Amanda Pelman remembers the moment she realised she was living the life of a sitcom character. She was in London guiding the ascent of Aussie boy band Indecent Obsession when she flicked on the telly and saw Absolutely Fabulous for the first time. “My jaw was on the ground,” she says, “like, ‘This is me. I’m that. I’m Edina’.”
Three decades later, Four Weddings and an Encore is the unfiltered memoir that Jennifer Saunders’ champagne-sodden PR parody forgot to write. Born to Melbourne fashion designer Elvie Hill and the man who invented the steering-wheel lock, Pelman’s trail from accidental Countdown dancer to Mushroom Records publicist, label boss, artist manager and high-flying stage musical and festival producer is one wild ride.
Kylie Minogue, though, is the jewel in her crown. Despite what some blokes might claim.
“Michael Gudinski certainly made a point through a lot of years that he was the one that signed her,” Pelman says from London, en route to Australia. Other Mushroom insiders, including her old housemate Molly Meldrum, “they know the truth. I saw Kylie in Vegas before she started her world tour in 2024. We both know where we sit in our history”.
As one of the winners who gets to write it, Pelman cuts a formidable figure “reflected from a Parisian window”, to quote her happy-ending subtitle. She can be scathing of partners in industry and love (she married her first husband twice; divorced her third, music legend Brian Cadd, in 2021) and remains unrepentant about PR victories that read very much like AbFab scenes.
There’s the time, for example, that she chaperoned British page-three girl turned pop star Samatha Fox to a TV interview with Mike Willesee. Fox had been in a relationship with serial conman Peter Foster and was drawn into promoting his fraudulent weight-loss products before she ended the relationship and severed all ties with him. Expecting Willesee to raise the matter, Pelman hid under the studio desk, ready to intervene.
Sure enough, when the journalist began to do his job, Pelman hissed to her protege to stand up and walk out. “Samantha confidently got up, paused like a true diva with the flick of her head, and departed. It was the best move we could have made,” Pelman writes. She means, of course, from a publicity perspective. “It was all about just getting on the front page,” she says with a shrug. She’s equally unapologetic about sending a rotten egg to one critic who expressed a lack of enthusiasm for Indecent Obsession, and remains unforgiving of the “so-called journalist” who awarded Kylie that perennial “singing budgie” label.
“Convincing the media that Kylie was the real deal and not a puppet was exhausting,” she writes before hailing a Rolling Stone cover shoot that gave the fledgling starlet “some much-needed gravitas”. Pelman’s revelation that the then-editor of that hallowed journal was also her lover strikes her as immaterial.
“Will people think now that the way I got Kylie into the mainstream media was by sleeping with a journalist? I don’t think so,” she says. “I was speaking the truth. I think if we were going to ask a lot of other women or men in the music industry at the time who they might have been having relationships with, it would draw very many comparisons.”
Parts of Pelman’s book are unsettling to read, less for the stories themselves than for how lightly they’re absorbed into the logic of the industry she clearly knows so well. Moments that might be usefully interrogated in hindsight are just the daily noise of a world in which power and excess were rarely examined.
“The boys’ club was the boys’ club,” she says. “I never felt used, abused or exposed. I never thought of myself as different… I never felt that I was threatened. What weighed on me is I don’t think that people inside the independent microcosm of the record industry in the ’80s were remunerated correctly. We were not praised. I think women are now.
“I can’t really speak to what the industry is like now, because I’m not a part of it any more,” she adds. “I left to go to America in 2016 and I went into the festival space.”
After a couple of stellar decades casting and producing Australian stage spectaculars (Long Way To The Top, Rent, Fame, Tap Dogs, Countdown, Priscilla), Pelman’s US venture with the planned Woodstock 50 festival in 2019 was among her bravest and most costly – personally and otherwise.
The brand seemed beyond salvation after Woodstock ’99 literally went up in flames, allegations of greed and assault making it a symbol of rock’s toxic male culture. “The audience was made up of mostly angst-ridden Caucasian males and young girls trying to impress them all,” is Pelman’s take.
She joined with Woodstock mainstay Michael Lang, she says, “because the message needed to be renewed, reborn. The ethos of what Woodstock was in 1969 needed to be replenished.” At the eleventh hour, “we were robbed of that experience by a very greedy, bad choice in business partner. So that’s the end of the tale. It’s gone.”
At the climax of her story, that collapse, Lang’s sudden death from cancer and the bitter end of her 20-year marriage to Cadd comprise a grave threat to the word Pelman repeatedly capitalises throughout. “FABULOUS” is what a childhood friend predicted her life would be, five husbands and all, when they were 10 years old.
And so, fabulously, to a typewriter in her umpteenth dream home: a “17th-century garret overlooking Notre Dame Cathedral” in Paris, to write the book that she dedicates to her children, Olivia and Austin.
“I wrote it absolutely and utterly for my children,” she says. “And then as the story kept unfolding… I stepped back from it and went, ‘this is kind of funny’. You know, what lunatic idiot marries four times, and what lunatic idiot goes and lives in all these different places and just thinks, ‘well, it’ll be OK tomorrow’?”
Ironically, she says, “I think it’s my kids who have paid for my wanting to be fabulous, because when you make a decision about living large and living loud and going hell-for-leather wherever you’re going, there is a price… But they haven’t ended up too bad.”
Nor has Amanda Pelman. She’s so far fallen short of her friend’s prediction about five husbands, but the “encore” of her title involves a French architect and two cats. “I think true love is not in a place or a time,” she says, more Victor Hugo now than Edina Monsoon. “It’s always around the corner, and sometimes it’s when you’re not looking.”
Four Weddings and an Encore is out on February 16 through E&R Publishers, New York.
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