BLUE SEPTEMBER NEWS

Sunday Age - Running at Walls

Last Updated: Monday 20th of September 2010 at 03:44:20 PM

Mark Holden has been a teenage heart throb, an actor, a TV personality and now a barrister. But his most important role so far is fighting for men's health, he tells John Mangan.

I WAS introduced to him here in the bowels of the Channel Ten studios in South Yana about 20 seconds ago and already Mark Holden is interviewing me. How old are you? When did you last have a check-up? Why haven't you got the results back yet? Minutes later he has been whisked onto the set of Ten's morning show, The Circle, for an interview on what has become his special topic, men's health. Especially cancer.

The former carnation wielding pop singer, LA-based songwriter and record producer, and Australian Idol judge is a spokesman for Blue September, a campaign encouraging men to monitor their health by getting regular check-ups around Father's Day each year. There's one explanation for the grilling I was getting earlier. The former TV judge and jury now asks questions for a living, having forged a new career as a barrister, unleashed on Victoria's courtrooms last November.

Under Channel Ten's bright lights, in between the jokes about putting on weight, the supposed trauma of having your prostate checked and the enthusiastic blue face painting for the TV cameras, there is an urgency in his tone that further explains the questions he was firing earlier.

Holden's advocacy for Blue September is a family thing. He got on board last year, driven by the tragedy of losing his father two decades ago, compounded by the recent loss of a best friend, both to prostate cancer.

His uncle was also struck by cancer but identified it early enough for successful treatment. Now 56, Holden has been getting cancer check-ups since he was 40.

"I decided I'm going to do everything I can to be a survivor," he says emphatically, when we sit down after his TV appearance.

"I'm going to do everything I can to be my uncle and not my father. I'm going to do everything I can to be the guy that's retired in his 70s going on beautiful trips to Ireland, like my uncle, and not the guy that's dead."

Cancer, he says, affects the whole family, not just the person who's got it. "My mum says it every time I speak to her," he says. 'About how she misses my dad, and the years they'd planned when he finally retired and they moved down to Port VVillunga in South Australia, down to the beach. This was going to be their golden time, and instead it was a time of him getting the prostate cancer and then it going into his bones. It was a very ugly end, and my mum had to go through that with him, and bury him."

And then his gravest fears about getting cancer himself were realised six months ago when he finally got a lump on his neck, which previously appeared to be benign, removed.

"I think my vigilance has saved my life for sure," he says. "If I was my father, I would've, having had two negative biopsies of the lump on my neck, gone, eh, let it roll, have another beer. "Which is what my father did, but I knew something was not right . . . because the lump didn't go away, it got bigger. And everything in me said there's something not right here. My surgeon said let's take it out and that's when they did the sliced cross-section, and they found that the lumps were the secondaries, and the thyroid was the primary."

In April Holden went under the knife for a six-hour operation on his neck. "My surgeon told me and my wife that he'd got it all. I subsequently had the radiation and they've done the scan and they haven't found any new tumours."

Holden is a gift to the campaign, says Blue September director Mike Chapman. "Not only because he's passionate about the cause, as all our ambassadors are, but because of that extra level of experience he can bring to every interview he does.

"He talks about being down, about being taken out of it for a while, being on his back, all this sort of thing. I don't see that. What I see is a guy who's running at walls. From a Blue September perspective, we're loving harnessing that energy"

Crucially, just because you've found one cancer, doesn't mean you're in the clear. Because of his family history of prostate cancer, Holden made sure he had his annual September check this month, which was filmed for the benefit of the viewers of The Circle, and for the Blue September website. "I did have the prostate check, my prostate's fine, my PSA is low, which is my blood test, so I just have to be vigilant," Holden says defiantly. "And that's the message."

Passion is the common thread in his health campaigning, his entertainment work and his legal career, says barrister William Lye, who has been mentoring Holden at the Victorian bar. "He puts great effort into everything he does, he goes all out, he's always over-prepared, I've learnt a lot from him."

Still, all those years of training counted for little when Holden had to make his first appearance in court last November. "It's a very different thing from performing," he says. "There's somebody's life, their liberty on the line. Just before I stood up I was as nervous or more nervous than I'd been in any theatrical situation. It's a big thing to stand up and advocate for somebody's rights."

The legal career began in 1971 when Holden started studying law at Adelaide University. "I wanted to go to uni and law seemed like a good idea at the time," he says. "I just liked the process of going into the library and thinking analytically and solving a problem, which is what law is, problem solving."

In tandem though, the teenager had a budding career in music bubbling along, auditioning for Channel Nine's Showcase, the 1970s equivalent of Idol. "I lined up out of the front of Channel Nine in Adelaide, just like the Idol kids, and Ernie Sigley took me on to his show as an auditionee. And then lie took me to Melbourne, I was offered a record deal with EMI and I dropped out of law three months before my finals, much to my mother and father's horror."

The excitement of a record deal with EMI led to a string of hit singles such as Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, and the household familiarity that went with being a Countdown regular, famous for his white suits and a habit of handing out carnations.

An acting career beckoned as he donned the white coat and stethoscope to play Dr Greg Mason in Nine's top-rating soap, The Young Doctors, which featured such stars as Delvene Delaneyy. Bartholomew John and Alan Dale.

He met ABBAs manager, Stig Anderson, in the lift at the Logies, having just picked up a best new talent Logie. "I said, 'Have you got any songs?', and he sent me I Want to Make You My Lady." Inconveniently, it was in Swedish, but a quick translation gave Holden another Countdown hit.

He rode the entertainment industry rollerco aster, parlaying his Australian record deal into a US record deal with the Scotti Brothers, whose acts included Leif Garrett, Survivor and "Weird Al" Jankovic, as well as, at one point, the one and only James Brown. He moved to Los Angeles in 1980, but the career stalled.

"So I found myself without a record deal in either America or Australia, going, uh, what do I do, go back to Australia with my tail between my legs having failed, or do I stay here?"

Holden's life tends not to run in straight lines. His fate, then, was determined by a chance meeting while he was watching a movie. "I started to talk to a woman next to me in the picture theatre in the dark. She was in her 60s, she was a psychologist, a Jungian psychologist. We started to have coffee every now and then."

He read every Jung book he could lay llis hands on, and started writing down his dreams, as the psychologist recommended. After a year of self-analysis a song popped into his head words, music, everything. The song was Lady Soul.

At the same time, he met some associates of R&B legends the Temptations, famous since the 1960s for such songs as My Girl and Pappa Was a Rollin' Stone. "I put the song down myself, recorded it myself, played the parts, sang the thing. They played it to Berry Gordy [founder of Motown records], who loved it, the Temptations recorded it, and it became a hit."

Holden's eyes almost mist over as he describes working with the Motown greats. "I got to watch them sing, and at one point when they were working out their parts they asked me, 'Could you just sing the melody while we work out the background parts?' "He sighs. "It was just unbelievable!"

While the song was being recorded, back home in Adelaide, the songwriter's father was dying. "I got to play it to Dad just before he died," Holden says. "Dad loved Ella Fitzgerald. At home he would play black music from his era, Ella and Satchmo, all the various people he was into. It was just a treat to be able to play it to my dad before he passed away. And it became a hit in 1986 after he died."

His career as a songwriter launched, Holden consolidated in LA, moving into producing and managing. That unfinished law degree, though, was tugging at him. He moved with his family back to Australia in the mid- 1990s, knuckling down at Monash University to complete the law studies and see what entertainment industry opportunities came up.

What came up was Vanessa Amorosi. He and Jack Strom, whom he had first met back in the days of Ernie Sigley's shows at Nine, discovered her at the age of 15 singing in a bar in Dandenong Road. Three years later she was singing to an estimated audience of 4.5 billion at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Strom, who manages artists and produces Red Faces for Hey Hey!, says he suspected Holden would return to the law, though choosing to become a barrister surprised him at first. "But given his penchant for performing, it made sense," he says. "And it leads to funny situations. He's had the experience of winning a case, and then as they left the courtroom the person who'd lost came up and asked him for his autograph!"

Holden says this year's cancer battle has tempered his ambition, but it hasn't left his diary any less crowded. He has some songs coming out next year, tracks recorded before the throat operation, which are being radically remixed by an enthusiastic Sydney rapper by the name of Syko, pronounced "psycho". He's writing a fictional account of a first-year barrister. And he's sitting on a journal he kept while he was an Australian Idol judge with a view to one day publishing it.

Meanwhile, as a lawyer he has a number of ongoing cases, and as an actor he is signed up to don the white coat and stethoscope once again to play a doctor, this time for an episode of Nine's Sea Patrol. And, of course, there's Blue September. Holden takes a break from our chat to do a radio interview on the phone with Graeme Goodings on FIVEaa in Adelaide.

"You had bowel cancer? When did that happen? How did you find out? You had chemo and the whole nine yards? How old were you, Graeme?" So many questions.