It wasn’t easy for me, as I had my doubts about appearing on another talent show. While programmes of this kind are a law unto themselves, what they have in common is that they’re on the lookout for something original and unique. I thought that was a box I could tick. In the end, however, I only came sixth in Die Große Chance, which really doesn’t sound like a stunning success, at least not if another famous Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is to be believed. Like me, he hails from the Austrian province of Styria, and says of himself: ‘I only ever wanted to be first, because no one is interested in who comes second.’ So who on earth might be interested in someone who came sixth? It had to be someone with vision, someone capable of turning that vision into a reality, and that’s how I got to know René Berto.
In interviews, I’m often asked what I think about this or that footballer, football being the sport of the masses. At that point, I usually have to pass, because there’s little to connect me and football. Yet there’s one comparison I can make: whereas I had so far indulged my pleasure of disguise and burlesque more or less as an amateur, like a child going for a kick-about with his mates on a football pitch, my life now reached a professional turning point, and this was in part down to René Berto. René had long been involved in the arts scene with his agency Genie und Wahnsinn. Several years earlier, he’d entered one of his artists in the Eurovision Song Contest in Riga. He saw in me more than others could see, even more than I myself could see at that point in time. This was down not just to his experience and desire to think outside the box, but also to his ability to ask the right questions: ‘What do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time? What’s your goal?’
What’s your goal? If ‘Who am I?’ is the hardest question of them all, then ‘What’s your goal?’ comes a close second. When I put the same question to other people, they often grow silent. I was no different. Perhaps it’s not true that most people don’t know what their goal is. Perhaps they simply don’t know how to put it into words. The same was true of me. To begin with, hardly anything came to mind. It takes a mentor like René, who’s capable of drawing out ideas, to identify someone’s goals and the best way to achieve them. His great talent is that he doesn’t confuse his own goals with those of his protégé.
Our conversations gradually became more and more in-depth and revelatory. René would ask questions, I would have a think, and, slowly, a memory would work its way to the surface of my consciousness. What was it like, many years ago, when I first realised I had to leave Bad Mitterndorf? I’d decided to pursue a career in fashion, something that was impossible in my home town. Despite being understandably worried, my parents encouraged me to set out for pastures new, and that’s what I did, full of apprehension, yet also full of enthusiasm to go out and discover the world – the world that stretches out at our feet, that belongs to us. The world is your oyster.
‘That’s my goal,’ I told René. ‘I want to discover the world. I want to conquer it, with everything I’ve got, and with everything I am. I want to be a world star.’
Those really aren’t words that trip lightly off the tongue. After all, there are critics out there who are ready to shoot you down, ready to dismiss such aspirations as arrogant, over the top, brazen, cheeky and big-headed. Even the critic inside your own head won’t hold back. You, a world star? Get real! One thing at a time.
Things were different with René. He took it just as seriously as if I’d said I fancied doing a short concert tour of Styria. What he was really after was to find out what I wanted. He sees himself as a strategist who finds the means with which to turn a vision into reality. So we also got to talking about who my role models were. Despite having no real idols, I could and still do get passionate about artists such as Céline Dion, Tina Turner and Cher. None of them came into this world on a bed of roses and they all went through the occasional rough patch. But they nonetheless always remained true to themselves and their artistry. They’re personalities, they have what it takes to send shivers of excitement down my spine: a really great singing voice.
I didn’t see René for a few days, but then he resurfaced. He brought with him a document that made me go weak at the knees as I read what was written at the top. It was what I’d been talking and dreaming about, what my goal was. When you see something in black and white, it immediately looks much more important and slightly closer to reality than the abstract thought of it. All of a sudden I felt this excitement, the excitement that comes over you when you’ve found the path to where you’re going.
‘I wrote this for you,’ said René, handing me the document.
I read aloud: ‘From talent show to world star.’ I read the rest quietly to myself. What was written there had been cleverly thought through. What was written there would change my life. What was written there sounded like a lot of hard work and more discipline than I’d ever exerted. It didn’t sound as if success was going to be handed to me on a plate. I thought of my parents, who’d worked hard all their lives, and I thought of my grandparents, who’d done the same. They’d been long-distance lorry drivers, youth hostel managers and restaurant owners; me, I was an artist. Other than that, there wasn’t so much difference. If you want to get to the top, you have to get up early. I was in possession of a working alarm clock. So what could go wrong? I smiled and stretched out my hand.
‘It’s a deal,’ I said.
We shook on it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MEETING THE HIMBA
‘Don’t dream it – be it!’
FROM THE MUSICAL THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Stories have always interested me, as has the art of writing stories. I once came across The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book in which the American author Joseph Campbell describes myths and folk legends from all over the world and draws on them to create a sort of instruction manual for how to tell a story. One of my favourite fairy tales, The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, fits wonderfully into the template that Campbell puts forward. Through stories she hears from her grandmother, the Little Mermaid learns about the world of humans and decides to go there herself. She has to overcome many obstacles on the way, facing challenges which little by little bring her closer to her real self. When today I ask myself the question ‘Who am I?’, I know deep down that, by meeting the challenges life throws my way, I’m moving gradually closer to the answer.
As the Little Mermaid discovers, these challenges are often tests on which we don’t perform quite as well as we’d hoped. Conchita has had countless such experiences, too. René and I embarked on our adventure full of enthusiasm, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. There were times when I was at my wits’ end wondering how I was going to pay the bills. Then weeks and months would go by during which I would have had to clone myself in order to meet all the requests coming my way. No sooner had I got used to everything being hectic than it seemed we were back at square one again. I sometimes wondered if we were getting closer to our goal or moving away from it. Campbell has a name for this rollercoaster of feelings experienced by everyone setting out on an adventure: the road of trials. We battle on, having to negotiate all sorts of tests that we can either pass or fail. Failure always involves an element of giving up. Around this time, it became ever clearer to me that I would never give up on something that came from deep within my heart – and that was where Conchita had come from. This still holds true when I’m confronted with animosity from others today. Faced with that situation, I just think to myself, ‘There you go, another test for you. You’ll be stronger for it afterwards, and closer to finding the answer to the most important question there is: Who am I?’
It was around this time that I got a special phonecall. The TV broadcaster RTL was on the line, and what they had to offer me was something called Wild Girls: Across Africa in High Heels. The idea was that I would stumble my way through the deserts of Namibia as a ‘wild girl’, part of a pack that included the models and actresses Sara Kulka, Fiona Erdmann and Kader Loth.
I didn’t know much about Africa, but what I read fascinated me: 200 million years ago, Africa was at the heart of the Pangaea supercontinent. By virtue of its centrality, the African land mass had escaped destruction when Pangaea broke up into pieces, becoming the earth’s oldest and most stable continent. That’s why the world’s oldest forms of life originated there, and also, over a hundred thousand years ago, the human race. The animal and plant worlds were able to evolve almost undisturbed, and today Africa possesses a wealth of 121 diverse ecoregions: rain forests, savannahs and deserts. It was a desert that the programme’s producers had sought out for us. The name ‘Namibia’ was already a hint. It stems from the word ‘Namib’, the name of the world’s oldest desert. ‘Namib’ actually means ‘empty space’ or ‘place where there is nothing’. Damaraland, on the other hand, is a rocky desert region stretching north from Walvis Bay up as far as Angola – right up to Kaokoveld, the home of the Himba.
This was all fascinating to me. Some of the world’s oldest peoples still live in Namibia: the San bushmen, for example, who probably already lived in southern Africa 25,000 years ago; and the Himba, the country’s last semi-nomadic people. It seemed obvious that this was not a place to be walking around in high heels. But, then again: how often are you offered the chance to explore one of the oldest parts of the world? So I agreed.
Flying from Vienna to Windhoek, you only need to set your watch back one hour. The ancient continent lies along similar lines of longitude as Europe, which thankfully also rules out jet lag. As soon as we arrived, we started to head north, our car journey taking us through the famous empty space. Every so often, a farm would appear on the horizon, some of them so large that they could easily have swallowed up the whole of Vienna. But it was the colours I found most impressive. Under a steely blue sky, stretching out as far as the eye could see, was an ochre brown landscape, broken up here and there by jet-black rock formations, as if some giants had just abandoned their game of marbles. Swaying in the wind was yellow desert grass on which herds of kudu antelopes were grazing, tended by shepherds from the Herero tribe.
We made good progress along the tarmac roads, which took us as far as Omaruru – but then we hit the notorious washboard roads, so named for their rippled surface of stones and sand. These ripples are capable of rupturing shock absorbers, and made for an incredibly bumpy ride. North of Otjiwarongo, most of the washboard roads came to an end, and we carried on cross-country before finally reaching the place that the television producers had selected. Our job as contestants – and it’s always the same for shows of this kind – was to complete various tasks thought up by a couple of crafty-minded writers. People could then vote us out of the game or choose to keep us in. Predictably, constant attempts were made to stoke up artificial conflicts, in the hope of adding some dynamics to the whole escapade. This is not my scene at all. We have enough conflict in the world without having to inflame the situation with artificially induced – and therefore totally pointless – disputes and quarrels. Conchita stands for love and tolerance, and I soon took it upon myself to act as adjudicator and mediator in these disputes. We were frequently joined in our tasks by the Himba, who probably laughed their heads off in secret after witnessing the chaotic ructions staged by the sweaty white people in the middle of the desert. I loved the elaborately-braided hair of the Himba women, and their skin with its reddish glow.
For one of the tasks, three of us wild girls had to keep a fire going all night. Before long, my two fellow contestants had fallen asleep, but I had fun gathering and piling up the material to get a small but steady camp fire going. An African night in one of the most remote corners of our planet is pure magic. As the night went on, the deep black colour of the horizon began to fade into dark blue. The billions of stars in the Milky Way gave one last burst of light before gradually dying away. I continued to hear the noises of prowling animals, as well as the sound of the wind driving the sand along the ground to form more and more dunes. I stood upright by the fire, as I’ve perhaps stood in some other long-lost time and place, and turned my face to the east. A weak light was beginning to show on the horizon, a tinge of orange shot through the blueness, and then it all happened very quickly: an orb of light pushed its way majestically over the border that for thousands of years marked the end of the world, a place that could never be reached. All of a sudden, the light became so bright that I had to turn away. It was like the raising of a curtain, a curtain that revealed a new day, a new life, a new love and a new existence. Never before had I felt so deeply that anything is possible if you really want it.
Behind me, I could hear groaning as my fellow contestants blearily opened their eyes to see it was daylight.
‘Is it morning?’ they asked.
I was able to confirm this.
‘And is the fire still burning?’
Another yes.
‘I’m aching all over. Oh my God, I can hardly move.’
I helped the wild girls to their feet. Anything is possible if you really want it. All the same, I’d had enough of running through the desert in high heels just for the television screens back home. When I was voted off the show shortly afterwards, I had already experienced the most beautiful thing: this moment of magic which has forever awakened in me the dream of Africa, the cradle of the human race.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TOUR DE FORCE
‘That’s it! What an idea!’
FROM THE MUSICAL NINE
When I arrived home, René had a surprise suggestion waiting for me: I ought to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest. Knowing him, I could be sure he’d already have thought this through and lined up some convincing arguments.
‘Do you want to take to the stage? Do you want to sing in front of the whole world?’ This was a rhetorical question, because we already knew the answer. Of course I did! For me, singing is a lot more than just making music. I feel a great affinity with harmony, which has been part of our musical tradition ever since Johann Sebastian Bach. In bestowing us with The Well-Tempered Clavier, this remarkable composer and musician opened up a whole new approach to music, creating the possibility of playing in every key. I’m often overcome when I hear music in its purest form: when we sing a note, such as standard pitch ‘A’, sounds are produced at different frequencies. Our ears do not perceive these individual sounds, only the combined note – in this case, the A. Yet the individual sounds can be represented using a frequency meter and a computer. What we then see is something truly breathtaking: between all the individual sounds exist swathes of empty space where no sound is being made at all. Music is, above all, silence.
When I get up in the morning and do my first vocal exercises, I can feel this silence. Without it, there’d be no music, something the brilliant composers and musicians who worked in my hometown of Vienna were well aware of. Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler: their symphonies, operas and chamber music provide us with constant proof of this fact.
René’s words cut through my reveries: ‘And you’re sure you understand what this will involve?’ Once again, my answer was ‘yes’. After all, we’d already done this before. In the preliminary heats for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, the band Trackshittaz had narrowly beaten us to represent Austria in Baku. As it turned out, they failed to make it beyond the semi-finals, where they gained just eight points and came last out of 18 contestants. This time we wanted to do better. René had spoken to the organisers at ORF (the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), who were thinking of throwing in the towel on account of the numerous Eurovision flops our country
had suffered. In 1966, the now late Udo Jürgens had won the contest for Austria with his song Merci, Chérie. A full 48 years had elapsed since then. There were many people who no longer believed that another victory was possible. It was René who convinced them to try again. Convincing people who are thinking of giving up to change their minds is no trivial matter. In my case, no arm-twisting was needed: I was already raring to go. I knew what awaited me – a gruelling tour across Europe to prepare for the contest – but in exchange I would be allowed to sing. I could hardly wait.
Being Conchita Page 5