If you only ever go to one concert in your life….go to a Beccy Cole concert. Adam Harvey once called her the greatest live entertainer that this country has. I’d have to agree. I’ve seen Beccy about 30 or 32 times….to be honest, I’ve lost count.
I have talked about this with other fans, and they all agree with me. You walk out of one of her concerts wanting more and yet, you know that she has given you everything. You walk out happy, like you want to really do a happy dance. Anyone who can make people feel like that is okay by me!
Beccy has lived a pretty full life, and she is only forty. If you go to one of her concerts, you will see how she holds nothing back. It is all there….the humour, the talent, the pathos, the irony, everything. What you see is what you get. She’ll play the drums, the guitar, the banjo, the piano….and all in one song. She is one of those energizer bunnies who jumps all over the stage. You get exhausted watching her. She can belt out the blues, rock out a classic, tell you a story and have you rolling in the aisles with laughter. She’ll stir you up with the story behind Poster Girl, amuse and make you think with Lifeboat, and go through the old rollercoaster ride through a full and amazing life.
Like a lot of artists of her era in Australian Country Music, Beccy’s Mum is a talented performer too. She obviously inherited the gene. Self confessed Dolly Partonaholic, Beccy often talks about her shoving balloons down her front as a kid and imitating her hero. Obviously Beccy adopted a bit of Dolly’s sass, and matches her in reaching the people.
Wonderful collaborations with pal, Kasey Chambers (particularly the award winning Millionaires), Sara Storer and Gina J with the Songbirds as well as fabulous shows with mate and male counterpart, Adam Harvey and people like Lynn Bowtell and Chris E Thomas and many others, prove that she is a team player as well as a brilliant individual.
Beccy has never been far from controversy. She has a laugh at herself when she sings songs like Lazy Bones and tells her infamous toilet story which changes slightly at each show and never fails to make people laugh. She wrote the song Poster Girl (probably her biggest hit) after she returned home from a war zone performing for the soldiers only to receive a letter from a former fan who was angry with her for supporting the war….she was supporting the soldiers.
The love that she has for her son, her friends, her fans and her Mother and Grandmother in particular, are evident in the way she talks about them and in her songs. She comes across as a larrikin, which of course she is in part, but she is much more.
Recently, when she revealed officially that she was gay, (most of us had an idea!), she said that she worried that she would lose a lot of fans. I suppose the redneck element of country fans was her major concern. She need not have worried. The concert that I went to at Tamworth (no. 31 or 32!) was the best that she has ever done. She was overwhelmed at the standing ovation and could not believe the reaction.
It is 2013. we love Beccy for being Beccy, funny, sassy, cheeky, musically gifted and a person who gives her all every time that she steps out onto the stage or writes a song.
I remember one year when Kasey won a Golden Guitar and she thanked her babysitter, Beccy Cole, who had offered to stay back at the motel and look after her kids, Adam Harvey’s, Gina and Rod’s son and some of the other Chambers Jnr, so that Kasey’s Mum could attend. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall. That’s the kind of person she is, and we love her for it.
Thank you, Beccy, for the music, and everything else that you give us.
