Garage tape discovery brings Chrissy Amphlett's lost 1998 studio sessions to life on new EP

A set of songs recorded by Australian rock icon Chrissy Amphlett nearly three decades ago is set to reach the public after the recordings were rediscovered on a tape stored in a suburban garage. Tim Finn, the former lead singer of New Zealand's Split Enz who wrote and produced the 1998 session with Amphlett, located the songs in 2023, and they will be issued on Friday as an EP titled Some Times.

The release means fans will hear Amphlett's distinctive, husky vocal on new material for the first time since her death — more than a decade after she died in 2013 at the age of 53. For listeners who came to know her through the global success of the Divinyls, the discovery is being treated as a small piece of lost history coming to the surface.

Amphlett was the trailblazing frontwoman of the Divinyls, and her raw voice and commanding stage presence helped carry the group through one of the most successful runs in Australian pop history. The songs listed in the BBC's related coverage illustrate the span of the band's career: Boys in Town from 1981, Pleasure and Pain from 1985, and I Touch Myself, which reached number one in 1990 and became an international anthem decades after its release.

By 1998, however, the singer was searching for a different sound. The Divinyls had become synonymous with a fixed commercial formula, and Amphlett had split from guitarist Mark McEntee after what the Australian Story documentary describes as a turbulent relationship. At the same time, she was growing closer to drummer Charley Drayton, whom she would later marry.

That transitional period is the context in which the lost material was created. Finn, who had long admired Amphlett's work, contacted her with a view to writing together. In a social media post about the session, he explained that the pair had not met before but immediately shared a bond and camaraderie as former lead singers of two prominent bands — a connection rooted in shared experience of fronting groups through their most successful and most difficult years.

The two spent several days writing a trio of songs in Sydney before heading into the studio, with Drayton playing drums. Finn recalled the atmosphere of those sessions with evident affection, describing Amphlett as intensely determined and single-minded about getting the performances right. He said he felt he was in the presence of enormous talent and charisma — a comment that suggests the unfinished songs were intended as a significant departure rather than a quick side project.

The recordings were made, but the project was never completed to either musician's satisfaction. Finn took the tapes home intending to work on them further, yet the songs were never fully realised and slipped out of view for more than two decades. For much of that time the material was assumed to be gone permanently, with the participants moving on to other projects and, in Amphlett's case, to a life cut short by cancer.

The rediscovery came through Drayton, who got in touch with Finn in 2023 about the 1998 recordings. The result was the discovery of a two-inch tape in Finn's garage, which he said had survived in remarkably good condition. That detail matters practically as well as symbolically: tape of that vintage can suffer from deterioration, and a surviving, playable copy means the songs can be presented as they were originally performed rather than heavily reconstructed.

Finn has described the songs as deeply important to him, to Drayton and to those who were close to Amphlett, adding that he had believed the recordings were lost to the universe. His decision to share them publicly now, rather than keep them as a private memento, underlines how significant the material is considered by those who made it.

The story has been documented in Australian Story, a programme produced by Australia's national broadcaster, ABC, in which Finn recounted the 1998 studio sessions in detail. That account provides the detail missing from a simple rediscovery story: the personal circumstances of the singer at the time, the writing process, and the sense among those present that something unusual and important was taking place in the room.

Some Times arrives at a moment when interest in Amphlett's catalogue continues to broaden well beyond the hit singles. Archival finds of this kind tend to reshape how an artist is remembered, shifting attention away from polished landmark records and towards the more vulnerable, transitional work made in between career phases. In this case, the songs were written by a singer who had just ended a long and turbulent personal and professional partnership and who was beginning a new one, and they were made alongside two men who knew exactly what her voice could do.

Whether the finished EP sounds like a lost classic or a revealing curio remains for listeners to judge. What is certain is that for a brief period in 1998, in a Sydney studio, Amphlett, Finn and Drayton put together something they believed was worth getting right — and thanks to a tape that sat forgotten in a garage, that attempt is finally due to be heard.