Piecing together a popstar

In the mid 2000s when I was just getting starting in the world of freelance graphics and video editing, a friend asked me if I wanted to do a couple of months of data entry with him in an office. The job couldn't have been more boring – literally scanning and filing documents in a government office – but it did afford me plenty of time to listen to the Ricky Gervais XFM archives (back when I was a fan of the guy) and it led to some other interesting insights.

One of my fellow mindless paper shufflers was, I soon discovered, a talented songwriter and singer. When she shared her first album one day I was very impressed with both her voice and the quality of the songs, with a few of them even going into my regular playlist at the time.

She was mid to late 20s at the time and though she had been regularly performing in pubs and small gigs for years with a guitarist friend of hers, had not yet 'made it big'. Despite her talent, she did not have a 'pop-star' image going for her, and I suspect this was at least in part why she was sitting next to me scanning pieces of paper 8 hours a day.

The indecent proposal

As we got chatting over the weeks, and I remarked to her that I was very impressed with some of her tracks, she told me that the manager of a famous Australian artist had previously offered her $50,000 AUD to buy one of them. He had come to a pub gig of hers on the northern beaches of Sydney – presumably on the prowl for talent – and approached her after the show.

The deal would be such that the artist he represented would own the track entirely, and would rewrite the lyrics to be about her life, and that my colleague would sign an NDA saying that she could never talk about it or claim that she had any connection to it.

Despite this offer being very tempting for a young woman with no money (hence why she was sitting next to me) she declined. Although the 50k could have bought her a year to focus entirely on singing and writing new tracks, she felt that this particular song was too personal to give up, and that it could well be her ticket to kick-starting her own career, so she said no.

Funnily enough, the artist in question was famous for and promoted on the basis that she was a singer-songwriter and musician. If this kind of situation occurred even once (as I believe it did with my colleague), it would obviously call into question the rest of her supposedly self-penned (or 'co-written') catalogue.

Anyway, my colleague refused to sell, and continued on with the hard slog of trying to get her career going while also struggling to survive. When the 2 month contract was up at the paper-scanning temp job, there was a very Office-esque farewell party and then myself and the other temps all went our separate ways.

15+ years later

I never maintained contact with that colleague but every few years or so I would inevitably think of the tracks and pull up the Mp3s from my dropbox to have a listen and see if they still held up – and they would.

I did the same around a week ago and googled her name to see what she was up to, curious to know if the career had ever properly kicked off. Apparently she had moved to LA and was involved with singing and voice acting and involved in some video game music and so on. Seemingly she was making a living at this kind of stuff but in no way a big name.

Curiously, I looked in the 'albums' section of her site and noticed that the album she had given me 15 years earlier was no longer listed there (like it had been some years before). The album was just gone, and she was calling another (later) album her debut record.

Was she suddenly embarrassed about this earlier work for some reason? Was it too personal and she was determined to not be reminded of the tracks, or had something else perhaps happened in the interim.

I sent her a brief email the other day to the email address on the site, mentioning that I had thought of her album and wanted to check how she was doing. I was curious to see how she might reply, and – perhaps the conspiracist in me talking – if she would maybe try to deny the existence of the album entirely. I long ago threw out the physical CD she gave me but I do still have a few of the key tracks still stored on my dropbox, if ever that claim was to arise.

She has yet to reply.

Statute of limitations on posing

Since this story of the offer to buy the track is ultimately second hand information (that my colleague told me), and no track-purchasing supposedly took place at that time, I think it's safe enough for me to reveal that the artist-in-question was Delta Goodrem. Of course Delta may never have even known that her manager was making this particular offer since it didn't go ahead, but I would presume that this was not a one-off case and that similar things had taken place at other times also.

Something I can say, by coincidence, is that around that same time period I worked in a technical camera capacity at one of Delta's concerts in Sydney. There were two shows in the same venue and so I essentially saw the exact same show back to back one day after another. On the first performance there was a part where Delta selected a shy 20-something year old guy from the crowd and had him come up and sing along with her on stage. The guy was nervous and awkward but of course powerful Delta guided him through it and the crowd loved it. It was all pretty corny to my mind but I figured whatever, this is her audience. The next day when the exact same interchange happened (basically word for word) with the same guy, I lost a bit of respect for Delta.

Of course it makes logistical sense, why take a risk on an unknown quantity when you can engineer a heartwarming 'authentic' fan-connection moment, and make it repeatable? Was he just the pre-arranged 'Sydney' guy, or did he travel all around Australia with her? I have no idea but I also would have zero doubts about her buying any and all of her tracks and sticking her own (or a ghostwriter's) lyrics in place of someone else's lived and creatively-inspired experience.

In conclusion

Taken one by one, each of these points is not particular shocking or surprising, but a pattern does emerge. What kind of person is willing to spend their life singing someone else's songs, faking interactions with fans like a stage-magician, and all-the-while telling the press that everything is 100% authentic? I would suggest that it is someone who nobody should be trusting on any other issue, which is of course the entire point that these celebrities ARE popularised – so that when the time is right, they come out and tell the people who love them what to do.

Did my colleague make the right decision back in the day? Arguably selling that track could have gotten her an 'in' with Delta and other artists, and perhaps begun a lucrative (albeit semi-anonymous) career of helping elevate other people to seemingly god-like statuses in the music business. Did she perhaps sell the album later and make this kind of deal further along in her career?

If she ever replies to my email I will report back.