Sarah Aubrey's saddest song

Written by Martin Gallery

We all have songs we listen to when we’re down. As Elton John sings “Sad songs say so much”. Sydney-based Sarah Aubrey went one step further – she wrote one for herself.

That song is called ‘Empty Room’, written after being dumped in devastatingly spectacular style in the top floor restaurant of the Tate Modern in London. The song, to appear on her forthcoming album, gets to the core of the range of emotions one experiences at the termination of a relationship: despair, melancholy and anger.

“I still remember the exact moment I wrote it,” Aubrey reflects while we sit in a Surry Hills café on a fittingly rainy Sunday afternoon, “I was sitting on the floor of my lounge room hitting the guitar with a very heavy down-strum because I was so angry. I think what people like about the song is that it’s so empowering. But if I hadn’t had my heart broken I wouldn’t be playing guitar right now. It’s the hardest song I’ve ever had to write. If that’s what it takes to write a good song, I don’t know if I can do it!” she laughs.

Born in Wales and moving to Australia when she was 10, Aubrey has, in the past three years, firmly established herself on the local music scene, in between gigs as one of Australia’s most sought after voice over artists. Currently she is the “voice of Channel 7”, plus a plethora of cartoon and TV commercial voices, including the Kleenex toilet paper puppy.

Ironically Sarah doesn’t even own a television. “It’s not that I don’t like TV,” she says coyly, “it’s just that I think because I’ve worked in advertising and promos for seven years and every day I deal with it, I sometimes find it hard to watch television now because I’ll be watching and I’ll recognize my voice or a colleagues voice and I just can’t switch off. Besides, when I’m home I like to be more constructive and write more music.”

We all know about cases of overt gay subtext in cartoons and kid’s shows (think Captain Pugwash, SuperTed, Snagglepuss, Spongebob Squarepants and Teletubbies to name but a few), but has she ever come across it in her work? She throws her head back and laughs, “Yes! There was this cartoon called Tabiluga and I was doing guest characters on it and there was this one character called Arktos, who was an evil snowman, and he had this little sidekick who sounded just like James Mason. He was this little penguin and he was so CAMP! It was fantastic… a camp, James Mason-esque penguin. It was G-A-Y!”

And is doing cartoon voices really as much fun as we all suspect it might be? “Yeah, it’s great. It’s very hard work. Coming up with a new voice is quite hard, but once you’re doing it and you know what you’re going to do, it’s just like a radio play, so yeah… it’s fun!”

So how does voiceover work and acting (Sarah is a NIDA graduate and past winner of Best Actress at the 2002 Tropfest for her performance in the short film Boomerang. Look it up on YouTube, it’s very funny) compare with singing her own emotion-charged material live on stage? “Well, it’s different from acting because I’m not hiding behind a character.” She’s putting her own feelings and emotions out there for public consumption, but it’s not always appreciated.

During one of her first gigs at Melbourne’s legendary Espy (The Esplanade Hotel in St. Kilda), she was heckled by yobbos shouting “play some fucken Slayer!” Lovely.

“Music is one of those things that people get really passionate about. We’ll go on about how much we hate a song, or how much we love a song, because music connects with people in such an immediate way.”

One of the highlights of a Sarah Aubrey gig is her and her band the Audio Visual Club’s rendition of Duran Duran’s ‘Girls On Film’. Shifted down a gear and acousticised, the song takes on a sultry new life that audiences love. “The thing I love about performing ‘Girls On Film’ is that I can get all sexual and have fun. You can go as far as you want because it’s not your song… you have license to play! Oh, and it’s about ladies (pronounced LAY-DEEZ), and there’s nothing wrong with singing about ladies!”

Moving on to her forthcoming album, Aubrey’s eyes light up. “It’s mostly about love. Love is the most important thing. We obsess over it. I hope people listen to my music and relate to it regardless of their gender or sexuality. It’s really important to me that you take something from it.”