When Sydney singer-songwriter Jack Colwell performed live, he was a one-man séance, cresting operatic highs and frightening the horses with guttural, primal lows. Visually, he was a vision board of romantic leads, from a knight in shining armour eating an ice-cream sundae, to a shirtless dreamboat swooning into a bed of flowers. On record, through his cluster of EPs and singles, his work with artists including Sarah Blasko and Patrick Wolf, and on his 2020 debut album Swandream, he tackled darkness and trauma head on. As a friend, he was generous and loyal, almost to a fault.
The Australian music community, his friends and his family were devastated on Thursday to hear of Jack’s death, at the age of 34.
Jack and I called each other “Mary” because of our shared obsession with Jesus Christ Superstar (and because we both wanted to play that role). We met 10 years ago, on a panel at a writers’ festival. Jack won over the audience with his warmth and the occasional roll across the stage, dressed in what I’m sure was a bow tie and sequined dinner jacket. He closed the night with a moody duet of The Motels’ Total Control with Ella Hooper. I want to know that guy, I thought.
Jack embraced big emotions and high dramatics. He wrote for the Guardian about crying “big lonesome tears” to the work of tortured genius Daniel Johnston. He loved strong female artists. His queen, the patron saint of lost boys and girls, was Tori Amos, and he’d play piano like her, half-facing the audience. He did for a new young audience what these women did for him: became a lifeline.
That outrageous spark was always there. Comedian and radio presenter Gen Fricker first spotted Jack at the year 9 disco for their high school, Sydney’s Conservatorium. Jack was in the centre of the dancefloor, krumping to Beyoncé. For their year 12 formal, he wore a fox fur stole despite the November heat; their friendship endured, with Fricker going on to sing on Jack’s records and play in his early band, the Owls.
“He was out and flamboyant at 14,” Fricker says. “So brave and so himself, always.”
That nature spilled into Jack’s career. Videos saw him naked in a gay bath house; dressed as a ballet dancer and chased through the forest by a demon lover; and being drowned by beloved Australian actor Claudia Karvan. In the video for Far From View he’s a crooner on TV, singing directly to a jaded debutante who’s been abused and spat out. She may well have been Jack’s avatar.
Jack’s long-term friend and collaborator, musician Brendan Maclean, met Jack 15 years ago, when they were both interviewed by a queer magazine. “Pitted against each other as ‘the two up-and-coming gay songwriters of Sydney’, we loathed each other from the start. We both came out before coming out was cool and it was, in part, the emotional toll this took on us individually that led us back together. I’ll never forget sitting outside venues on Grindr, trying to convince nearby homosexuals to buy tickets to our shows. It never worked!”
Still, Maclean says, Jack was and will always be an integral part of the queer music scene.
“Where I concerned myself with sounding and looking pretty, he was unafraid to bark, belt and scream,” he says. “Jack’s only focus was the song and communicating it with his audience, even if it left some terrified of the ferocious, writhing, howling musician on the stage.”
Jack’s career was studded with highlights. He was backed by a string quartet at a sell-out album show at the Sydney Opera House; he accompanied Patrick Wolf on stage in Australia and in London; and he impressed Sarah Blasko so much when he supported her on tour that she produced his debut album. As a talented musical director and arranger, he worked with Architecture in Helsinki; arranged the strings and vocals for an Avalanches tribute night at the Sydney Opera House; was chorus coordinator for Karen O’s “psycho opera” Stop the Virgens [sic] at Vivid Sydney in 2013; and programmed the 2017 Unity: the Equality Campaign concert in Sydney.
Ever generous in connecting people, Jack was, as Fricker says, “the opposite of a gatekeeper”. Like so many artists, he had to stretch himself thin chasing different revenue streams; our phone calls were always squeezed in while he caught buses all over Sydney to teach kids guitar, piano and singing.
Jack was also music director for the joyful Polyphony Choir in Sydney, often conducting in a glittery cape or leather chest harness; the choir brought a huge group of disparate people together, helping them find home, and find a family. I know a little about how the choir might be feeling now. In 2015, I organised a concert in the newly minted Amphlett Lane in Melbourne, and Jack came on board without hesitation as choirmaster. He arranged Divinyls songs into four-part harmonies and worked tirelessly coaching us in this tricky a cappella. As our conductor on the night, his face, always animated, was the ballast we needed.
Like so many of his peers, Jack faced an uphill battle in being a fiercely independent artist in Australia. Oftentimes our messages lamented that “no one cares”. And then he’d shake us out of it.
“I get it!” he said, to one message. “But I feel something good is around the corner.”
At the time of his death, Jack was finishing a follow-up to Swandream. Whether or not this album sees the light, the legacy he leaves is larger than he will ever know.
