Suzanne Lynch doesn’t like to brag. But the last time she was in hospital with a suspected concussion – worryingly, there have been a few over the years – a doctor told her: “Suzanne, you have a beautiful brain.”
Which might sound like a Leonard Cohen song. But no, it seems learning all those lyrics and all those harmonies to all those songs has given the 74-year-old a cerebrum she can be proud of. That’s whether it was on her mid-70s stint backing Cat Stevens with then-husband and bassist Bruce Lynch, or her tours with Neil Sedaka and Charles Aznavour – the man who wrote Yesterday, When I Was Young, which gave her an early solo NZ hit and her new autobiography’s title. Or it could have been her more recent decades performing with her music mates on her cover band, corporate, cruise-ship circuit.
All of which, she thinks, is why a doctor at North Shore Hospital said he was impressed with her head scan. “He said, ‘You’ve been using both sides of your brain all your life,’” she laughs over a coffee. “Yeah, so there’s nothing wrong up there.”
The Listener has met Lynch in a Devonport cafe where the staff know her well. If you didn’t know Lynch was a singer, her velvet boots with the embossed musical notes might give it away. They have heels not quite high enough to lift her to 1.5m in height.
Like her book is to read, she’s good fun to talk to. Especially when you focus on her years outside New Zealand, a period that also saw her singing with Irish crooner Val Doonican to millions on British television, and with R’n’B great Luther Vandross.
But back to her brain and medical history. She explains she ended up in A&E after faceplanting on the footpath outside her Bayswater home while checking on her cat (Buddy, who gets his own chapter, one of two dedicated to felines she has known) in the middle of the night.
Yes, for someone who has never strayed far from the middle of the road musically, she has been something of a headbanger. Whether it was accidents with cruise-ship hatches, falling off horses (but not the one on the soft-focus cover of third solo album Oh Suzanne), or car accidents while on tour in the late-60s C’mon days, back when she and older sister Judy were The Chicks, New Zealand’s first girl almost-group.
The book also includes childhood encounters with rat poison and an anaphylactic shock in 2006 after a flu jab requiring a defibrillation and intensive care. Its many photos suggest there was possibly a hazardous amount of hairspray in the C’mon and Happen Inn era and a lot of clothing that was a fire hazard.
No, it is not a sex, drugs and rock’n’roll memoir. It was prompted, after all, by wanting to explain to her grandkids what Nanna did and why she still has a closet of sparkly dresses.
The book does recall a naked man outside a hotel window in Napier who she wouldn’t let in, but they remain friends to this day. There is a 1970s David Bowie party in London where he showed her his kimono. There is one backstage argument with Stevens, and an apology involving him kneeling before her with a rose in his teeth.
“My trouble was, I was always squeaky clean anyway. I was the girl next door and always younger than everybody else … I didn’t want to put anything in there that the grandkids might not like. To be honest, I’m very grateful now that I don’t have a lot of skeletons in my closet. I have never taken drugs, and I was married at 20 for 28 years.”
There haven’t been many memoirs by women in NZ pop history. Lynch’s one had research and editing help from broadcaster Karyn Hay. And the book arrives in the year in which Lynch marks 60 years in showbiz. She was just a 14-year-old at Henderson High School in west Auckland when she and Judy were discovered by guitar star Peter Posa. They got a manager, headed first into a recording studio, then a television one. They were pop stars for five or so years. They were objects of lust to a generation of Boomer boys.
“Well, they tell me that now. Where were they then?”
After The Chicks amicably called it quits, Suzanne headed to a solo career helped by Happen Inn, the duller TV variety show that followed the go-go energy of C’mon. Then, having married Bruce in 1971 while wearing a mini-skirt wedding dress (“what was I thinking?”), the pair headed to London. They’d made some musical contacts with UK acts touring NZ, like Doonican. In London, Bruce’s bass-playing soon made him an in-demand session guy. In early 1973, Suzanne appeared singing one of her NZ hits and a duet with Doonican on his television show, seen by an estimated 19 million Brits. It screened in New Zealand a year later.
While that might have seemed a UK solo-career launchpad, Lynch didn’t see it that way.
“Maybe because I grew up with Judy beside me all the time and The Chicks, I wasn’t ever really fussed about being a soloist. So, when I got to London, I found I could catch a bus by myself to be really exciting. And that I could actually decide what I was going to wear and go out and no, it didn’t matter if I had make-up on or not.”
Doonican wanted her back, but she had found her comfort zone as a member of Bones, a vocal trio with fellow New Zealander Joy Yates and American Jackie Sullivan.
They became the versatile first-call backing group in the London studio scene, doing up to three sessions a day. It paid better than being a pop star in NZ, and Lynch enjoyed it more.
“I’m a team player. I like singing harmonies. I like singing all different types of music and I just found that if you become a soloist here, they still want to hear [early hit] Timothy 50 years later.
“I like to think of myself as being a bit more of a musician. I want to do everything and try all sorts. That was my happy place – 10 yards from stardom, because Cat Stevens had all the pressure. I had all the fun.”
The Stevens attachment started when Bones got called into their first Stevens session where producer Paul Samwell-Smith noticed the new guy bassist and one of the vocalists had similar accents. “Well, yeah, we’re husband and wife.”
As well as Stevens, there were other connections made earlier in New Zealand, when American bassist Tony Visconti toured with his Welsh wife Mary Hopkin (singer of the hit Those Were the Days). He was still on his way to becoming a big-name producer to stars such as David Bowie and T. Rex.
That meant when Lynch recorded a few songs in London for solo release, a young Bowie backing singer by the name of Luther Vandross was on hand to supply harmonies. “I loved him. He was huge. He was like a mountain. I was pregnant at the time, and he was giving me advice about having a baby. It was hilarious.”
About that time, there were also tours with Sedaka (“just like the guy next door, funny as a fight”) and multilingual backing duties for Aznavour – and, non, she never told the French star she’d had a hit with one of his songs. She was too busy getting to grips, phonetically, with his French-German-English repertoire.
But the rise of punk meant less demand for backing singers, and regular employer Cat Stevens converted to Islam, retiring from music. The Lynches returned home, with Bruce taking a stake in Auckland’s Mandrill Studios then building his own in Bayswater.
“I didn’t want to come … I was having a great time. But music was changing.”
Life after seven years in London forms part three of the memoir. There were two kids to raise, both of whom followed their parents into showbiz, jingles to sing and weekends flying the family Tiger Moth to their holiday home in Pauanui.
Lynch kept performing on land and sea, often with The Lady Killers – a line-up with fellow veterans Jackie Clarke, Tina Cross and sometimes Annie Crummer. Lately, she’s been doing gigs with Shane Hales and his Shazam! Band. Back when Hales was just Shane, he was the naked man outside her Napier hotel, the victim of a prank by fellow star Larry Morris.
When the era of reality-TV singing competitions such as New Zealand Idol rolled around, she got a job as a vocal coach over many seasons. After all, she had been a teenager singing on television. But this was different.
“Ours was really raw, and what you got is what you got. These kids were trying to live up to something that’s almost not real. NZ Idol was a competition that I found hard for them, because I spent the end of each show mopping up the tears for an hour or so, and I felt for them all.”
Yesterday When I was Young (Bateman, $45) is out on October 1.
Hit Parade: The big numbers with Suzanne Lynch on backing vocals
Various hits by Cat Stevens
During her stint with the singer-songwriter across three studio albums and multiple tours, Lynch’s voice appeared on singles such as Oh Very Young, (Remember the Days of) The Old School Yard, and many more tracks.
Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas
The martial-arts disco crossover novelty hit of 1974 features Lynch and some others roped into the recording for the “huhs” and the “hahs”. Possibly not her most melodic contribution, probably the biggest hit she’s ever sung on.
The theme to The Goodies
One of the latter iterations of the manic theme song to the madcap mid-70s British comedy show starring Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden.
No Regrets by The Walker Brothers
The comeback hit single and title track of a 1975 reunion album that proved a commercial last hurrah for the briefly reunited American trio.
If You Love Me Let Me Know by Olivia Newton-John
The early country hit by the pre-Grease Australian star was recorded at Abbey Road with Lynch on harmonies.
Quite a lot of NZ TV commercials
A sideline that started with The Chicks imploring us to “whisk up a treat” with Gregg’s Instant Pudding, would also include the greatest petfood hook in Kiwi advertising history: “Cats prefer Chef. Meow.”
How does this one go again? The Lynch-ian lyric-learning method
Suzanne Lynch, who teaches singing and has coached a bunch of contestants on NZ Idol and other talent shows might need to see you in person if you’d like to know how to sing in tune. But if your problem is remembering the lyrics – and she’s learned a lot of songs in her six decades of performing – she has a technique she’s developed herself.
“Before I go to sleep, I go through the first four lines of the first verse. I’ll say the words, I’ll look at them, then I’ll shut my eyes, and say the words and I’ll look at them again three or four times and then I’ll go to sleep. First thing I do in the morning, when I wake up, is say those four lines. Once you’ve got those, which usually you do, go on to the next four. That night you go through the eight lines, wake up and go through the eight lines. And so on. I’ve done that for years, and when the music starts playing, here they are.”