Tina Arena slams COVID-19 restrictions and former premier Mark McGowan as ‘a piece of work’

When Tina Arena hits the Perth Concert Hall on Sunday to perform her lockdown album her heart will be full of both love and fury. The Australian pop stalwart has revealed to The West how she fell for her Swedish music producer Mattias Lindblom during the making of the record and they are now engaged. One man she won’t want to see in the audience is former Premier Mark McGowan who she furiously dubs a “piece of work” after he locked in her WA fans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sharing the fallout of her first original album in eight years, the 55-year-old Chains singer said the studio romance got her through COVID woes. “Relationships (got me through that time) and also finding love later on in life,” said Arena, who has a teenage son Gabriel with her French artist ex Vincent Mancini. “I live now with and am engaged now to a gentleman who produced my record,” she said of Lindblom. Sharing their lockdown love story, Arena said: “He is a Swede and has been a mate of mine for years. We’ve been writing together for years and we always truly enjoyed writing together. He’s just one of my favourite people in the world, my partner. He’s got a big heart. He has an incredible mind. Constantly challenging himself intellectually and a wonderful keen observer of life. He is an exquisite writer and has a way of bleeding words together and conjuring stories out of real experiences that makes music a really potent thing.” Performing the songs in WA will have mixed emotions for the Hall of Famer. Ready to sing in WA once more, she is angry she was kept away. “Perth was pretty much locked away. Your former premier is a piece of work, like our former premier (Dan Andrews) is a piece of work. We can only hope that we never see them again.” Heaping heavy criticism on their border controls and lockdowns, the star fumed: “They’ll never be held accountable for the poor, poor decisions that were made. The record is really reflective of that time.” She says her new songs are full of “heavy questioning” and “experiences that came about during that time. Personal and otherwise. Not only with myself but just watching the social fibre of life break down in the way in which it did.” Despite her angst, she said the pandemic was “wonderful material for me” to sing about. “Having a teenager in the house, unable to go to school. I can’t tell you what that was like as a parent. Just on that alone. It’s an absolute crime actually. What happened was criminal.” She said she wanted to challenge claims we were “successful” in fighting against COVID-19, criticising “locking people up”. “You didn’t do well at all…It’s very arrogant to say that and massively disrespectful to pat themselves on the back. They have nothing to pat themselves on the back for. Not in my eyes anyway.” “They ruined more lives than saved lives. Ultimately the lives and ruining of it is going to be more and more seen. It’s seen all the time now. Families fall apart. People not being able to visit, or bury their loved ones. It was just, yeah…absolutely outrageous. It was a massive massive f… up and Australia was a massive social experiment for me. That’s what I truly believe. I believe that Australia was an experiment.” Arena says her new partner has boosted her confidence to sing and speak up about issues she was afraid to before. “I’m proud of my records. I listen back and go ‘s… why was I so hard on myself. What was I thinking? What did I not get? Why was I being so stupid?’ I was overzealous on commenting on myself and not kind to myself. Looking back, the beautiful thing about hindsight and life experience, good, bad and indifferent, is you do grow to appreciate what you are writing about. I understand it more now as I get older. I go ‘Jesus Christ!’ The experiences of writing are almost out of body experiences and difficult to intellectualise. You can write from your subconscious. You write from experiences and observations.” She added: “It was an incredible moment in time with all the lunacy that went on, how far I was able to reach within my emotional gravity centre to be able to get those songs and speak about things that happened to me and happened to other people as well.”