Clairy Browne is set to make a musical splash, but is Australia ready for R&B with attitude, asks BERNARD ZUEL.
Clairy Browne used to do power poses before going on stage, self-actualisation exercises where you assume strong, assertive positions. Hands on hips, legs well spaced apart; arms behind the head, torso thrust forward; arms raised high in "victory".
By the time we got to see her, playing with her band The Bangin' Rackettes, she would be all hips and lips, high hair and tight dresses. Sometimes leading the backing vocalists in a line from dressing room to stage, she'd stare down the front line of the audience as the band played a swinging soul groove. 
She'd look as if she were the embodiment of power: leaning over us and asserting her place; standing up and open and demanding our attention. Clairy Browne was in the house and in control.
Echoing many who saw those Bangin' Rackettes shows, Paul Kelly, who brought her into his rhythm and blues project The Merri Soul Sessions (alongside hardly retiring characters such as Dan Sultan, Dan Kelly and the experienced Linda and Vika Bull) says: "Clairy brings the heat to anything she sings, whether it be an aching ballad or lay-down-the-law R&B. She's got rhythm, attitude and style."
True enough. But Browne now admits that it was a confidence-boosting trick for the woman who had always seen herself as a writer ("poetry was a huge passion") rather than a performer.
"When I first started performing I was petrified to be on stage," she says. "I don't think anyone would have been able to tell that because my way of combating any kind of fear I had was to create this character: hyper feminine and fierce and formidable, even scary sometimes.
"When you are afraid and need to build a character, as quick as hell it's like you get a one-way ticket to self-exposure because people will tell you what they see. They would be like, 'Clairy Browne she's scary and she's fierce and she is a diva'. When I look at photos of myself on stage I'm doing a lot of those [power] moves. That stuff can strengthen you."
Browne, who grew up in comfortably suburban Elwood, Melbourne, doesn't do the poses pre-show any more: she doesn't need to convince herself of anything. You can see it in the self-funded and directed video for her first solo single, Vanity Fair, a song which laughs at, and plays with, the tropes of "big booty", highly sexed, modern pop.
"That is what pop music is for me, a lot of it is about fun," she says of the provocative song and video. "And I like innuendo and I like metaphors . . . so playing with all of that stuff was a lot of fun."
You can hear it in the more nuanced lyrics on the coming debut album, Pool, that play to both strength and vulnerability without fear that the latter would weaken the former. As Browne says, the strong profile she had presented "had become a habitual mask that was definitely part of me but was caricature", while the complex woman on Pool "is more raw, more real".
And you can definitely feel it in the strong contemporary R&B of these new songs, a generation or two on from the '60s soul and old-school rhythm and blues of the Rackettes material. It's more in line with a Beyonce or Foxy Brown ("I like tough women . . . she doesn't take shit from anybody") than the
oft-compared Amy Winehouse or the definite influence, Etta James.
Modern R&B is no casual choice. R&B in all its forms, more than pop, more than rock and electronica, has always been a haven for strong women. Inconsistently maybe, but historically true. From blues singers who had sex and drank as much as the men, through rhythm and blues belters who took no prisoners and on to soul, funk and now the chart-dominating R&B pop, women have not only had the right to be strong and expressive but to deal with sex and power on their own terms.
"Definitely with the sex," Browne says. "For women to feel empowered to express themselves in that way is important and it does coexist within that music, and that's something that is a big part of me."
Of Pool, she says: "It's like a rebirth because there is a lot in there that I feel like I have been wanting to say."
Clairy Browne's Pool is out now.
Watch her perform the album's Love Song to the World - at smh.com.au/entertainment/music.