Toni Childs Takes Stock As She Prepares To Re-Launch Her Career In Australia. By Tony Hillier
Twenty years after her debut album hit pay dirt Downunder, Toni Childs is preparing herself for a second coming. The spiritually-charged singer-songwriter has slipped under the radar somewhat since the double platinum days of Union, which shifted more than 500,000 copies here. But she’s returning to our shores this month to launch her first new album since 1994, intent on resurrecting her career following an illness dictated hiatus.
Childs has chosen to release and tour her comeback album, the aptly-titled Keep The Faith, in Australia first, months before the US and Europe. While driving around LA, she attempted to explain the rationale behind that decision, talked about her trials and tribulations of the past decade, how she divined a new path, and the resumption of her life as a recording and touring artist.
The Californian’s world came crashing down literally before her eyes shortly after her last Australian tour in 1997. “My eye was already starting to poke out of my head. Really weird things were happening. My feet and my hair were cracking,” she recounts. Childs didn’t know it at the time but she was afflicted by an acute thyroid disorder. “I said to my aunt, ‘I think I need to go to an eye doctor’. She said: ‘I think you have Graves’ Disease.” After the diagnosis was officially confirmed she discovered that George W. Bush senior and his wife had it too. “I wasn’t too thrilled to find out about that association,” she laughs.
“I was told by three doctors that I needed to stop my life. At that time, I had been living at high stress altitude for over a year. I was put on heart inhibitors and told I would have to be on thyroid medication for the rest of my life.”
So Toni Childs stopped her life in Los Angeles as she knew it and moved to the salubrious Hawaiian island of Kauai, where she spent the next half-dozen years battling, and recovering from, the rare stress disorder.
You can read the full story in September Rhythms.
Keep The Faith is available through MGM. Toni Childs plays the Great Southern Blues & Rockabilly Festival, full tour dates in the Gig Guide.