can tell from the lyrics that it’s a song that’s
been lived. And that song was basically me
writing from when I was a teenager. I just
pulled all these scraps from all these diff er-
ent journals and I put them together as vi-
gnettes.”
So she decided to go back there for Girl-
hood.
“I was a hospo baby,” she says, referring
to the fact that her parents were in hospi-
tality. Her father is chef Stefano Manfredi;
her mother is restaurateur Julie Manfre-
di Hughes. Dad was – and is – a voracious
consumer of music. And for a man now in
his mid-60s, he’s eclectic and curious. Al-
though he did play his daughter boomer sta-
ples such as Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, she
remembers that he was the fi rst person she
knew who owned an Eminem record and he
turned her onto PJ Harvey, Massive Attack
and the Stone Roses when she was a kid.
Her parents’ break-up seems to be a di-
viding line in her life. “I didn’t really have a
girlhood,” she says. “I had a great childhood
asasmallgirluptoabouttheageofseven
or eight, but my parents weren’t in a happy
marriage.TheninmyadolescenceIwasa
lostgirlfor10years.”
The house was sold, her mother re-mar-
ried and only-child Manfredi was not happyin the new blended family. She recounts a
heartbreaking story about sneaking into the
old family home in Queens Park, in Sydney’s
inner-east. “We’d planted gardenia bush-
es out the front,” she says. “The smell of the
gardenia still brings me back to my home
because I’d always pick them and put them
in my room. After we moved, I remember
skipping school and going on these pilgrim-
ages back home, and I would pick the gar-
denia fl owers and bring them back with me
and put all the petals in my bed and then eat
the rest of the fl ower, just so I could have my
home inside me.”
She drags on her cigarette. “I was a weird
kid. I was a weird girl.”
“Still is a weird girl,” Moffi tt adds softly.
“Still is a weird girl,” she grins.M
offitt keeps work-
ing on those wires and
leads, but he’s attentive
to Manfredi, bringing
her tea, bringing her
food, chiming in to support or supplement
somethingshesays.Thetwoofthemlaugh
conspiratorially every now and then.
Manfredi’s family split coincided with
her being bullied at International Gram-
marSchoolinYear7.“Itgotreallybad,”shesays. “It got to the point where I would
come to school, walk into the room
and this guy would say in front of the
whole class, ‘What are you even doing
here, Izzi? You’re the ugliest girl I’ve
ever seen and no one wants you here.’
“My personality was excavated. I re-
member this girl actually saying, ‘Izzi’s
got no personality.’ And it always stuck
with me, I was like, ‘Fuck, how did I
get here?’”
She changed schools, and although
she found refuge in reading, writing,
acting and music, the angst continued.
She missed six months of Year 12 due
to glandular fever. She started running
with a group she refers to as the Bronte
boys. “You’ve seen Puberty Blues, right?”
she asks. “It was exactly like that. Hier-
archical, tribal, cut-throat.”
The new song “Cherry Ripe” is central
o all this and digs into those years and
he distance she’s travelled since then.
Put you on a stage, now they know your
ame, but you used to be diff erent, baby,
ack in the day,” Manfredi sings over a
low, lush R&B feel.
“That was the fi rst song I wrote that
really informed the context of the re-
cord,” she says. “I wanted to address myself
at that point in my life, as an older fi gure,
someone that could look at that young girl
with some sense of forgiveness and accep-
tance. But also recognising that there were
so many qualities I had at that age that were
actually really special. When I grew up,
when I met Thom and Jack [at the Austra-
lian Institute Of Music in Sydney], I just
left all that behind. I said, ‘I’m never going
to look at that again.’ It was just this big
scar in my life.
“Even though that allowed me to grow
into myself as a young woman, I think in
the process of rejecting that girl I also lost
something about me which was the quali-
ty of the artist, because I really was an art-
ist when I was that age. I was extremely
open to the world and sensitive and pro-
ductive in my own way. Always writing, al-
ways reading, always drawing, always sing-
ing to myself.”
By the time she says this, I’m in the pas-
senger seat of a taxi. Bass player Champion
has arrived, as he and Moffi tt have to get
to the Lansdowne Hotel to do an interview
about their guitars and gear. I turn around
and catch a glimpse of Manfredi in the back
with one arm around Champion’s shoul-
ders, the other around Moffitt’s.
The girl who became the woman who
madeGirlhoodis smiling. The late after-
noonsunisanglinginthroughthetaxi’s
rear window and glancing off her sun-
glasses.
Ifsomeonehadtakenaphotoatthatmo-
ment, the three of them could be mistaken
fornothingbutaband.Buttheywouldalso
looklikeafamily.September, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 69KITTY CALLAGHAN; THOMAS CHAMPION
12The Preatures at work in Doldrums. (1)
Guitarist Jack Moffitt produced the
band’s new album. (2) Bassist Thomas
Champion. (3) Izzi Manfredi goes
deep on Girlhood, coming to terms
with events from her past. “Put you on
a stage, now they know your name,
but you used to be different, baby,
back in the day,” she sings on “Cherry
Ripe”. (4) Drummer Luke Davison.STUDIO DAZE
43