Tina Arena's knight's tale

Tina Arena is officially a knight in France.

Arena was awarded France’s Knighthood of the Order of National Meritin 2009 for her contributions to French culture, the first Australian to receive the honour. “It was certainly lovely to be given that recognition, but I’m certainly not walking around with armour or a sword. These things are not executed in the way that everybody fantasises about!”

While Arena’s adopted country of France has taken her under its wing with ardour, her home country is sometimes more judgemental. When you’ve been as famous for as long as Tina Arena has, there are bound to be preconceptions about you.

Arena began her career as an eight-year-old on Young Talent Time, leaving after seven years at the age of 16, and releasing her debut album, Strong As Steel in 1987. So she understands the vicissitudes and pressures of the industry, particularly for young people. Speaking from Paris, Arena considers the sense of claustrophobia and over-scrutiny that she dealt with as a performer in the public eye in Australia.

“The general public have almost been conditioned to think that people in the entertainment field lead life completely differently to everybody else. It never ceases to fascinate me actually. But the pressure is immense, and I guess you do get to a point where you feel claustrophobic. But it’s not only that. It’s also the feeling of wanting to not be perpetually pigeonholed, something that is almost inescapable in music today.”

That pigeonholing, she says, has been a constant frustration to her over the almost four decades she has worked in the industry. “I think that it’s just a mechanism they’ve put in place that actually makes their jobs a little easier, as opposed to the artist. I think that categorisation is difficult because art evolves instinctively with time.”

It’s a remarkable feat for a woman in her 40s to still be a pop star. Few manage it, which means Arena’s age (she is 46) is something that is constantly mentioned, and not always in a positive light.

“I’ve always struggled with the fact that it’s such an ageist industry,” she says. “You’re supposed to be, again, conforming, pigeonholing, facilitating their jobs. For some reason a woman doesn’t seem to be as interesting in her 40s whereas I believe the absolute opposite, which is a shame that they’re not able to scrape through the layers. But it just shows you that they’re not about finding out what a person is like, they’re just interested in the externals, which is, you’re 40 therefore you’re no longer interesting. Which is a real shame because people, and women I find particularly, and men, just get more interesting with time. ”

When Arena sat down to write her latest record RESET, her first original, English-speaking record in twelve years, she found her songwriting had changed significantly. She now had more to say. “Life brings those changes instinctively. And what was really nice about the whole process was that at this point in my life I didn’t feel like I had to be guarded about much.”