Katie Noonan taps into the magic of Karen Carpenter

Katie Noonan has a theory about the waves of nostalgia-inspired shows hitting the touring circuit of late.

“We’ve had a pretty horrendous few years,” she tells PLAY. “So I think there is a real sense of nostalgia and joy going back to songs that remind you of a time before COVID, from when things were a little more innocent.”

She first realised the thirst for familiar songs when she did a show last year celebrating the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, an album she says “changed my life”.

“I said to my agent, ‘here are some dates we can do’. I thought it was going to be one gig, it ended up being 40,” she says. “I was amazed at the pick-up of the concept. I think people go ‘I remember that record, that was before COVID . . . I just want to go to that because I will forget about the difficulties’.”

Noonan is one of Australia’s most distinctive voices, having first come to public attention in the early Noughties as frontwoman of rockband George, where her classically trained voice set the band’s sound apart. These days she spends a lot of time on the road, lending her powerhouse vocals to any number of concerts. But she says the COVID years were tough as a musician — she did five 14-day quarantines in order to keep working where she could. And so she relates to the audience thirst for music that soothes the soul.

Noonan is now paying tribute to another of her idols, the folk hero singer-songwriter/drummer Karen Carpenter. She has assembled something of a supergroup of (mainly) female musicians to bring the songs of the Carpenters to life, with a band including singers Melinda Schneider, Abby Dobson and Layla Havana.

“Karen Carpenter was the first pop voice that I fell in love with,” Noonan says. “My parents at the time were overseas and I was missing them terribly and I got a cassette tape of them and her voice soothed me. It’s the first pop voice I fell in love with, before rock’n’roll. She was one of the first women I had ever seen behind a drum kit. She is a total master drummer, she’s amazing.”

“I just thought, ‘man, I would love to perform her songs and I would love to do it with an all-female band’. There is something special about women performing together.”

She has been deep diving into the Carpenters back catalogue to prepare herself for the show and has found herself gaining an even deeper appreciation for the legendary group.

“I’ve been going back and exploring how many great songs they wrote and seeing how many great songs of other people’s they did and how they turned them into their own,” Noonan says. “They did Ticket To Ride by The Beatles and they turned it into this really sad ballad, totally different to how The Beatles did it.”

Noonan names Solitaire, Rainy Days And Mondays and Hurting Each Other as some of her favourite Carpenters songs that will be part of the concert, and adds they will also be performing pop hit Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft.

“That’s super 80s,” Noonan enthuses.

“Lots full of synths and all the daggy 80s awesomeness that I love,” she says with a laugh.

“I realised I love daggy pop tunes. That’s my dirty secret. And these tunes they have a nostalgia to them, but when you study them they are musically brilliant, they are complex and interesting and Richard Carpenter was a great arranger and Karen was a great singer and a great drummer so they are actually surprisingly challenging, so it’s fun.”

Noonan says she is excited to put her own twist on the classic songs, while still honouring the original work.

“There is something very special about being able to go back and remember just how magic these songs are,” she says.

A Kind Of Hush: The Magic Of Karen Carpenter is at Perth Concert Hall April 21, Bunbury Regional Entertainment Centre April 23 and Mandurah Performing Arts Centre April 24. Tickets from mellenevents.com.