DIVA IS DEAD-SET: DIAMANDA GALAS
by ALISON BARCLAY
Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
October 5, 2005 Wednesday
Defixiones: Friday, 8pm.
Songs of Exile: Monday, 8pm. Where: Hamer Hall.
Tickets: $19-$65.
Bookings: 1300 136 166.
SHE was born 50 years ago and hasn’t died yet. If Diamanda Galas can
wrest her ancestral gods of Olympus to her desires, she never will.
“We Greeks don’t really believe in life after death. We believe
in death after death,” the Greek-American musician says with
blood-curdling emphasis.
“We are absolutely mortified by death — ooh, bad word. Terrified
by death.”
Terrified? This from the woman who sings of the worst types of death
and has spent the past 20 years becoming an expert on it?
But Galas is sharp on her subject. For the brother and friends she
lost to AIDS, she wrote Plague Mass.
Last in Melbourne in 2001 with La Serpenta Canta, she returns this
weekend with Songs of Exile and Defixiones: Orders from the Dead.
The latter is an operatic mass for those who died in the Armenian,
Assyrian and Pontic Greek genocides from 1914-23.
Most of these she has recorded, but the question about whether her
work will survive her, whether she may achieve immortality via CD,
brings a sigh of profound longing.
“One would love to think such things, but it isn’t true,” she says.
“Greeks certainly feel we should live forever — and what is wrong
with that? I really do not appreciate this sentence of mortality. I
take issue with the gods about that!”
Styled for a concert, Galas is the nightmare life-in-death, with
sootened eyes and talons that recall that oddly comforting rumour
about fingernails continuing to grow after the ghost has left the body.
But on the phone from Italy, where she toured before coming here,
she is energetic, funny and friendly.
Unlike the Greek Americans she complains are “invisible” — and silent
about past atrocities committed against them — Galas has a big mouth.
She loves Greek Australians because they do, too.
“There is no comparison. When I have spoken to Greeks in Australia,
wow, there are so many genocide scholars in Australia.
“And I’m telling you, there is no comparison between the consciousness
of the Australian Greeks and the American Greeks. It is a completely
different world.
“A lot of the Greeks don’t even want to discuss it in Greece, and
they don’t want to be Greek. They want to be French!
“They say ‘Oh, let’s be friends with the Turks’. And I say shut the
f— up!”
She wonders if her outspokenness cost her a gig at the Athens Olympics
last year.
“I was going to sing, but they chose Bjork instead,” she says.
“She is a lovely singer, but what she has to do with Greece is beyond
me. Instead of a Greek singer they chose an Icelandic singer because
they don’t want to be Greek. They want to be European.”
THAT genocides are allowed to keep happening has much to do with
nations protecting trade, Galas says.
Mass death “is an insignificant problem, economically speaking,
if it gets in the way of larger interests”.
Hurricane Katrina is a case in point. “Here we have in our own country
a disaster in which the individuals must take action because the
government completely ignores it,” she says.
“If anyone had any doubt about what was going on in Iraq, they now
know for sure. If Bush is treating his own people like this, imagine
what he is doing in Iraq.”
In speaking, as in singing, Galas barely pauses for breath, a legacy of
her training in bel canto technique, for which another Greek American,
Maria Callas, was famous.
Of Callas, Galas says: “I adore her beyond words. She was such a
magnificent musician.”
But it’s the Welsh tigress Shirley Bassey who makes her roar with
admiration: “She has a monstrous great voice. I am just astounded at
how great she is.”
From: Baghdasarian