“It’s a long story, do you really want to know?” asks Marcia Hines. We are sitting down over coffee to discuss her mammoth career as a musician, performer and TV personality. I’ve asked how it all began.
There is a lengthier version that involves a fascination with the choir at her godmother’s Baptist church, the music school she briefly attended but hated and Donna Summer (a family friend who helped inspire her to start performing). But the short version goes like this: in 1970, Hines snagged a role in Hair, the anti-Vietnam war musical sweeping the globe. A friend had referred her when producers said they were looking to cast a “rough diamond” and Hines, who had always dreamed of being a singer but never done so professionally, auditioned. She was just 16 years old and living in her native Boston with her brother and West Indian-born mother, but this production of Hair was taking place in Sydney.
Hines “didn’t know where Australia was” – at first, she thought she was bound for Austria – but within a fortnight she was on a plane. It was meant to be a six-month gig: 53 years later, she is still here.
“I don’t know that it actually feels like 50 years,” she says.
Hines, who is about to celebrate her 70th birthday, has packed a lot into those five decades. She has released 22 albums that have sold 2.6m copies, was inducted into the Aria Hall of Fame in 2007 and awarded the Order of Australia in 2009. She was the first Australian female artist to have a platinum-selling album, as well as the first female to have seven consecutive Top 20 album releases. For seven years, she was a judge on the reality TV juggernaut Australian Idol.
She has been married four times, and part of her lore includes being a (perhaps somewhat distant) cousin of both Grace Jones and Colin Powell. And she is not done yet, with a 50-year anniversary album release and a tour to match. It is, she says, “very nice to still be relevant”.
In our conversation, Hines has the presence of someone who has lived an exceptional life. She is warm and immediately likable, full of motherly advice (I have to get my calcium elsewhere if I’m going to take soy milk in my coffee, she says; she is not sure I should be wearing double denim) and homespun wisdom (“the most important thing in my life is to make your bed”).
She has the habit of dropping a sage observation and letting it hang in the air for a minute before continuing, maintaining intense eye contact all the while. She is prone to happy tangents at some points, but glib at others, like when I ask if she has some incredible dinner party stories from her years touring the globe. “Yeah, but … would I tell you?” she says. “No.”
All these years later, Hines remembers those early days performing Hair fondly. She flew to Australia solo, leaving behind her family, and landed in the “vibrant” streets of Kings Cross, amid a community of artists, bohemians, and hippies. She spent her time with the fellow US actors there for the musical, as well as the local cast – which included the actor John Waters, whom she had “such a crush” on. “I couldn’t speak to him!” she remembers, tipping her head back to laugh. “He had this beautiful face and these gorgeous hazel eyes.” Despite being underage, she disrobed in Hair’s nude scene, which she says was tasteful and brief: “If you blinked, girlfriend, you missed it.”
But the production had barely begun when Hines learned life-changing news: she was six months pregnant. She worked right until the night she was induced and was back on stage two weeks later, after the birth of her daughter, Deni. Hines managed the early years as a young single mother with the help of a nanny: “I had money, and when you got money, you can do lots of stuff.” It was what came later that was harder: “There were many nights I wanted to sneak up there with the pillow and smother her. Teenagers, man!”
Today she counts motherhood as her proudest achievement, and loves her daughter, who is also a singer, “to death”. But she wouldn’t recommend teen pregnancy to anyone. “I did what had to be done,” she says. “And I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t.”
After Hair wrapped up, Hines was offered the role of Mary Magdalene in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which ran for three and a half years. Then her career as a recording artist began. Hines had recorded a cover of James Taylor’s Fire and Rain in a small Sydney studio and soon after, flew to Russia for a one-month tour with the Daly-Wilson Big Band, who’d asked her to be their singer. She remembers getting a patchy international call from her manager, who had good news: “He said, your single, it’s [on the charts]! I said, who bought it? I had no idea. I wasn’t here for all the hype that happened.”
Five decades on, Hines still has that same manager, Peter Rix, who guided her through the many gold and platinum records that followed Fire and Rain, including her biggest ever single, 1977’s You, and 1981’s Your Love Still Brings Me to My Knees, which was a top 10 hit in both Australia and Europe.
There have been bad times along with the good – like the five years her former label, Wizard Records, blocked her from recording and forced a hiatus in a huge legal dispute that she now considers the lowlight of her career.
But Hines counts her “50-50” relationship with Rix as a crucial part of her longevity in the music industry. “You have to have a good team of people around you – and people who aren’t impressed, who know how to say ‘no’,” she says. “And I do know what ‘no’ means.” And she thinks having a “big, burly, ugly” manager helped her make it through those early decades as a young woman in music unscathed.
Then in 2003, Hines signed on for the gig that would introduce her to a new generation: Australian Idol.
Hines was the “nice one”, the rose between the thorny Mark Holden and Ian “Dicko” Dickson on the judging panel. She found it “very hard” to give negative feedback to those trying out for the show: “I learned how to do it, but especially the delusional ones would just get so angry with you. They really couldn’t sing, and they basically looked at me and said, ‘What would you know?’ And I’d say nothing.”
Australian Idol quickly became a runaway success. “I’d get on the plane and the pilot would speak to me about who was on, then somebody sat behind me [would want to talk about it], then somebody else in the airport,” Hines says. “It was huge.”
One infamous Idol moment was when both Dicko and Holden critiqued the weight and appearance of then-21-year-old contestant Paulini Curuenavuli on live television – Hines did not join their chorus, instead hitting back at Holden on air.
“What you didn’t see is when the cameras went off, I said, what the hell are you guys thinking? I said, you’ve got daughters, what are you doing? You can’t say that to a girl,” Hines recalls. “You can say I don’t like the dress. But don’t say you’re too fat for the dress.”
Hines continued judging on the program until 2009. She says her trademark on-screen niceness wasn’t an act. “[The producers] would give me notes. And I’d say, you hired me, right? Just let me be me.”
Sydney musician Brendan Maclean, who performed more than 300 shows with Hines in Velvet Rewired, one of her most recent stage shows, says Hines is every inch as generous and sincere in real life as she is on screen. “People always want to know what ‘the real,’ Marcia is like off stage or screen but here’s the thing: Hines has neither the time or interest in faking it for anybody,” he says.
Now, after 50 years in the spotlight, Hines is glad she made that trip to Australia all those years ago – not least because “there are a lot of things about America I’m really starting to dislike.”
Like what? “Well, how political do you want me to get?” she says. “I grew up with president Kennedy and the presidents that followed after that, they seem to want to make America a better place. And now it’s just … not the America I grew up in.”
Hines had the opportunity to move to LA in her 20s but declined, choosing the relative “normality” of Sydney over the prospect of sending Deni to Hollywood High. She only wishes Australia invested more in the arts. “If only we took music as seriously as we take sport, nobody could touch us,” she says. “We’ve got great musicians in this country.”
Today, Hines still lives just one suburb over from the Cross. When she’s not on tour or in front of a camera, Hines spends her days with her cat, or in bed “cracking up” at things she sees on Instagram (where she’s very active). She is, like much of the country, trying to finagle Taylor Swift tickets after failing to make it past the Ticketek lounge. Retirement is not on her radar.
“I really still adore what I do,” Hines says. “So I think when I become an embarrassment to myself and my friends, I won’t do it any more. Right now, I’m doing OK.”
Hines’ new album Still Shining: The 50th Anniversary Ultimate Collection is out now. She is also touring Australia in 2023; see her website for dates
