Some say they were the best band Australia has produced; if you were ever lucky enough to experience the Divinyls live, surely front woman Chrissy Amphlett stands out in your mind. The rock queen is well remembered for her performance antics, including making her way across the top of the mosh pit, held up only by the sweaty hands of her eager fans. She’d sing the entire time, never skipping a word while wading through the crowd to reach the security staff waiting patiently at the end of her journey.
Amphlett would then be carried back on stage, still singing and not appearing any worse for the wear, short of her messy hair and crooked dress. Amplett never seemed scared of risking life or limb (or being groped by over-enthusiastic fans) as she walked across the crowd. But she found it difficult at first to be quite that fearless in the face of a brain and spinal cord disease.
When Amphlett learned she had multiple sclerosis (MS), her first reaction was to panic. “I was very angry,” she said. “I was terrified because there's no road map. There's no predictability. You are living with uncertainty. The only certainty is uncertainty.” Amphlett also said she feared being defined by the disease.
The Divinyls singer first began experiencing symptoms of MS in the late 1980s, but she wasn’t diagnosed until around 2002. At the time, she kept her disease a secret from everyone—even her husband, American drummer Charley Drayton, who played on the Divinyls’ self-titled album. The entertainer, who can't get out of bed some days because of her symptoms, revealed to Drayton that he had “married a dud” and offered him the chance to divorce her. Amphlett says she worried that her husband would waste his life by staying with her and that she would become a burden.
Amphlett had stopped drinking over a decade prior to her diagnosis but believed that the public might be quick to link her condition with the lifestyle she had embraced in the past. In her book Pleasure and Pain: My Life, Amphlett takes readers backstage at gigs in seedy suburban beer barns and huge stadiums, and into the wings during her acclaimed two-year run playing Judy Garland in The Boy From Oz. And then she covers her greatest triumph: battling alcohol, drugs and a million dollars worth of debt to finally find peace and the love of her life in New York City. Amphlett also wrote that she was being treated with an immune balancer.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that there were plenty of people with MS who have not lived the life she’d chosen. And she’s come a long way since her initial feelings about her diagnosis. In 2007, on the eve of the Divinyls’ headlining reunion performance at Homebake Sydney, Amphlett bravely went public with her diagnosis. "It's not a life sentence and I've learned a lot," she said. "The self image thing has been a little bit difficult to deal with; in that I'm not perfect."
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