Looking Through a Window by Wendy Saddington – Australia's first lady of soul

Stop what you’re doing for a second.

Listen to this song. Really listen to it. Can you hear the pain and solace in the singer’s voice as the song builds, piano, guitar, strings and her wailing competing for your attention? Can you imagine this bluesy, soulful singer almost visibly shaking as she pours all of herself into the music? At the end of its six tumultuous, heartfelt minutes she sounds spent – and understandably so.

She’s given everything.

It’s weird, listening to Wendy Saddington’s recorded work today. A pivotal Australian singer and feminist identity – both former Go Between Robert Forster and actress/singer Loene Carmen (who co-runs her Facebook page) cite her as an influence – you wouldn’t know it to look at her back catalogue. Just one single and one live album, recorded with Copperwine in 1971, serve as documentation of her legendary live shows and inspirational visual presence around the turn of the 70s.

But it just adds to the myth.

As Carmen wrote in 2012, “How a girl from the outer suburbs of Melbourne emerged just before 1970 with this utterly unique gift of a heart-stopping old soul singer’s voice and fully-formed, almost punk fuck-you, performance aesthetic only adds to her mysterious glamour and deserved legendary status.”

There were no half-measures about Saddington. She stood out: attired in the psychedelic hippie gear of the day and an out-there afro hairstyle, she sported numerous gypsy-style beads and bangles, heavily made-up eyes, pale sombre lips and a cheesecloth top. And her voice! Not for nothing did she attract comparisons to Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin.

Saddington had attitude. Oh yes. She sang protest songs, like idol Nina Simone’s Backlash Blues, while around her all-male boogie and jam bands rhapsodised about teenage love and went bare-chested. A feminist icon before most people even realised such things existed, she regularly supported Sydney drag performance troupe Sylvia and the Synthetics between 1972 and 1974, during the formative years of the Australian gay rights movement.

“She wasn’t a technically brilliant singer, but that hardly mattered,” wrote music historian Ian McFarlane. “She could belt out a blues number with such power and conviction that the stage could literally shake, or she’d hold back with such a soulful near-whisper that it could take your breath away.”

Just Saddington’s physical presence was enough to inspire people: her entire look radiated a fierce independence and the sort of unsophisticated, nonchalant elan which went on to inspire generations of Australian women and girls, desperately seeking role models beyond homemakers and bread-bakers.

Saddington came out of the vibrant Melbourne pub scene of the 60s and 70s. After a period spent performing in local coffee lounges and a stint as a private investigator’s typist, she began her singing career at the age of 17, in a couple of psychedelic soul and rock bands – Melbourne’s Revolution, and Adelaide’s the James Taylor Move – before teaming up with the Chain (later just Chain) in December 1968.

Her one single, 1971’s Looking Through A Window was co-written and co-produced by former Chain bandmate Warren Morgan and Billy Thorpe. It made an immediate impression. “Saddington has finally proved that she is without doubt one of the most talented female singers to ever come out of this country,” Molly Meldrum wrote in Australia’s teen culture magazine Go-Set.

Listening to it now, it sounds almost scarily raw and unpolished in the way much of Joplin’s Big Brother Holding Company output sounds. Its earthiness and honesty is intimidating. The single reached No 22 in the Australian charts, but the singer never made it onto Meldrum’s Countdown TV show.

In the early 70s, Saddington joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, taking the name Gandharvika Dasi, and effectively ending her recording career. From 1985 onwards, she performed irregularly around Sydney, and in March 2013 was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

Sometimes billed as “Australia’s Lady of Soul” or the “First Lady of the Blues”, the singer died on 21 June 2013, aged 63.