"I don't see any point in being cagey or lying," says Angie Hart at one point during our lunch. And she's not joking: over the course of a couple of hours, the conversation touches on her battles with drugs and alcohol, her experience of losing her religion (twice), her ill-fated IVF treatment and eventual pregnancy, the at-times difficult relationship with her mother, and her long-running battle with depression.
Hang on. Is this the same Angie Hart who beamed and bounced her way across our television screens as the lead vocalist of Frente, singing about how life had never been so sweet?
"Goodbye Kelly Street," she says, smiling wryly.
Is it traumatic dredging up all this stuff? "No. I just have to remember that there's a purpose to it. Is it useful for other people to hear this or is it just verbal spewing?"
Before we sit down to a meal of dumplings – mostly vegetarian, since Hart is big on animal rights – at Hutong Dumpling Bar, Hart and I are strangers. But within minutes she's laying herself open for me and my recorder, and now you, the readers of this column.
She is by nature shy, she says, and I believe her; everything about her body language, her nervous laugh, her quick and not especially loud manner of talking points to that. What a strange choice, then, to pursue a career as a performer.
As a child she did ballet, then youth theatre at St Martin's. It was not a happy fit. "I found that just the wrong sort of terrifying," she says.
She was 16 when she stumbled into what would become Frente, 17 when they started performing live, 20 when Accidently Kelly Street made them simultaneously top of the pops and flops on the street, its relentlessly cheery video irritating the hell out of the same Fitzroy pub crowd that had nurtured them in their early days.
She has previously said the clip was a mistake, creating a false impression of what the band was about; in fact, they released a second clip, a far more restrained affair that seems to slow the tempo of the song (it's an illusion; it doesn't), as an antidote. But the damage was done.
"Kelly Street was part of a turning point that made things so sour and difficult here," she says.
She wasn't prepared for the backlash, but then she wasn't prepared for the success either. "It was just the wrong time and wrong place and maybe the wrong life. I keep thinking it would be nice now that I have my wits about me, but I don't think I'd want it now either."
Hart was born in Adelaide but spent her childhood in Tasmania. Her parents were involved in a "community-based church"; when they moved to Melbourne, when she was 10, they lived into a commune and did "urban mission work". They left the church when her parents split up, when Hart was about 14.
I've had an ongoing battle with alcohol. I go in and out of having a healthy relationship with it, if I'm honest.
She and her mother moved into a share house together that was, she says, "beyond unsavoury".
It sounds like you had the full Monkey Grip experience. "I did, unfortunately, you're not wrong there."
Frente – born out of the Punters Club on Brunswick Street – was her deliverance. "It happened at just the right time," she says between mouthfuls of tofu and broccoli. "I moved up on top of the pub, to get out of the house."
She was only 16 at the time, but soon the band was gigging regularly and she was making money. "So I called my mum and said, 'I've found this house in Carlton to rent, come live with me'. And I pulled her out of the share house and we went and lived together."
In retrospect, she says now, she thinks that first share house was yet another commune, where her mother was again cast as the carer for a bunch of damaged souls. "Except that I was there too, and I kind of missed out on that scenario."
Were you angry at her for not parenting you enough?
"Of course," she says. "Oh, of course, yeah. That's where therapy is great."
There's a beguiling mix of innocence and experience about Hart. She tells me that when she moved into the pub she didn't drink, and was dead against all those people around her who over-indulged. But she soon came to develop a taste for it, and became one of those people she would have tut-tutted at.
"I've had an ongoing battle with alcohol," she says. "I go in and out of having a healthy relationship with it, if I'm honest. I had a period of drugs in my life, too."
Heroin?
"No, and I was so lucky. I mostly did ecstasy."
She was surrounded by people doing heroin at a time when Melbourne was awash with it, though for whatever reason she was shielded from it. "My first three boyfriends were junkies. My first – I was so young, I was only 14 – I just thought he was so tired all the time. 'He has one drink, he falls asleep'." She laughs merrily at her naivety.
For the past four years, Hart has been working on a memoir about her unusual life – the commune, the religion, the dodgy share houses and the pub and the band and the success and the backlash. It's rich material, but she's struggled to find a form that works for her.
"I don't have one chapter that I'm happy with yet," she says. "I just seem to be writing down facts at the moment, and it's not the way I see it.
"My time in Frente was really interesting and full-on, but it's been really boring to write about. It's quite numb on the page. It's not my main story, I've realised … [but] if I'm realistic, I wouldn't have anyone interested in me writing anything if I didn't have Frente."
Writing occupies a big chunk of Hart's working life now. Late last year, she replaced co-founder Michaela McGuire as host and co-curator (with Marieke Hardy) of Women of Letters, when McGuire left to take up the role of creative director of the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Angie Hart in 1996, the Frente years.
Despite the performance anxiety she has always suffered, Hart seems a natural fit. She read at the very first event in 2010, and has done four more since. She gets paid "a nominal fee" she says – "not enough to pay the mortgage but it makes me feel like I'm a contributor to our household" – but she's not the boss. "There are no bosses."
So you're back in another commune?
"Yes I am," she says, laughing. "And I'm ready this time.
"It's interesting how that stuff plays over and over. I think it's really important to have a community. And I have guilt – I think anyone who has grown up in a religious environment feels indebted, that they should give something back. It's not a bad thing to have. Accountability is not a bad thing."
Hart is on her second marriage, to Blair, a management consultant. The fact that he's not a musician, as her first, American guitarist Jesse Tobias was, is "great", she says. "We have things to talk about, and he's very supportive of what I do and the fact it makes no money, that's OK."
Two years ago they had a daughter, Isabella Peach Melba. "We call her The Peach, or Peacho."
She came after a long, expensive and psychologically brutal experience with IVF that almost destroyed her marriage. "It was like PMS times 1000. I told Blair, 'You should leave me, I'll go and live in a hotel and do this by myself'. Those hormones are f---ing nuts."
They spent more than $50,000 on treatment over 18 months. "We were watching our dreams evaporate – no baby, no travel, no house. And me going mad. No marriage soon, either." And then, at 42, she was pregnant, naturally.
Hart and first husband Jess Tobias, as the band Splendid, in 1999.
She had been on anti-depressants for years, but went off them, cold turkey. It was disorienting at first, "like being on really strong ecstasy – but not in a good way".
She's kicked a lot of other things, too. "I was teaching yoga and doing a lot of alternative medicine, the whole deal, and I've just dumped the lot." There was shiatsu, Chinese medicine, visits to a naturopath – even a spiritual healer. "All the woo-woos."
It was, she says, a conscious decision to lose her religion a second time, to hit the reset button, and it was triggered by a breakdown that left her curled up on the sofa in tears. She did therapy, and it helped. And she came to the realisation that while she'd never put much stock in Western medicine, in rejecting it out of hand she might have "thrown the baby out with the bathwater".
"I've been looking for normal for a long time," she says. "I've been trying to neaten everything up, wanting everything to make a bit more sense."
Is it working? Would you say you're happy?
"Yes, I think I am," she says. "Not hysterically happy – realistically content. That's living with all the things I'm not happy with.
"I still have anxiety, I still go in and out of suffering from depression. But having that perspective where you can be outside it rather than deeply within it is such a great step for me. I never thought I would have it."
Women of Letters is held monthly on Sundays at the Thornbury Theatre. The next event is Sunday, July 30. womenofletters.net.au
THE BILL PLEASE
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Open every day, 11.30am-3pm; 5.30pm-11pm.
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