1990s US singer-songwriter Toni Childs to bring retrospective show to Albany

US singer-songwriter Toni Childs will bring her biggest hits to Albany next weekend for a retrospective show featuring the highlights of her musical career, plus some of her new music.

An Emmy Winner and three-time Grammy nominee best known for her late-1980s and ’90s hits Don’t Walk Away, Stop Your Fussin’, I’ve Got to Go Now, Zimbabwe, and Because You’re Beautiful, Childs will bring her career retrospective to the Albany Entertainment Centre on October 16 as part of a regional Australian tour.

In an interview with the Advertiser this week, Childs said the concert would be a “night filled with memories”.

“The evening’s a full main course, but we’re going to start with dessert first,” she said.

“So all the fan favourites happen at the beginning, and then we have an intermission for 20 minutes, and then we’re back in with the new music that’s rolling out this decade.”

The musician, who became an Australian citizen earlier this year, has been living between Byron Bay in NSW and Katherine in the NT since 2012.

In 1997, Childs was diagnosed with Graves’ disease which forced her to take 10 years away from the music industry while she recovered.

During that time, she moved from Hawaii to Australia and turned her focus to her passion for caring for nature.

“It gave me an opportunity to look at the world and what I wanted to do,” she said.

“To add, to inspire, really, and just realising that’s really where I’m best served — inspiring and shining light on some areas.”

Childs said over the next decade she planned to release two new albums and create three touring shows with a connection to her environmental causes.

First she will release her album, It’s All a Beautiful Noise, which takes inspiration from her “love of the bee”.

Then she will tour the album as a concert, bringing 3-D animations and a series of activities to each town it visits.

Childs is also working on a project called Reef 360, in which she is performing “underwater concerts for whales and dolphins” in locations off the coast of Australia.

The concerts will be filmed in 360 degrees for a 45-minute film shown in a custom-built cinema dome that will tour regional Australia over a five-year period.

The Reef 360 project will include an educational component linking local schools with marine biologists.

Another album, Citizens of the Planet, has been completed, but Childs said it would not be released until the end of the decade, when she plans to pair it with another concert tour featuring 3-D animations.

Childs said her musical and touring plans for the next 10 years aimed to “celebrate” the natural world.

“It’s all to celebrate our life on planet Earth and the preciousness of the different areas on the planet,” she said. “And it’s playful, and it’s fun, and we need to play with each other.

“Everything I do is about being super playful, loving each other up, and kind of rolling up our sleeves and doing some things that are going to really leave a beautiful future for the people who come after us.”

Songs from the two upcoming albums will be performed in the second half of Childs’ show in Albany next Sunday, before the first two singles from It’s All a Beautiful Noise are released next year.

Tickets are available from: bit.ly/3EfTSyC.