Catching The Sweet, Scary Feelings

By JAY COCKS

Imagine her standing at what she calls, in one of her songs, "the last station home." It would be twilight, because she makes music that catches the sweet, scary feelings, all the uncertainty and release, that can come when the sun goes down. She is the tall, windblown woman standing solitary at the end of the platform, trying to fathom the signal lights and waiting for the next express. Now that could be the Midnight Special, or it could be the Mystery Train, but, whatever comes through, Toni Childs is going for a long ride.

At 30, this molten singer-songwriter has just made her first album, Union, a diary of dashed love and stubborn hope set into layers of melody that will never let the memory loose. Her voice, bold and smoky, has the heft of Joan Armatrading's, a hint of the spiritual urgency of Van Morrison's and, all on her own, power to burn. Union, heard even for the first time, sounds eerie and immediately familiar too. Childs herself puts it perfectly in Dreamer: "You're the voice of a dream I had."

Union doesn't fit snugly into the background and doesn't much sound like the sort of fleet pop that coasts effortlessly onto the charts. The record, superbly crafted, turns each of its nine rock songs into a face-off with emotional overload. Whenever the lyrics threaten to come on too strong, the urgency of the beat, the fluency of the synthesizer layering give them perspective. The music is deft, but the feeling stays raw.

Childs' collaborator in much of the writing and production of the album was David Ricketts, who with David Baerwald created one of the seminal albums of the '80s, 1986's Boomtown. Ricketts and Childs lived together and worked together, and Union has much to do with their affair. Childs signed with A&M records and moved in with Ricketts on the same day. She moved out 16 months later, with memories enough for an album and with a professional relationship that endures. "We couldn't live together," she says now. "We both push too many buttons in each other. For music, that is good, but when it comes to personal life, we both need somebody gentler. We are not so gentle."

Perhaps that is a good thing for the rest of us. The record has the shock of sudden intimacy and of irrevocable disruption, in great part because Childs often found herself singing Ricketts-inspired songs straight across the control room to the inspiration himself. Ricketts provided bass, guitar and synthesizer support and worked closely with Childs and Producer David Tickle on the album's overall production. "David helped me understand the groove," Childs says. His presence, and his occasional prodding, also forced her to struggle hard with her own feelings. "In Let the Rain Come Down, that person I was singing about was right there with me, and the words coming out were, 'You don't love me anymore,' " she reflects. "I was facing up, right then, to what was happening." Their personal relationship had ended by the time the album was actually recorded in 1987, but, Childs says, "David and I will be an item for a long time, only it won't be sexual." Harking back to David + David's Boomtown, she laughs and adds, "I think of this as a David + Toni record."

Union took three years to get right. Childs waited out anxious months for Ricketts' continued collaboration, while he worked on Boomtown. Mostly on sheer instinct, she went from Los Angeles to Swaziland and Zambia to search out a choir and found two. The Sibane Semaswati Singers and the New Generation, who show no traces of a Paul Simon-Graceland influence, are on five of the album's tracks, lending rhythmic backbone whenever Childs' writing tends too much toward the brittle. They also summon ironic memories from Childs' past, casting a kind of sanctified shadow across a childhood spent within the often unwelcome reach of the church.

Childs' mother was, and remains, a staunch member of Assemblies of God, and her maternal grandparents were both Assemblies missionaries. Childs and her three brothers "weren't allowed to listen to pop music or rock or even go to the movies. There was a lot I missed out on." There was a lot she made up for too, as well as a lot she probably could have done without. Her mother and father moved the family every year or so, from little towns in California's San Joaquin Valley to places in Arkansas and Oklahoma no bigger than a post- office box. Dad departed when Toni was twelve, telling the kids just before he left that he was in fact their stepfather. Their real father turned out to be a man who dropped by from time to time, always introduced as a "family friend."

It is a familiar case history of rebelliousness -- hard scuffles, bad drugs, determined excess and scrapping to sing -- but Childs played it faster and tougher than most. At 20, trying to keep a band together, she got busted on a drug rap and did three months in a federal penitentiary. "It was," she says, with uncharacteristic understate ment, "a very big scare-the-hell-out-of-me situation." Fellow inmates included a "couple of Manson girls and murderers and all kinds of things. And Patty Hearst too. I liked her." On the outside again, Childs sought more conventional means of supporting the band, which split up anyway. She took off for London, worked in a friend's recording studio in exchange for living space and lessons on the equipment, even hawked her first single before heading back to Los Angeles, and new unions of all kinds.

With the album behind her, and final plans being made for a summer tour, Childs is forging a fresh perspective. She has got in touch with her family. She is thinking about a second record ("I want Indian percussion, African voices and an Indonesian influence"). If she can get an album like Union from a single relationship, the music she makes from the rest of her life should really be extraordinary.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York