Splendid

The former Frente songstress doesn’t mind hanging out with blood-sucking creatures - she’s in the music industry, after all. Bernard Zuel reports.

SPLENDID
Vic on the Park, corner Enmore and Addison roads, Marrickville
Saturday, 8pm
$12
Bookings 9557 1448
Splendid’s EP States of Awake is out now

In a certain parallel universe to this one, Angie Hart has a rather splendid claim to fame. And no, it has nothing to do with singing Accidentally Kelly Street or covering Bizarre Love Triangle. Nor with her post-Frente band, the quiet electro-poppers Splendid.

You see, Hart made two appearances on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, performing her slow-burning, quiet-voiced songs in the Bronze, the Sunnydale nightclub frequented by the neighbourhood’s teens and teen-gobbling vampires.

Hart went a step further with Whedon’s post-Buffy and Angel show, the short-lived futuristic western Firefly. In one episode she played an outpost whore.

"I think I acted badly," she says. "I was just a little worried that I was wide-eyed and responding a little too well."

Is that such a bad quality in a $5 whore in a dusty town on the outskirts of a frontier planet? Sounds like she may have nailed the role. Anyway, it’s Hart’s only acting role so far, though she did audition for Angel as a young singer rescued by the vampire hero.

The response by the casting agent was "you’ve got a very natural style," Hart explains, laughing. "Which I took to be ’I’m not a very good actor.’ I went home and cried." She laughs again.

Fortunately, having a natural style is a good thing in a singer. Hart’s singing is direct and, well, natural, something evident in her work in Frente and in Splendid with partner Jesse Tobias.

"I can’t be otherwise onstage," Hart says. "If I’m nervous then we’re all going to share that.

"I’ve been working on it, but I’m not good with schtick onstage. My dream is that I would get onstage and it would actually be an escape, but I’m one of those people who gets onstage and it’s exactly the same as my life."

Has she wondered why she’s still doing this after setbacks such as her record company folding before it got to release Splendid’s debut album, Have You Got a Name for It, in the US in 1999, her first band falling apart and the public backlash to her early success?

"Yes, I’ve asked myself that many times," she says. "During my Frente years when there was the backlash I had a really shit time."

She adds that the disappointment of that first Splendid album "sorely tested [me]".

"Then I stopped doing music so, yes, I have thought about not doing it. I didn’t do it until I felt it was something that I really wanted to do.

"I started when I was 17 and fell into it and then I realised that I don’t have to do music, that’s not who I am. I stopped until I felt I really loved music - and I couldn’t do anything else. That’s what happened."

Is music a compulsion again?

"Yeah," Hart says. "I got a job [as a jewellery designer and maker], my first job since I was 16, which was a rude shock. But I found that designing was f---ing all my creative thinking, so now I just make jewellery.

"It was the perfect thing because I had to fight to get my time back and my creative side back and it made me realise that no one could take that away from me."

Would people who knew Hart 10 years ago find her different now?

"Very much," she says. "Number one, I think that I played the victim and I think I got wise to myself and stopped doing that. I now look back and there were certainly some times when I would call me a dick.

"Being 22 and famous is an awful combination. I thought that Alanis [Morissette] was the biggest dick I’d met at the time, but I look back and think we all were."