In the early 90s, Melbourne's Frente were little fish swimming against the tide.
Guitars were loud, vocals were raw, bands were angry and Nirvana were rock's reluctant, tormented heroes.
As grunge swept the world, Frente bravely arrived with gentle, rhythmic folk pop songs which instantly struck a chord with noise-weary audiences and took them to the top of the charts for their debut LP Marvin The Album.
Although singer Angie Hart was still a teenager and Frente was her first band, the songwriting partnership she formed with guitarist Simon Austin was unique.
Frente had a freshness and innocence about their music that was starkly different to the disaffection of grunge. The band's sweet first single 'Labour Of Love' placed in triple j's Hottest 100 of 1991 and, all of the sudden, Frente were everywhere.
They quickly followed up their debut single with their ARIA award winning 'Ordinary Angels' and a platinum selling EP Clunk.
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As the band began touring overseas, Frente looked to create international interest with reworked versions of 'Ordinary Angels', released on a limited edition 7" single called Ordinary Angles.
The song was given three new dance-pop remixes by producer George Dracoulias, a big name at Rick Rubin's hip hop empire Def Jam Records.
It was a big leap for the band and a song which Angie Hart says began in fight brought on by the pressure of their early success.
The writing of 'Ordinary Angels'
Simon Austin and I wrote 'Ordinary Angels' together kind of on a dare.
We were trying to get signed to a record company and it was all very big time and very exciting.
We stupidly promised them that we would deliver a brand-new song over the course of two days of recording. That was disastrous because we just panicked as soon as we said we would do it.
We were staying at a friend of Simon's mum's, in her apartment in Sydney, sitting on the floor on the carpet, petting the cat. And we just flipped out and had a massive argument. It was almost the end of the band before we started. We were in tears.
Just as we were about to give up, this song just began and we wrote the whole thing while we were sobbing. It was very dramatic. It came out line by line, like a jigsaw puzzle.
I think with really great songs often there's like this kind of earthquake before they happen.
It was it was built from the bottom up starting with the first line 'You get the world for your birthday, baby'.
The song is really about giving ourselves such great expectations. We were pushing ourselves really hard. We began writing and we were just looking at each other and knowing that we were writing about it being okay to be kind of ordinary.
So, we were writing about the world being fantastic and us just being human.
Before this, we'd released the Labour Of Love EP and we were definitely getting some attention at that stage. So, we were feeling like something was happening
Simon and I both love words. We were rhythmic in our writing style, so every syllable mattered. We really liked hip hop and I think we really liked the idea of being rhythmic without words. I guess that was my way of creating some sort of an instrument for myself.
Simon put down a very strong rhythm right from the start of the song, which really keeps the whole song very positive and light.
The single was produced by Daniel Denholm and it was really fancy for us.
He's a really great producer and he'd worked with string arrangements and really understood quantizing complex beats together with the music. He and Simon nerded out like you wouldn't believe. But it really took us up a new level.
The influences on 'Ordinary Angels'
I was a pretty messy, eclectic listener of some pretty embarrassing stuff. I was young.
I remember when Simon asked if I wanted to join the band, he came over to my house. I played him some LL Cool J, Bette Midler, Crown Of Thorns, and Neneh Cherry was a really strong influence during that time. I was just cherry-picking snippets from everything that I liked.
I remember hip hop being quite a theme, which is hilarious, because obviously our influences often seem to have nothing to do with our music.
I got Simon into hip hop as well. We used to sit and I'd play and all the things that I had on cassettes that I was into at the time. Simon was into a lot of really indie guitar music and it seemed to me that none of our music was representative of anything we were listening to, but I listen now and I can hear how that played into what we were doing.
For instance, Siouxsie and the Banshees or Echo and the Bunnymen or somebody like that. I hear Simon's guitar and it makes sense to me now. And in the rhythmic writing and in the smart-arsery, that we liked to play with in words. I think that's very hip hop, the spirit. We definitely picked up on that.
Two key members at the beginning of Frente was Tim O'Connor and Mark Picton.
Tim really loved listening to like the Stranglers and Mark was into really esoteric bands that had really angular, interesting time signatures. It was a really strange combo with me with my Bette Midler.
As a band we were eclectic, so I think that that created a real playfulness as we bounced ideas off each other musically.
We started off playing at the Punters Club, which was a small bar on Brunswick St in Fitzroy. Lots of bands had their start there.
Grunge was definitely a big thing during that time and we were pretty jangly and light and had this sad music with a positive message, or positive music with a sad message.
This was my first band ever. I joined thinking that this would just be a great experience for me to be in. I was really into writing poetry and I loved music, but I'd never performed.
I was at drama school at the time and I was really bad at that because I was really shy. I loved studying the plays, but then I hated performing them.
So, when I joined Frente, I thought that it would just be a great thing to play songs and it started to take off quite quickly. That was wonderful and also confronting.
The Remixes on Ordinary Angles
We originally released the song as a single to radio but when we decided to release it internationally, we wanted to do something a bit fresh with it.
So, we decided that we would release it on collectible vinyl, and that it would come with remixes. Because that seemed like a really exciting thing to us. I think we wanted to create something different with the song.
When we were looking to sign a deal to the US, we were in meetings with Maverick Records, which is Madonna's label, and with Mammoth Records, which was an indie label from North Carolina. We met with both labels to see which would be most suitable for us.
When we walked into the office of Madonna's label, they had done a remix of 'Ordinary Angels' which was so brash and just highly confronting. They took the chorus and thrashed it.
It's such a subtle song, even though it's a pop song. There's a way of delivering a chorus so that it feels like something that you want to hold on to and not be bashed over the head with.
I think maybe it was the key reason we decided not to sign with Maverick.
We were really into the Beastie Boys and some artists from Def Jam. So the idea of having George Drakoulias, who worked alongside Rick Rubin at Def Jam, remix something just seemed really pie in the sky.
When we heard the remixes, I just felt like we had joined the cool kids club. It was really great to hear our song that context.
The b-side has two more mixes – the Ayonarra mix is like our tropical moment, and the third remix is the 4A remix, I imagined that it would have been great to dance to in clubs.
It was very of that era, with the big bass. I think that might be a particular favorite remix of Simon Austin's.
The physical item
The 7" single was collectible, that was a big thing at the time. It's really fun to create something collectible and it was pre internet.
You didn't get to find out who bought all the copies, so people would write you snail mail and tell you they've got number one. That was really fun at the time.
My copy of the 7" single is very dog eared. I don't have the number one copy. I don't think I'll ever sell it.
I didn't play it at the time. I wanted to keep it pristine. But I do sometimes play it now.
I got a record player about 15 years ago, because I was in between vinyl collections for a while. I started collecting records again and thought I'd like to listen to some of my own vinyl.
The spelling on the 7” of Ordinary Angles was actually deliberate, because 'Accidentally Kelly Street' is spelt incorrectly and it was not deliberate, it was a misspelling.
This was deliberately spelled Ordinary Angles because there were new angles to the song. It was a great opportunity to have a little pun there.
I was always involved in the artwork, often drawing the covers. It's really great to have more platforms to do artwork on and to pick colors for vinyl and present them in that way that could be collectible. It was a really good format.
The artwork was based on a collage. We put out a cassingle of 'Ordinary Angels' that had a collaged child angel that I'd created out of magazine, and a sketchy drawing of a disc with wings coming out of it in much the same collage fashion. So it was kind of a remix of the cassingle cover.
The music video
This was our very first video clip and was our first major song off Marvin the Album.
We shot our very first video with Robbie Douglas-Turner. He was really into theatre and stage sets, so he created this elaborate set that we could wander through.
Alannah Hill styled it, and I was terrified of her. We've now become really good friends but at the time, everything was new to me and it was a really big deal.
There's some pretty crazy hairstyles in those videos, a lot of hairspray and rollers.
I had short hair and at that time the idea of doing a video was so foreign to me. They did my hair and makeup up and I thought 'well, everybody else probably knows better than I do about how that's going to look, so this is probably great'.
Frente's image at that time was very chirpy and hopeful. We were really learning the ropes. There was a lot that we still didn't understand about the visual of things and we were still kind of consolidating as a band musically.
The ARIAs
'Ordinary Angels' the single went gold, and I remember having a panic attack on the day of the ARIA awards. I'd started to have a lot of anxiety by that stage.
Part of me was thinking it was really great and wonderful, but I was also wobbling with being the public face of that.
We won two ARIAs: Best Breakthrough Single for Ordinary Angels and Best Debut Album for Marvin The Album. It was an amazing night with INXS being on stage and being right up front to see that.
Performing live at the ARIA's felt very out of body. it was huge for me.
I was channelling Judy Davis that night and I had my hair crimped and was wearing a two-piece waistcoat suit. I remember around that time, we got sent a box of clothing from Mambo and we wore all of that stuff and it's got like 50 colours in every single item of clothing. We were always really colourful.
At the time in Melbourne there was a big backlash against us. I can't remember what publication it was in, but we were labelled as the most annoying band in Melbourne, maybe Australia.
I still use that for our publicity now. It's a pretty great title, but I didn't like it at all at the time.
I had no sense of humour about any of that back then. There was a send up of us on the D-Generation and I was very sad about that. I felt really picked upon.
They apologised, which they shouldn't have because it was comedy, but I was feeling pretty raw at that stage.
I think it always intensifies things when you become successful early on in a band's career, because you really want to consolidate what it is that you are all striving towards. It's good to have a bit of hard work together, wanting the same thing.
So, when it takes off so soon, I think it's a different kind of work. It wasn't like that thing of just being in a garage all day as a band, nutting it out, touring together and having lots of crap shows that were unifying.
What happened next?
In the band, we were harmonious for a very short amount of time. Then for most of the time we probably were not. I'm sure that happens with a lot of bands.
For us we were not unified before we became a band, because we came from the four corners of very different worlds. We tried to marry that together when it all took off, and I think that was probably a big ask.
To top that off, Simon and I started dating. A creative relationship with somebody is so intense. It's a pretty magical thing, and you're in each other's pockets all the time.
Then of course, we broke up, and then we started touring a lot, so that was a great spanner to throw into the mix.
But to this day with Simon, there's a really strong chemistry there. When we write together, we don't bother to think what the song is about, we just throw words back and forth at each other and melodies and just know that we both will understand when it's right.
The collaboration kind of happens in the air between us, which feels very special, it's a hard thing to find.
Looking back
I cringe a lot about early stuff that I did in Frente. It's really hard to look at yourself being so self-conscious and so shy. I was still learning my sense of self. I'm 49 now, and I think I'm hopefully coming into it next year.
These days 'Ordinary Angels' is just joyous for me. I still love the song. I think it's really tight and really well written and it's something I'm really proud of.
I feel like it's something that I can give to people as a blessing, rather than something that I'm putting out there. Now I feel like it's a love letter, like a way of telling everybody 'Look, I did it! I'm really awfully normal and I had a really big career. You can just be yourself.'
I love getting up now as a nearly 50-year-old woman and singing about just being yourself, because I think that's a great message at this stage.
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