Carly Binding: Passenger

By REBECCA BARRY

Carly Binding is sitting in the front row of her own gig, helping herself to someone else's chips.

The rapport-building exercise is to calm her nerves - she and her band are about to play songs from her debut solo album, Passenger, to an audience of radio station competition winners crowded into Queen St's Classic comedy club.

But if she's worried about their reaction, it doesn't show once she starts playing - save for her slightly exaggerated smiles and bashful giggles between songs.

"This one's for the ladies," she hoots, fringe flopping over one eye. "It's a happy song about kissing."

We Kissed, a top 10 hit this year, may be her least favourite track on the album - perhaps because her former girl group TrueBliss performed it - but tonight it's a popular singalong hit with the crowd.

It was a different scenario a few months ago when she played the Summer Jam concert and the young punk-pop fans awaiting Good Charlotte chanted, "TrueBliss sucks!"

"It just makes me laugh because I know I'm over it and I think, well, everyone else must be over it," she shrugs of her time in the manufactured-for-television pop band. "That stage of my life means little to me. I don't feel like I learned anything."

TrueBliss, whose brief life was filmed for the television show Popstars in 1999, made instant celebrities out of Binding and her bandmates, and launched the TV careers of Erika Takacs and Joe Cotton.

Binding's severe copper hairdo, much-publicised spat with Takacs and a tendency to question authority made her the notorious Ginger Spice of the band, a nickname that became even more appropriate when she quit less than a year later. While TrueBliss album sales slumped almost immediately after the show ended, Binding's reputation has taken a life of its own.

Perhaps that explains her record company's caution about rebuilding her profile, as they refused interviews with Binding for months before her album's release.

"I think people thought of me as quite hard-nosed, as being - for want of a better word - a bitch. But personality-wise, I should never have been in a girl group, I should never have put myself in that situation where I was being told what to do because it doesn't turn out very pretty. I like to be in control of what I'm doing."

On one hand, she is - Binding wrote all the songs on Passenger and managed to convince her record company to employ the producers she wanted to work on the album.

On the other, she agreed to the label's recommendation she should rework the track that clinched her record deal, This Is It - a process which delayed the album's release by more than six months - to make it suitable for release as a single.

And while Binding plays guitar in her live shows, she only plays snippets on the album, leaving the rest up to her band, Stellar's Andrew Maclaren and Chris Van de Geer and Garageland's Dave Goodison.

"I wanted to use people who were really experienced in pop," she reasons. "I wanted to concentrate on the writing and the vocal. In all honesty, my playing is not yet to the level I want it to be. Next time round I'd definitely like to play more, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking I can do a better job than someone who's been playing for 20 years."

Another surprising nuance for someone who seemingly craves autonomy: Binding doesn't drive, hence the title of her album.

"I don't want the responsibilities of owning a car," she says.

But even that small irony makes sense when you consider her free-spirited upbringing.

She was named after singer Carly Simon, grew up on a farm in a "ridiculously artistic" household in Paengaroa, Bay of Plenty, and was home-schooled until the age of 9.

Her mother, a stage performer, and father, a painter, separated when Binding was young and she moved around a lot, attending a variety of schools.

"I hated school, absolutely hated it. I just thought it did everything to squash creative minds," she says. "It's a terrible place to develop children."

She escaped the drudgery of the classroom in her early teens when her mother wrote and directed her in a musical which toured the country for two years.

"Yes, I did my homework," says Binding sarcastically. "I just sang and danced all day and that's all I did around people who were 10, 15 years older than me. My parents raised me to think it was strange to have a normal job, that it was a very wrong thing."

Later, Binding taught at her mother's dance school, took on a job as a grill chef in a cafe and studied opera for two years in the Hawkes Bay.

Then she moved to Auckland and auditioned for a post-graduate year at Auckland University.

"I went in going, 'Yeah, I'm going to get in' and didn't and it rocked me," she says. "I stopped singing classical music."

A more successful audition a year later won her a part on Popstars when she gushed, "I always knew one day I'd get this break and I can finally do everything I was meant to do."

But now she feels differently.

"I had no idea it was going to be what it was. We didn't know what kind of music we'd be making. We thought it would be slightly groovier. After a while I was just over it."

She completely cut ties with the band, started writing songs, recording her own demos and teaching herself to play the guitar "out of selfishness", she explains, "because I didn't want to give up half my song".

She reckons she'd still be in the position to release an album if it wasn't for TrueBliss. Perhaps the question will come up in a week's time when she's interviewed on the TV music show RTR by none other than her former bandmate and rival, presenter Erika Takacs.

"I'm just so happy right now in making my own music that any competition that anybody thinks is there just doesn't even register with me," says Binding.

"That only happens when you're not completely happy with what you're doing, when you're failing yourself. I'm ecstatically happy, so it's no skin off my nose. I'm quite looking forward to it."

She's also anticipating a trip to Australia this year when she will release and promote her album. As for further afield, Binding imagines one day she will be pinching pub chips from her own gigs in America.

With bluesy, folk-pop songs such as Love Will Save Me, Unable Too and Alright With Me - her debut solo hit from last year, the video of which has her playing the guitar in the back of a pickup truck - making it in America seems possible.

In fact, when she played last year's World Series - an industry gig that showcased Kiwi artists to influential music industry types from abroad - someone suggested We Kissed would be ideal for Leann Rimes to sing.

The comment didn't lead anywhere, but a later gig playing support for Paul Kelly in Melbourne attracted more interest from the US, prompting a trip to LA this year to meet potential publishing and management companies. Binding will return to the States in August to follow up on their interest.

But she is aware life as a pop artist can be a fickle business, especially in the land of stars and stripes. Funnily enough, she watched the last few episodes of American Idol, the televised talent quest in which singers perform others' songs, a format she believes is far more legitimate than Popstars.

"I don't want to be seen as a serious singer-songwriter, it's just naff," she says. "I just want to be seen as someone making good music, having fun.

"I seem to have proven, I hope, you can have a second life if you play it well and if you're honest."

* Passenger is out now.

* Carly Binding supports Bic Runga at the Cambridge Town Hall, Thursday July 3, and Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna, Fri July 4.