VOICE STAR’S SECRET PAIN
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SIALA Robson, 18, was moving into a Tweed women’s refuge the day The Voice Australia producers called.
She almost didn’t pick up the phone.
“There was a random number calling me, I was getting (direct messages) on Instagram saying, ‘Please answer us’ and I was literally moving my stuff in with my mother and my five siblings,” she said.
“They said ‘can you make it (to auditions) on Friday’ – I’m not goddamn rich, I can’t just get up to Brisbane from Cabarita. They said they’d just pay for a taxi.”
Weeks earlier the Gold Coast teen, who will appear in the Channel 9 reality talent show’s blind auditions tomorrow night was at rock bottom.
“I was in a pretty scary place when I put my application in,” she said.
“From a young age I was always having to physically stick up for my mum. It got to the point sometimes I’d be sleeping with a knife under my bed.
“I got lost as a teen and ran away from home. Some really bad things happened to me.
“I had issues with substance abuse and I felt the lowest I’d ever felt.”
Music proved a lifeline for Robson, who first picked up a guitar at Threeworlds Burleigh, the then-10-year-old tentatively plucking a few chords from Angus and Julia Stone’s Big Jet Plane.
“The lady gave me the guitar for half price,” Robson said.
“I started writing music – raps – when I was an adolescent and my mum was going through heaps.
“I was such an angry teen and I had no other way to let out what was in me.
“If I talked about it I’d get really worked up, so one day I picked up a guitar and wrote a song and played it to my mum and she just cried. She said, ‘I didn’t know you could do this’.
“I honestly don’t think I was alive if I didn’t have music. It allowed me to open my heart.”
Robson plans to perform an original song at her blind audition, hoping to turn the chair of judge Kelly Rowland.
If she’s successful, the gender-fluid singer-songwriter wants to use her platform to share her story and forge a better life for her family.
“I know there could be so many people in such rough situations … why would I just sit back and keep my mouth shut (about what I’ve been through)?” she said.
“I want to support my family and music is my passion.”
The Voice Australia Blind Auditions, Sunday, May 31 at 7pm on Nine.
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