From ‘Sons And Daughters’ to Bakers Daughter, Alyce Platt has swapped the screen for the stage as she embraces life as a singer-songwriter.
Best known for her role in iconic Australian soap operas ‘Sons And Daughters’ and ‘Neighbours’ as well as co-hosting ‘Sale Of The Century’ with Tony Barber, Alyce comes to Fringe World (Perth) in her musical incarnation Bakers Daughter. “I consider myself as an artist. . . I’m very much a writer but I’m also a performer,” Alyce says.“I’ve always been playing music since I was eight years old – playing guitar; I started writing songs as a teenager, but I’m not very well known for that so it's always a surprise when people find out that I am a songwriter and that I’ve always done that.
“In terms of vocation, it goes hand-in-hand with me; it’s like my go-to for giving form to artistic ideas and so forth.”
Familiar as Alyce is to audiences from her years on television, she says that although that’s what often initially arouses people’s curiosity about her music, working as Bakers Daughter allows her to create work outside what she has achieved in her screen career.
“It's always a little bit awkward in the beginning when people don’t know my music, but they're coming along to see me because they know me – Alyce Platt – from television, which is lovely and wonderful, but there's [an] expectation. . . that’s why I decided to put out my music under a pseudonym,” she says.
The last Bakers Daughter album Alyce released was ‘Funny Little World’ in 2015, along with a soundtrack for recent documentary film ‘Journey Beyond Fear’.
Alyce says much of last year was working on new music, some of which was recorded while she was travelling through the Maghreb region of North Africa. “I travelled to Tunisia earlier in the year in May with a delegation of women in arts and I went along as a performer representative, so I had no idea what to expect,” she explains.
“It was a funded expedition that I was very fortunate to be a part of and it was the most extraordinary experience of my life, I absolutely loved it.
“I got to meet Tunisian musicians, I went down south to the dangerous border of Libya – I wouldn’t highly recommend that – but I was very inspired when I was there, and I wrote some music. I actually recorded some songs in a hammam, which is a Turkish bathhouse that has excellent acoustics. I came back really inspired and I would very much love to go back there at a later date.”
Alyce will be showcasing some of her new material when she brings Bakers Daughter to the stages of Fringe World in Perth ahead of the album’s release later this year. “I’ve already got [the new album] tracked, it’s recorded and mastered, and I’ve been playing around with ideas for a video clip,” Alyce reports.
“That is for a song called ‘Faraway Song’, which I really love, and it was produced by a guy called Glenn Lewis who plays with Mick Harvey and J.P. Shilo; that will be the first single. I think I’m just going to do lots of little singles then later in the year release the album.”
