Olivia Newton-John – No Matter What You Do

She had no label, no producer she’d worked with before and no songs by anyone but herself, and she shot the video in her own paddock with a friend’s cows.

The cows in the video for No Matter What You Do belonged to a friend. They grazed on Olivia Newton-John’s land in northern New South Wales, and in 1994 they wandered into the promotional clip for the lead single from the most personal record she had ever made. Most of it was shot on her own property in a single day, and she later called it the easiest video of her career. Labels had spent years steering her toward the little black dress. Now she was filming in her own paddock, and the plainness was the statement.

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The record was Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, and it came out of the years that ended her charmed run. Her Koala Blue retail chain collapsed, her father died, and in 1992 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 1994 she said she had planned to write a book about getting through the illness, to talk other women through it, and that it came out as songs instead. She had placed the odd song of her own on earlier albums, but surrounded by writers like John Farrar, she had rarely felt confident enough to offer one. This time she wrote every track herself.

She paid for it, too. Newton-John knew exactly where she stood with the industry. She had not had a big hit in years, and a singer in that position who walked into a label asking for money would be told what to record and what to wear. “You’re hot when you’ve had a big hit,” she said, and by that measure she was cold. So she financed Gaia herself, finished it, and only then offered it to the business. Festival Records, her Australian label for years, backed it from the start. Overseas, she had no deal at all.

Strangers in a studio near Byron Bay

The people making it were as new to her as the arrangement. After two decades with Farrar, Newton-John chose to co-produce with Murray Burns, formerly of Mi-Sex, and his partner Colin Bayley, two Sydney producers she barely knew, having liked what she heard of their work with the singer Carmella. They recorded at the Music Farm in Coorabell between November 1993 and January 1994, mostly with local North Coast players, plus the jazz flutist Don Burrows on five tracks. She credited the album to Byron Bay, a name that gave listeners a region without giving away exactly where she lived. Burns said at the time that the honesty of her lyrics and the strength of her melodies took him aback.

When the album was finished, she picked No Matter What You Do to introduce it. Festival issued the single in Australia in September 1994, with the one-day video from her property. It is an uptempo song with a country lilt that recalls her earliest records, and the lyric is addressed to someone who blames her, insisting that whatever went wrong, her intentions were honest. As the opening statement of an album she had written to work through the worst years of her life, it chose resolve over self-pity.

Without a worldwide label, the record traveled one country at a time. CMC issued the single in Belgium in 1994 and in Denmark in 1995, and MRP released a French CD single in 1995. That is why, on November 29, 1995, more than a year after the Australian release, Newton-John was still singing it on Si on chantait, Julien Courbet’s music show on TF1, promoting Gaia to French viewers. The performance at the top of this page comes from that broadcast. The original 1994 video, filmed at her property, follows below.

The single never approached the size of her 1970s hits, and nothing about the project was built for that. What it shows is a singer whose career had been shaped by producers, managers and labels writing her own songs, paying for them, recording them with strangers in the country, and shooting the video in her own paddock with borrowed cows. No Matter What You Do was the first song the world heard from that Olivia Newton-John, the songwriter she had been too unsure to release for twenty years.

The original 1994 video, filmed in a single day at Newton-John’s property in northern New South Wales: