By Michael Lallo
Marcia Hines, 70, arrived in Australia at 16 to star in the anti-Vietnam War rock musical Hair. By the late 1970s, she was our top-selling female artist.Credit: Simon Schluter
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The possibility of Marcia Hines becoming a successful singer – she was Australia’s top-selling female artist until the 1980s and thrice voted Queen of Pop by TV Week readers – probably never occurred to her childhood physicians in Boston.
As a girl, Hines was desperately unwell with asthma. “Marcia, please don’t die on me, please don’t die,” she recalls her mother pleading while holding her limp body against a wall during one severe attack. When she wasn’t confined to an oxygen tent or a hospital bed she was convalescing at home, missing months of school on end.
“I lost a lung at one point,” says Hines, who will soon return to her musical theatre roots with a role in Grease. “I still live with a collapsed lung.”
“I think the heart that I felt … people heard it,” Hines says of the song she recorded as a tribute to her late brother, Dwight.
The day after our interview, I watch her perform to a sold-out audience in Swan Hill, a Murray River city four hours north of Melbourne. Her powerful voice fills the art deco auditorium. At 70, she moves and sings with the vigour of someone half her age.
“My instrument is me … you can’t plug me in, so I have to take care of myself,” says Hines, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes after collapsing on her kitchen floor in the mid-1980s. Long walks, nourishing food and plenty of sleep have since kept her healthy.
This year alone, she has toured regional Australia, resumed her role as a judge in the 2024 season of Australian Idol and released two albums – a greatest hits compilation called Still Shining: The 50th Anniversary Ultimate Collection and The Gospel According to Marcia, featuring classics such as Amazing Grace, Morning Has Broken and Abide with Me, a song of sentimental significance.
From the age of 10, Hines accompanied her blind godmother, Florence James, to lead the choirs at four different churches on Sundays. “She used to sing Abide with Me and whoa, did she sing it!” Hines says. “And so I sang it [in the recording studio] with as much gusto and heart as I could possibly muster … I wasn’t channelling her, but I felt her; I felt the love she gave me as a singer.”
“You can do as many takes as you want, but I sang it maybe three times and I don’t think I could have sung it any more.”
While other children griped about having to attend one religious service each week, Hines rarely stopped at the four Sunday services she and Florence went to. On Saturdays, she’d take herself to a synagogue or a Seventh-day Adventist church. It was the singing that drew her in.
“Wherever there’s music, I’ll follow,” she says. “The heart that you hear in church singing; there’s nothing quite like it when you’re praising. You sing in another way and I don’t know that people who are doing it even know how beautiful they sound.”
Hines was six months old when her father, Eugene, died during an operation to remove shrapnel from a war wound. This left her mother, Esme, to raise her and her older brother, Dwight.
Hines with John Waters, who also starred in Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Their friendship spans more than 50 years.Credit: Fairfax Media
“Music was company because my mother had to go to work and Dwight went to school,” she says. “It nurtured me somehow and I loved hearing other musicians create music because everybody hears and feels it so differently. It’s beautiful.”
Hines has a soft spot for country artists, especially Dolly Parton, because “they tell great stories succinctly and they tell them with humour”.
When Hines was a teenager, her good friend Linda Gaines appeared in the anti-Vietnam War rock musical Hair in Boston while Linda’s sister LaDonna (who later found worldwide fame as disco queen Donna Summer) performed in the Munich version. They encouraged Hines to audition and at the age of 16, she boarded a plane for Harry M Miller’s production of Hair in Sydney, which she understood to be in Austria.
Hines (right) with daughter Deni (left) and mother Esme.
“The thing is, Americans didn’t learn much about Australia but I got here and [realised] this is the best country in the world.”
While Hair’s nude scenes drew much attention, Hines believes it resonated because it acknowledged the young men drafted to fight in a war that killed more than 58,000 US troops and left survivors maimed and traumatised.
“I’ve met a lot of guys who went to Vietnam who have endured coming back and not being appreciated,” she says. “They thanked us for bringing all that to people [to help them] realise what it was all about and how wrong it was.”
When Hines arrived in Australia, she didn’t know she was pregnant with her daughter, Deni, who also became a musician; her first clue was a kick in her stomach while performing a scene in Hair. Eventually, Esme moved to Australia to help care for Deni – three generations living under one roof – while Marcia reinvented herself as a solo artist following her role as Mary Magdalene in the blockbuster musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which was picketed by those who deemed it blasphemous.
In 1981, while Hines was recording an album in London, Esme phoned. She reserved such calls for when Deni was sick, but this time the news was horrific: Dwight had died by suicide. “I am going to stay here and take care of Deni,” Esme told her daughter. “It’s time for you to go home and be a grown-up and go and bury your brother.”
On that awful flight to Boston, Hines was surrounded by passengers laughing and clinking champagne glasses. “I wanted to scream, ‘Don’t you know what I’m going through?’” she says. “Then I had this epiphany. I went, ‘Oh, is this what it means when they say life goes on?’ And it does.”
Upon her return to London, Hines recorded Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross as a tribute to Dwight. It’s a song that’s been covered countless times, but the raw emotion of her version stands out. “When you’re recording, you can do as many takes as you want, but I sang it maybe three times and I don’t think I could have sung it any more because I might have burst into tears,” she says. “It became a huge hit in Europe. I think the heart that I felt when I sang that song, people heard it.”
She does not consider it a coincidence that disco – one of her primary genres along with pop, gospel, R&B and funk – took off after the Vietnam War.
“It was a tumultuous time in history and then disco music happened and it was joy. You dressed up, you danced and you enjoyed life once again.”
On New Year’s Eve, Hines will make her debut as Teen Angel in Grease, a role played by Frankie Avalon in the 1978 film adaptation, at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. The production moves to Sydney’s Capitol Theatre in March and Perth’s Crown Theatre in June.
Although the character is traditionally performed by male actors, Hines will put her own spin on it, harking back to her formative years in Boston.
“I think very rarely has a song got a gender,” she says. “It’s all about how you put your stamp on it. I’ve talked to David Skelton, our musical director – and I want to make it gospel.”
Grease opens December 31 at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Tickets: greasemusical.com.au
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