Israeli singer Ivri Lider riding high

SAMANTHA MIMERAN

IVRI Lider did not dream of becoming a singer when he was growing up. By all accounts he was very shy, and planned to stay in the background writing music and scoring movies.

But for the artist who last year was named one of 10 people with the most significant impact on the Israeli music industry by Timeout Tel Aviv — Israel’s premier entertainment magazine — it seems singing found him.

“Actually, it’s a funny story,” he told The AJN from Israel, ahead of his first tour of Australia. “I wanted to go to UCLA to study film scoring but my parents didn’t have enough money… so I stayed [in Israel and] started working. At the same time I sent some demos to record companies. They called back and said let’s make a record, so we did and the record did really well. And then I became a singer,” he adds matter-of-factly.

The 36-year-old singer/songwriter made his debut Australian tour last week with concerts in Melbourne and Sydney.

“Australia is this place you always want to go because everybody tells you it’s amazing,” he enthuses. “Because it is so far we are not coming with the whole band. We are doing a scaled-down, acoustic version, which sometimes is even nicer. Sometimes there’s a magic in that because it’s kind of intimate and close and the songs are more naked and that can be very cool.”

Lider’s tour is being hosted by the Embassy of Israel in Canberra, which organised the visit as part of its program to promote Israel. It coincides with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, where he led a discussion entitled “Queer Tel Aviv” as part of Queer Thinking.

It’s an apt festival for Lider to make his Australian debut given that, along with being voted Best Male Singer of the Year and Best Live Show at the 2005 Israeli Music Awards, he is also one of Israel’s most famous gay performers.

In fact, he is considered a gay icon, a title he is more than happy to embrace.

“At some point in my career, actually kind of early, I decided I didn’t see a reason, or rather I didn’t see a good enough reason, not to come out,” he explains.

“I think famous people have an opportunity to influence society in a way — because that is the kind of society we live in — and you have this role … where you can help other people and agendas that you believe in and I wanted to be a part of that.”

One of the agendas that Lider has been particularly vocal about is the devastating shooting at a gay youth event in Tel Aviv in August last year, and its impact on the gay community.

However, despite last year’s attack, Lider says the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) community in Israel has come a long way since he came out in a 2002 interview with Ma’ariv newspaper.

“I think it’s getting better because that is the way things work, they take time. In terms of [gay] rights it has got better,” he says.

“Tel Aviv is a very gay city and last year we had a wedding with five [gay] couples. I played at the wedding and that’s moving forward.”

Besides his prolific singing and songwriting career, and his role in pushing social agendas, Lider has also succeeded in realising his dream of scoring movies.

The past decade has seen him write the score for three Israeli hit films: Yossi & Jagger (2002); Walk on Water (2004); and The Bubble (2006), in which he also appeared as himself singing the theme song of the movie.

Lider was contacted by director Eytan Fox, who offered the musician the opportunity to write the score for the film Yossi & Jagger.

“And so we met and I became very good friends with him and with Gal [Uchovsky], his partner, and since then I have worked with them on every movie or TV series that they have done.”

In addition to movie scoring and the five platinum albums he has written in Hebrew, Lider is now working on an English album with British producer Andy Green, which he hopes to release later this year.

“One of the songs was actually chosen by Amnesty [International] — they are releasing this compilation now called Peace, comprising artists from [more than] 50 different countries — and they chose my song [Mike] as the first single. So that’s a start of something for us.”

And then there is producing. Lider’s involvement with Israeli superstar Rita — who was in Australia last year — has been quite extensive. He covered her song Bo in Yossi & Jagger — making it one of 2003’s most popular tracks on the radio. And then he produced her most recent album.

“[The record] was really successful and did really well in Israel. Now we are working on the new album so I hope it is going to be good.”

Lider was born on Kibbutz Givat Haim Ichud near Hadera. His mother is a Holocaust survivor from Poland who went to Argentina after the war, where she met his father, and they then made aliyah together.

“[My mother] used to talk to me [so] I know stories about it [the Holocaust]. You can find it in my songs here and there, it is something, of course, that influenced my life, you know, growing up.”

His mother, Dalia, is a costume designer for the Batsheva Dance Company. His brother Amiel is 14 years older and a choreographer in New York; his sister Raya, also older, works as a dresser at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre.

“We are pretty artistic,” he says. Indeed, it seems talent is in their genes, with Lider having undergone very little formal tertiary music or composition schooling.

He did study at an arts high school and with private teachers. His musical influences during those years, he says, were not the conventional kind.

“I had funny influences as a kid because I wasn’t this like ‘I want to be a singer’ kind of kid, so I think my influences weren’t necessarily singers. Brian Eno, the English musician, Keith Jarrett, because I played a lot of jazz and Gil Evans, Jean Michel Jarre because I loved electronic music … new music, anything electronic.”

He attributes his great success in Israel to those “funny influences”.

“That is what made my sound a bit different when I came on the scene here in Israel. Because my sound was a bit different to what was going on at the time.”

Looking to the past, Lider says: “I feel my greatest achievement is maintaining my level of — I want to say success, but it is not about success itself. It is about having those great fans and people who love my music make all this possible for me, to actually work and live off this thing I really like doing, which is my life and the thing I like doing best.”

He considers himself “very lucky” that for the past 10 to 12 years he has built up his career to where it is.

“The human connection to all those people through music, that is something I am really proud of.”