Summer sunlight filters through a large gumtree in her family’s backyard, as Martha Brown’s dog Story cruises for pats. It’s an idyllic scene, but for Brown – aka alt-pop musician Banoffee – being back in Melbourne is complicated.
It’s the city she fled after what she describes as a mental breakdown; the place where cycles of substance and relationship abuse began.
“People [here] see me as the person I was three years ago, before I sort of went through a metamorphosis, grew the fuck up, formed a new identity, and really reshaped myself in ways that helped me survive,” says Brown, who now calls Los Angeles home.
In 2018 she played stadium shows to tens of thousands in the US, in Charli XCX’s band on Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour. Two years later, Brown is back in Australia to promote her debut album Look at Us Now Dad: an oil slick of a pop record, with rainbow synths sliding over the viscous slurry of guilt and shame many survivors wade through before reclaiming their identities.
The album embodies Brown’s refusal to let her past dominate her future. It dissects the meaning of consent, and the intergenerational trauma that reverberates through her father’s family line, as people of colour who only recently discovered their origins: her great-grandfather was Parsi-Indian, part of a dwindling group of Iranian refugees that settled in India 1400 years ago. He remained in England while her great-grandmother left for Australia with their unborn child.
The next generation, now in Australia, had its own struggles: Brown’s grandparents’ happy marriage dissolved after her grandfather returned from World War II suffering PTSD and alcoholism; her grandmother started drinking too.
Brown’s father, the album’s eponymous Dad, was removed from his parents’ care at the age of four, and placed in a children’s home. He remembers being locked for hours in a pitch black broom cupboard, until the tears for his missing family dried. His traumatic childhood led to struggles with alcohol, depression and a phobia of crying that followed him into his 70s, before he found solace training as a Buddhist monk, at a silent monastery in Thailand.
During an interlude on the album, Brown’s father recalls being woken in the middle of the night, disturbed by resurfacing memories. He found catharsis in meditation.
“He’s crying in that recording,” says Brown. “He goes on to speak about how he feels his life is like when you cut your hand, and the only way to make it better is to put it under running water and let it sting like fuck while the blood runs down the sink.
“He used that metaphor to explain using pain as a weapon for healing, which I think really sums up my record.”
Brown certainly has wounds to heal. Searching for her Parsi relatives in Mumbai, she contracted malaria which left her with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Those conditions put a strain on her early relationships, which evolved into a cycle of abusive partners.
One relationship taught her that sex was primarily a deterrent to violence. In others, men exploited her nurturing side for their own sexual gain, or promised emotional support only to leverage it as sexual currency. Brown says she has experienced assault by members of the music industry too.
“[Those relationships] ended up with me feeling like I’m just a coffin at the end,” says Brown. “Someone’s taken the body, they took the soul out of it, they took everything they could and I’m just the container left at the end waiting, and realising that I didn’t even see the whole move go on.”
Look at Us Now Dad also untangles emotional and physical consent. On the track Permission, Brown uses the memory of her sisters pulling her teeth out with a piece of string as a metaphor for the way even verbal consent can be extracted against someone’s will.
“It’s important to me that abuse is seen as something very complex, and it’s not about men being bad people,” says Brown about the track. “It’s about everyone being a survivor and trying to survive in a way that ends up often really hurting other people, hurting yourself and creating dynamics that you were trying to escape in the first place.”
Ultimately, this is a survival record. The single Count on You is about forging solidarity among fellow survivors when faced with systems that are often stacked against you – systems which do little to rehabilitate the perpetrator.
“Sometimes it’s really easy to live in that victim role,” says Brown. “But by being a person who’s suffered abuse instead of a person who’s giving it out you’re already in a good place in your life, you’re already a good person; you’ve got people who want to connect with you, who will want to reach out to you.”
Although Brown is making strides to move past her pain, it isn’t all smooth sailing. She initially wanted to speak out more specifically about the various traumas she has lived through, but over the course of three interviews became increasingly wary of the consequences – a fear that highlighted how frightening it can be for survivors to tell their story.
Counselling has helped Brown distinguish between friendships and damaging relationships – lessons that were reinforced as the #MeToo movement broadened definitions of assault, abuse and consent. She lifts weights now to fortify her physical and emotional strength and has taken up boxing, a skill she began learning hitting a heavy bag given to her by her friend and ex-partner, Melbourne alt-R&B singer Oscar Key Sung. “I don’t think anyone could imagine you broken [in LA],” he told her during a recent visit there.
In Los Angeles, where Brown has shared houses with lesbian bodybuilders, artists and mannequin hoarders, she’s found a community in the city’s queer underground that helped her explore and form a new identity. There, no one uses her birth name any more – it’s just Banoffee.
• Look at Us Now Dad is out February 21 on Remote Control Records / Dot Dash / Cascine.
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, the domestic violence helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
