Amanda Palmer

I have never seen Amanda Palmer perform live. I really only came to know of her in more recent years, after I exploded out of my marriage, culture and religion - a very sheltered, naïve and impressionable single mum. A few new arty friends were proclaiming I needed to check her out like my life depended on it.

And they were right. After watching her very graphic music video from 2012, ‘The Killing Type’, I thought ‘yes’, Amanda is my type of feminist. There was blood, gore, and it was angry. It was raw and real.

But Amanda’s show on Saturday didn’t have that flavour. Perhaps because, that was a long time ago, and Amanda is in a different space now. This five-show tour of Australia and New Zealand had a specific purpose: to release her EP ‘New Zealand Survival Songs’ and, as Amanda explained, get the songs out of her system, and hopefully never have to do them again, kind of how we all don’t want to think about lockdown again, and that whole period seems to have been erased from our minds.

As many people know, due to Amanda’s very public social media presence, Amanda got stuck in New Zealand when COVID hit. It was her last stop after Melbourne before she would return home to New York after touring for two years where she would finally be able to give herself six months to be a wife and a mum, even plant a vegetable garden, she told the audience. But then COVID happened. And she stayed. For two and a half years. New Zealand was doing so well with no cases, the USA was falling apart (if you can remember).

But that’s not the only thing that happened. Her marriage ended. And she became a single mum. 

Amanda shared her experience in this show through storytelling and song, her only musical accompaniment her exceptional skills on the grand piano, and, at times, a ukulele. There were no sounds effects, no backup band, and it wasn’t needed – she was more than enough.

Amanda has a very unique ability to create and perform music on a wide spectrum, from quiet vulnerability to intense rage. I was really moved by this show and found myself crying at times.  

Amanda uses the ordinary in life to crack open gut-wrenching observations on the human condition. She draws you in with her honesty and truth, even sharing the actual names of people she is writing about – you almost feel like it’s one-on-one with Amanda in her living room. Her openness and ability to let you into her heart is courageous and so needed. She helps you feel less alone in this crazy world we live in where you can’t even open your mouth and say what you think anymore.

As I sat there hanging off Amanda’s every word, I found myself also intertwining my narrative with hers. I can’t remember how (because my mind erased it, COVID), but when Amanda was in Melbourne just before COVID hit, I was invited to a group session with her and about twenty other artists where she spoke of her experiences of being an artist, and how she has successfully funded her art through her Patreon. I found the talk very inspiring, and had given Amanda copies of my books Love and Fck Poems and Just Give Me The Pills (about becoming a single mum), hoping if she liked them, she could provide me a quote. Then COVID happened. I had followed up a few times to ask if she had taken the books with her, if she had read them. Little did I know that her world was falling apart and that she would soon become a single mum like me.

I had come to Amanda’s show at Hamer Hall on Saturday just after launching my third poetry book, She’s Not Normal during the day. When Amanda performed her song about people telling her to shut up, I could relate immensely. My life has been one person after another either telling me what to do, telling me to be quiet, or telling me to shut up. Only a fortnight ago I was thrown out of the Facebook group ‘Diversity in the Australian Media’ for sharing a ‘diverse opinion’. Oh, the irony of the world we live in! It has taken me many years to embrace myself for who I am, and it’s thanks to artists like Amanda.  

Amanda didn’t just perform songs about the weirdness of COVID. There were newer songs too, and some classics, which excited the audience. She even had the daughter of a family friend who is studying professional dancing dance to one of her songs. This combination was extremely moving, especially because, as Amanda said, she had known Boudicca Farquhar since she was three, and now she was all grown up and dancing on stage with her. The moment resonated with me as a mother of an almost adult, and how time flies by so quickly before we can catch it and hold on.

Add to this special guest Clare Bowditch, who performed a song about how skinny in a woman is perceived as an accomplishment when the reasons behind it may not actually be healthy. I absolutely resonated with this having lost a lot of weight myself due to health issues and everyone telling me how great I looked. 

From periods, to pubic hair, from single motherhood to relationship breakdown and the search for the truth amongst a sea of lies, from the domesticity of doing the dishes and dreaming of escape to Australia, to being too busy to look at life yet embracing yourself exactly as you are, Amanda’s show was an emotional rollercoaster of empowered, feminine delight. Funny, raw, complex, courageous, passionate, eccentric, vulnerable and real, she was exactly what I needed.

Koraly Dimitriadis

Koraly Dimitriadis is a writer, poet, performer, film and theatre maker and the author of Love and F—k Poems, Just Give Me The Pills and She’s Not Normal.

Photographer: Kierra Thorn,