Peggy Frew
On writing, music, and where stories come from
This article is a guest contribution from Tamara Lunn
Acclaimed writer with four novels under her belt, bass player, and sometime-songwriter and vocalist in ARIA-winning band Art of Fighting, Peggy Frew has been a creative in the Melbourne music and literary scenes for over 20 years. She was travelling in India with her daughter and intended to come home and hit the ground running in a Masters of Creative Writing when, on a train somewhere between Agra and Delhi, she received an email from Remote Control Records offering to release her first solo album, Dial-Up.
It was time to focus on her music, instead.
Peggy meets me with a friendly smile, her iconic blonde curls shining golden in the autumn sun, a little puffed from the bike ride and wearing a vintage floral shirt, black flared jeans and scuffed brown Dr Martens. We’re having lunch at the leafy CERES Merri Café to discuss her journey from musician to novelist and back again.
Peggy moved from St Kilda to the north side of the Yarra River when she was 17, and learned how to play bass guitar, forming Art of Fighting with her then-boyfriend, Ollie Brown. The band released four full-length records, and four EPs. Their first album, Wires, won an ARIA for Best Alternative Album of 2001. In 2021, it was named by Rolling Stone Australia as the 159th greatest Australian album of all time.
“I met Ollie, the singer and rhythm guitarist, at a Beasts of Bourbon concert and we were like, let's start a band together. He could already play the drums and guitar. So, I was like, well, I'll play the bass.”
Initially, Peggy took turns singing with Ollie. But by the time they recorded Wires, she had written and performed just one recorded song, “I Don’t Keep a Record”.
“And that set the pattern for the next three albums,” she says. “I wanted to contribute more, I just kind of underwent this terrible shrivelling of confidence about singing. And it was hard.”
During her years touring with the band, Peggy de-stressed by reading books.
“My God, when you do a six-week tour with three other people and you're sleeping in a van, you really need a way to escape that's not a physical escape.”
She also always wrote — letters, postcards, long literary emails to friends, and short stories.
“And poetry,” she laughs, “really bad poetry.”
A story that she wrote in secret got longer and longer until she thought it might become a novel. She heard about the PWE degree at RMIT through friends, worked on the novel in the writing classes, and came out of the course with a finished manuscript.
After winning the Age short story competition for her story Home Visit in 2008, and with her third child recently born, Peggy felt the idea for another novel arise. She wrote it quickly, at night, while up feeding the baby. This became her debut novel, House of Sticks, published in 2011.
Hope Farm, which won the 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award, was her second, and then she reworked her first manuscript to write Islands, published in 2019.
During the COVID pandemic lockdowns she worked on her fourth novel, Wildflowers, but after it was published in August 2022 there were no more novels waiting in the back of her mind.
She breathes in sharply. “It was actually terrifying.”
Peggy panicked, got a day job at a second-hand clothing store, and enrolled in a Masters of Creative Writing.
“I wanted to ignite some creative flames in myself because, like so many people, lockdowns kind of destroyed my creativity.”
It seems to have worked, because in early 2023 Peggy wrote a whole album of songs. Lacking confidence in her voice, she intended to work with another singer for the album. But when recording technician Marty Brown heard her voice-memo demos, he told her they wouldn’t work with a different singer; she would have to sing them herself.
“And I was like, okay, I guess I'm doing it. I don't have a good singing voice. I've just got my own kind of thing. And I've eventually come around to accepting that and thinking, well, I may as well just do what I can with what I've got, because the other option is to just never make anything.”
Dial-Up is about ‘memory, middle age and mental illness, how freaking hard it is to be an artist, to have relationships, and just to be a human in this world’.
Like her novels, the songs contain imagined stories about real feelings.
“They may be autobiographical on an emotional level, but the scenarios are fictional. The characters are invented versions of myself, experiencing things in a way I might have.”
“The album came of out a really shit time for me, mental-health-wise,” Peggy confesses, “and so it’s pretty sad and dark in places.” But she found the writing of it was very positive and, ‘to be corny for a moment’, healing.
After sending Dial-Up out to record labels, Peggy took her daughter to India. She found the trajectory of the trip mirrored her decision to write a solo album:
“I wanted to do something new and different. People travel all the time, and it's not a particularly brave thing, but for me it was. I've never done anything like that before. I organised it all myself and just ran the whole show. It felt inspiring.”
It felt right that she got the news from Remote Control while she was on the train.
“I’m not the first person in the world to say that travel is good for mental health. Oh my god, it’s so good. I felt strong, and I haven't always felt strong over the past few years. And I think there was something about finally stepping out of those lingeringtraces of the Melbourne lockdown, sort of smallness of world, and going somewhere that was so different from here. I made that decision, like, I'm going to give this a shot.”
It feels like a long time since Peggy’s been involved in music, and she’s not on social media. She’ll need to re-learn about publicity, how to release a solo album, how to promote it, how to put a band together, how to do shows as the band leader. With a day job, ‘pretty heavy family duties’, Peggy knew she had to let go of something.
“I think the leave of absence from the Masters is right because I can't take the family stuff out. That's always going to be there. And if this is the year that my album comes out, this is the year to put the energy into it, because it'll be all over by the end of the year.”
“It doesn't hurt anybody to write songs and sing them,” she says with a smile.
Dial-Up is out now on Remote Control Records.
Frew ‘Dial-Up’ Album Launch
Sweet Whirl, Mika James
Bergy Bandroom (Brunswick, VIC)
Saturday, 9 November 8pm
Tickets here