Music executive Amanda Pelman is best known for helping discover a number of Australian music acts, including Kylie Minogue. Here, the 64-year-old talks about her experience working for two “titans” of the industry, her three marriages, and finding love again in her 60s.
My paternal Italian grandfather, Augusto Pellicci, was 16 when he left his Tuscan village of Verni, bound for Scotland. He had zero knowledge of what it was going to be like. With just two pennies in his pocket, he forged his way through life and started making gelati.
My maternal grandfather Charles Hill’s family is from Wales. He worked as a bricklayer and moved to Melbourne from Bunbury, WA, when my mum, Elvie, was eight. She lost her mother, Elizabeth, when she was 16, and her father when she was 21.
My mother married her childhood sweetheart, Neville, who died in devastating circumstances in World War II. She was living in East Melbourne when she met my dad [Hector]. Dad arrived in Australia in 1952. Mum was living in the same building when he knocked at the kitchen window to attract her attention.
Dad was my everything; we were two peas in a pod. Going to record stores on Saturday morning was our ritual. He gave me a Super Eight camera, and we’d go to Foxeys Hangout on the Mornington Peninsula and make movies in an abandoned warehouse. I was making video clips at 11. I owe an enormous amount to him in terms of the career I chose.
Dad worked as a civil engineer. He was also a colonel in the British Army. When Mum’s fashion business [Elvie Hill] took off, he stepped in to help. He found her the best real estate in Collins Street and then Toorak Village.
My first kiss was with Martin Savage at St Leonard’s College in Brighton. He was the son of my English teacher. My friend Leanne and I tied him to the shelter sheds with our pinafores and kissed him at lunchtime.
My first crush was David Cassidy; it began when I saw him on The Partridge Family. He was stunning and I was obsessed. He was on the cover of Tiger Beat magazine and I would hunt those magazines and put the posters up inside my wardrobe so I could kiss him goodnight. I ended up meeting him in 2003. I was completely smitten.
I was in love with two boys at Melbourne Grammar: Humphrey Bower and David Moore. They were extremely different friendships, one very physical, the other cerebral. I’m still close to Humphrey.
I worked for [record executive and promoter] Michael Gudinski for 13 years, and when I left his Mushroom Records group, he saw it as somewhat of a betrayal. I went to work for [promoter] Michael Chugg – the “dark side” apparently. Still, I was at the front line the day Kylie Minogue and her father, Ron, first came to Mushroom, and helped launch her music career.
Men like Gudinski [who died in 2021] and Chugg are titans of the Australian music industry; entertainment would have a completely different place in the international sphere if those two men had not risen to the top. I was fortunate to have had both of them as bosses.
I met my first husband, Clive, in London in 1982. He wanted to come out to Australia, and the visa rules back then were crazy. Ours was a shotgun wedding. Nothing was working between us and my career took first place. Clive and I split in 1994. We have a daughter, Olivia, who was born in 1991.
My second husband, Damien, was 10 years younger than me. I was 36 and he was 26. We had an open relationship; we were chalk and cheese.
Damien is the father of my son, Austin, who was born in 1998. Damien has bipolar disorder. We didn’t marry until Austin was two years old, and it was always on and off again because of his mental illness. We married in Thailand and split in 2002.
Singer Brian Cadd swept me off my feet in 2002. Both Michael Chugg and Billy Thorpe told me not to date musicians! The dissolution of that 18-year marriage in 2021 was due to geography and COVID-19. Brian was in Australia and I was living in Woodstock, US, during COVID – and some dark forces in his family saw our relationship demise.
I have found love again. I met my partner, Didier, in 2023, and we are very happy.
Four Weddings and an Encore (E&R Publishers) by Amanda Pelman is out now.
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Jane Rocca is a regular contributor to Sunday Life Magazine, Executive Style, The Age EG, columnist and features writer at Domain Review, Domain Living’s Personal Space page. She is a published author of four books.Connect via X or email.
