucial inside you. I think all the instinct was to suppress that, dissociate and compartmentalise it, which is what I’m very, very good at. But I think the better thing to do and what I would try to do now is to articulate that feeling somehow, put it down, get it down.

John Murch:
Are there some songs that you just can’t listen to?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. There’s probably only one album that I can’t ever listen to again. It’s Beach House, Teen Dream. I can picture it perfectly and I can listen to the entire thing back-to-back.

John Murch:
In your head, that is?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah.

John Murch:
Yeah.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Never, never completely. It was an album that I fell in love too and then the relationship broke down and this was quite some years ago and I’m fine now. I listened to the album again once when I knew the relationship was over, I sat down and I listened to the whole thing, start to finish and I could listen to it now, but part of me is… It’s like you don’t want to because it has such power. And you’re worried that by opening that box, some of it will escape and the potency of it is what’s impressive about it. And so you want to save that for when you next need that feeling where you want that feeling, because it is so rare to have that kind of potency contained in anything. I once knew a guy who loved Nirvana so much, he was saving the entire Nirvana back catalogue to listen to over the course of his life.

Ange Lavoipierre:
So he worked out how long he thought he was going to live. He had worked out how much of the Nirvana back catalogue he hadn’t yet experienced. He was letting himself listen to a Nirvana song at regular intervals for the rest of his life. So I really hope he doesn’t have premature death for so many reasons, but especially him, it would seem tragic because I just don’t know anyone who’s loved a band quite so much, or at least in that specific way. But it’s a little bit like that, it’s like you’re impressed with the potency of it and so you don’t want to let it lose anything.

John Murch:
So he’d be getting small hits by listening to Foo Fighters going, “There’s a little bit of Dave Grohl in there. That’s okay.”

Ange Lavoipierre:
Hear that. Yeah.

John Murch:
It’s just enough. Just a wiff.

John Murch:
I want to talk about the idea of reading in bars. What is it about the written word that you find such enjoyment in those scenarios?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I’ve always found my brain works better when isolation isn’t exaggerated by literal isolation. So, which is why reading and working in bars has always been good for me because if there is activity happening, then I don’t know, for some reason that’s always… I found it easier to focus that way. So, that’s why bars… I probably do drink too much. Sit and have a really nice martini with a book.

John Murch:
Is that the drink of choice? Martini?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. Yeah, really nice martini and a good book, radio and podcasts, and sort of the audio experience and music and live performance is so linear. You don’t have a choice about how you experience it. It’s this train that comes for you and then it passes you by and whistles as it does. There’s a joy to that form as well. But it is very specific. In contrast, written word, couldn’t be more different. You have the absolute autonomy to move around the page and to move around the meaning and revisit parts and just like squeeze everything you can out of it as you go. I have come to enjoy, really enjoy kind of inter-textual reading like Jia Tolentino and Rebecca Solnit. They’ll refer back to other writers and you get this richness to the writing and you can jump in and out and I’ll sometimes read with reference material next to me, so I can learn what it is they’re talking about. Try not to go to my phone to do it because then you fall into your phone and reading time’s over.

John Murch:
Are you a lyrical kind of music listener?

Ange Lavoipierre:
I thought I was, and then recently, there are songs that I thought that I knew very well and I’ve heard lyrics and kind of like, “I never considered what they were saying.” I think now I would say that with a bit more wisdom in hindsight, I probably engage primarily on an emotional melodic level with an rhythmic level with music. The real lesson in that is that I have always loved hip hop, really loved hip hop. I would learn all the lyrics to these songs and kind of rap along to them. But I think it was the rhythmic element of it rather than the lyrics, but I’m coming more to the lyrics as I get older.

John Murch:
Hip hop, it’s about being inside the cannon of what they’re trying to say-

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. It’s incredibly immersive. You can be so much more a part of hip hop than you can of any other music because to participate melodically is one thing, but participate lyrically and rhythmically at the same time, the energy that you can put into that performance is almost limitless, right? Whereas when you need to sing something or you need to perform something melodically, it’s kind of, there are natural constraints and what it is. If there’s no tonality to it, then the ceiling sort of disappears on how much energy you can put into it-

John Murch:
And the call-and-response has a sort of amen to it as well.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Totally. Yeah. There’s that as well.

John Murch:
Just to bring that back.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Bringing that back. Very skillfully done.

John Murch:
You left religion to one side, but now you’re with tarot.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah.

John Murch:
Which is also about understanding, based upon the written word and images and understanding, and philosophies and everything else.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Right.

John Murch:
Who first introduced you to tarot?

Ange Lavoipierre:
My friend Eddie Sharp, who has written with me a lot. I came back from Edinburgh last year and was a bit of a… Just a bit listless and weird and deranged as people often are when they come back from Edinburgh and was trying to write the beginnings of what became this show to sort of trial at and a split bill at Sydney Fringe. Was hanging out at Eddie’s house and just not knowing what I was doing, I was just a mess. He did a couple of readings for me, but was quite mortified. Because I think he thinks of me as quite a grounded, rational person.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Maybe that’s not the word, but certainly like not someone who believes in magic and I don’t. But he was like, “Oh, I guess I’ll do a reading for you, but you don’t care about this. Don’t listen to me. What are you doing?” And just sort of like halfheartedly threw out some cards to me. I was like, “This makes sense. This is great. I love this.” And immediately fell in love with it and went about getting cards and learning and just reading obsessively everything I could for the next little while.

Ange Lavoipierre:
So it was all pretty new to me, still. Full disclosure, I mean, I’m a baby in this world, but also look, as I say, don’t believe in magic. Don’t think of it as a substitute for religion, I think it’s interesting adjacent sort of territory. I think for some people it is religious spiritual experience, but like the psychoanalysts loved tarot for the reason that it mucks around in archetypes, right? It’s just a useful way to kind of triangulate meaning with you and another person that is still a friend and you use the cards as a kind of medium for understanding yourself and just getting insight that you never would otherwise.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Also it’s a way to cut through with people. You sit down with a friend, it might take you two hours to talk and you may not ever talk about the thing that matters. But if you put the cards down, then the thing you say to the person is, “What’s something that’s been keeping you up at night. Let’s talk about that.” You have to ask the cards, then we unpack it. It’s really quite a clinical organised, structured way. The way I do it, anyway.

John Murch:
Religion was there till the age of 10 and now heading towards the third, or maybe in the third decade, you’re finding another form of finding understanding in what is written in a way, or an understanding of a particular kind of text. Is it a sense of guidance that you find through them?

Ange Lavoipierre:
No, I’m my own guide. I’m my own guide. Yeah. And the wisdom of people before me, that’s my guide. Totally different experiences. It’s sort of mischievous of me to equate them in the show. I think they tell us something about the same material, which is why the same area of culture in the world, which is how I justify equating them in the show. But for me totally different experiences because I very literally, very wholly, completely believed in Christianity in the word of God as described at the time to me. To the point I was utterly convinced and that’s why that process of going from belief to unbelief was actually pretty like painful.

Ange Lavoipierre:
You don’t cross back over that bridge. I know one person who has, but I think in general, it’s fair to say that you don’t cross back over that bridge once you cross it once. Yeah. And for me, I think I like the ritual and I like the drama. I think that’s the other reason. I think I’m attracted to both of them for similar reasons in that I liked the theatricality and the story of religion as well. I like the theatricality and the story of mysticism. And so part of my personality that, that appeals to, that’s still there. So that’s the parallel, I suppose.

John Murch:
What joy are you finding in your comedy at the moment? You are the receptionist of the Greta Thunberg Helpline, which of course went quite virile as the kids say.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yes. Yeah, they do say that.

John Murch:
What is that vibe that you have for comedy right now? What’s exciting you about it? What are you looking forward to?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Got this absurd web series, literally absurd is also absurd that it happens at all, called Impostors, gross-out humor, which we didn’t ever really intend to do. But when we started writing it and making it, the things that made us laugh so hard, so hard. Because we started having these ideas just because we were doing a split bill together. She was the person who I first did a split bill with, I just bullied her into doing comedy, she didn’t do stand up.

Ange Lavoipierre:
She’s a very funny improvisor, incredible actor, split now, when you feel as if you’re not really ready to make your debut, or maybe you’re trailing new material or whatever, but just for whatever reason, you don’t want to do a full hour, an European a friend and say, “Come on, let’s do this together.” And we toured this split bill because I wanted to kind of get a taste for the comedy circuit, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Edinburgh, before I went out and said, “Ta-da here’s my first hour, which is what last year’s show was.” But the year before Jane and I went and did that together. When we’re out on the road, we would sit and just the stuff that would make us laugh, we came up with these ideas and stuff that would make us laugh was always weirdly gross stuff. The kind of humor that is not usually associated with women. I think that is what I like about what we do is that we sort of try to… The feeling that you get in the world, the feeling that you get when you feel as if you might be an imposter.

John Murch:
Right.

Ange Lavoipierre:
That scenario, there’s one that was set at a baby shower. There’s one that we did about being at a nail salon and being made to look pretty and not really knowing how to exist in the world after that. Jane dies in that one. Spoiler. It’s incredibly weird. There’s blood, there’s baby sh*t, I made Jane p*ss herself at one point in an office water cooler scenario. It’s just, we’re trying to make real, the common moments that all people in general, but women… We’re doing it from a female perspective, feel where you’re like, “Is this just me or is this the weirdness of the world?”

John Murch:
Let me just mention sending a fax is one of the most beautiful lines I’ve seen in quite a while.

Ange Lavoipierre:
How do you send a fax as a way to get out of anything?

John Murch:
Got to send a fax. It took me back to at least 1995.

Ange Lavoipierre:
I don’t know if it stands as a excuse anymore, but it’s a wonderful burn if you get out of something quickly to be like, “Yeah, I’m going to listen to fax.”

John Murch:
Ange is our special guest on radionotes. We’re here with those in life talking about music. Your favorite live music experience.

Ange Lavoipierre:
My favorite band in the whole world, in the history of the world as because of their live music experience, are you familiar with the Sydney band now defunct, Royal Headache?

John Murch:
Yes.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yes. Okay. So I started seeing Royal Headache by accident because I went to early, by myself to a Black Lips gig at Sydney University. Royal Headache was the support act and there were like five people in the audience and it was before they really kind of… They were big in like the punk scene in Sydney at that point, but they hadn’t really taken off and I saw them and I just thought, “What is this?” And started obsessively showing up to every single show that they did. And these shows were always wildly unpredictable. The ones that were kind of born out of the punk scene, were really well attended. You never knew how long they were going to play for because Shogun the lead singer go for 20 minutes and be like, “I F this, I hate this.” Then just kind of get off stage.

Ange Lavoipierre:
It wasn’t actual contempt for his audience, but this seeming contempt for his audience in everything that he did and he’d pace up and down. He was kind of hunched and he’d take… He had this same windcheater that he’d wear to every show and he’d take the windcheater off early, this kind of like scrawny body and he’d curl himself over like a leaf and sort of rip back and forth along the stage. There was that violence in the shows that I loved. I don’t mean violence in a… No mal-intent any from anyone, but there was nevertheless a real, a violence that was exciting to the shows, but it had a joyful aspect to it. I remember being torn around and ripped around in there and you’d be pushing people and you get up.

Ange Lavoipierre:
It’s not a way that you get to participate in the world very often as a woman. I think that’s what was exciting to me about it, particularly exciting. But in any case, the music itself is kind of power punk, but he’s got a soul vocal. He’s got like his oldest running vocal, but it’s really kind of treated very low fi and then it’s all over the top of this garage, punk soundtrack. There still people… Because, there is a weird little band of like Royal Headache obsessives. That’s how much these band inspired love, is that there are people now who I will see in the street who I haven’t seen in years, where we’ll just kind of nod and it’s because we know each other from being Royal Headache fans. But yeah, they’re gone now and it’s very sad to me.

John Murch:
Do you Ange, find there is a connection between that idea of assertiveness and love?

Ange Lavoipierre:
In the context of music, you mean, or in the context-

John Murch:
Music and life, even.

Ange Lavoipierre:
It’s like the nexus between those two concepts is probably passion, right? It’s like force of passion. It’s where something is expressed in fullness, then that is exciting. That’s I think why I’ve always gravitated towards extremity because it seems like the purest version of something. Ideology aside for one second, obviously, I mean, straight away, my brain as the journalist goes to the dangerous version of extremity, which has always been a fascination of mine as well, which is how people end up with extreme ideologies and particularly the far right is an ongoing area of research for me. But yeah, maybe interesting to me because I myself love the extremes, not in an ideological way, but I do understand how people end up out on a limb.

John Murch:
Do you feel that people have become less passionate and more passive in their daily lives?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Oh, that’s a really big question. I don’t know. I think I get a pretty narrow slice of society and I have the privilege of working in journalism and in the arts. And so that is a self-selecting sample of people who are naturally more passionate. So I couldn’t talk about people more generally.

John Murch:
No, I’m talking about your daily experience. You’re walking through life observing.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Walking through life. I don’t think people are passive. I mean, I can’t help but organize the world in terms of silos, ideological silos now. I think we’re being polarised. That is no good thing. I think yeah, we’re not very good at talking to each other. I think the opportunities are now richer than ever to lock yourself in a figurative room with nothing that will ever challenge you. So perhaps in that sense, it’s just so much easier to build a little nest, a clustered little passive nest for yourself. If you’re that way inclined, you can do that. You don’t have to negotiate with the world if you don’t want to, whether that is having food delivered to your door, instead of going out into the world, whether that is only hearing opinions that you happen to already agree with, it means that we’re not as challenged in an involuntary way. It is easy ways to circumvent difficulty.

John Murch:
What music is inspiring you to continue on?

Ange Lavoipierre:
In life? I have a broader diet than I’ve ever had. This week, Denzel Curry.

John Murch:
As a cellist, who would you like to perform live on stage with?

Ange Lavoipierre:
Oh, it’s funny. I don’t think of myself as a cellist, but I suppose I am. I think of people who I would like to score. I think of the comedy that I would like to say that I would make up the music for, rather than musicians that I would want to play with-

John Murch:
So rather than the playing of the instrument, the actual scoring, as you’re saying.

Ange Lavoipierre:
Yeah. I think the most dramatic actors in the world and the people who are most emotional and unexpected and who are good at rendering a world onto the stage, just using nothing but themselves and expressing the… Steen Raskopoulos is very… And Carlo is as well, are very, very talented in his way, which is why they’re exciting to school. Because you get to sort of react to them in the moment and participate in that conversation. So there’ll be talk, talk, talk, cello, cello, cello you will almost be a third voice in dialogue that’s happening. So I suppose I would love to be scoring the best improvisers in the world.

John Murch:
Ange, thanks very much for joining radionotes.

Ange Lavoipierre:
My absolute pleasure.

 

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