For Australia’s one time Queen of Pop Tania Doko, it’s high time for a bit of good old fashioned self indulgence.
After spending the past few years writing songs for others, like former pop matriarch Taylor Dane, she’s back to expressing what’s in her own heart. And she wants to do a lot more than just give yours a gentle tug.
“I want to rip your heart out now,” she laughs. “That’s what I’m up for.”
For Doko, her next (“very autobiographical”) solo album will hopefully be a return to her glory years of the late 1990s, where songs like Buses and Trains and Permission To Shine from pop opus Waiting For The Day, were flogged to within and inch of their lives.
“This is definitely heart on my sleeve, it’s really going back to Waiting For The Day,” she says.
“That record was incredibly heart on my sleeve.
“I spent a lot of time doing electro rock (She Said Yes), that kind of doofy DJ stuff, but now it’s like at 37 years of age, I want to tell real stories.”
She’s keeping it real and she’s back in Australia after spending much of 2011 in Stockholm, a land seemingly teeming with heavy duty pop writers.
“It’s such a songwriting mecca,” Doko says.
“Not long ago seven of the Top Ten Billboard Chart producers in the US were Swedish.
“There’s something in the water, they grow them on trees. If I wanted to write with somebody different every day, I could do it easily.”
She says tailoring a song to the headspace of another artist was mostly a gamble.
“You want to understand the flavour of the artist you’re writing for,” she says.
“It’s a bit like Tattslotto, you have to take a gamble and take a guess.
“(And) it’s like the muscle you have to keep flexing.”
The move to Sweden was an attempt to get out of her comfy Melbourne existence.
“Australia has been very kind to me, but I had to get out of my comfort zone. Just for the predictability of what I knew,” she says.
“That’s provided the perfect backdrop to write these songs (for the album).
“You’ve got your people that you really trust (in Melbourne), but that doesn’t happen overnight (in Sweden).
“Finding those people, you’re going to bump your head up against the wall.
“You experience things you haven’t experienced for years. All of a sudden, you’ve got something to write about.
“That’s what this record is about for me, working relationships, intensity, heartache, fun, all of it, all because I felt new and improved in Sweden.”
Doko and James Roche of Bachelor Girl were the pop king and queen in the late 90s, but she says they were first oddities, in a industry that couldn’t define them.
“We were asked to go on Recovery, before anybody knew we were a pop band,” she says.
“I guess radio decides what you are... but we were on Recovery which was quite an indie program.
“Then the big stations jumped onto us like madmen, and the rest is history.
“But for five minutes there we were a little bit odd.”
Oddities, stars then eventually victims of music label belt tightening, six years after the pop juggernaut that was Waiting For The Day.
“2004 was probably the worst time in the music business,” she says.
“Sony and BMG merged and as a result most of the BMG acts were a casualty of that merger and we were one of them.
“We could have gone to another label, there was still a bit of currency for Bachelor Girl, but we didn’t.
“James got married and went over and produced in London and worked for the BBC, and I started She Said Yes.
“Then I started the songwriting thing and got some cuts overseas.”
It was only until she was outside the spotlight, that she began to fully appreciate the legacy of those songs.
“After Bachelor Girl I did some youth work, because I’ve got a background in criminology, I felt fortunate I could still sing these Bachelor Girl songs,” she says.
“Some of them were lightweight, but a lot of them... there’s a lot behind them, some substantial meaning.
“And these kids were latching onto Permission To Shine, because they mean something, 13 years later that’s pretty cool for them to still pretty relevant.
“You know, we did something that meant something to people, that’s pretty cool.
“I am the girl in Bachelor Girl to some extent, always.”
Tania Doko plays The Palais Hepburn Springs on February 24,
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