Dame Lynda Topp’s heart-breaking, hilarious speech at the Aotearoa Music Awards in full

Her speech was spontaneous, spirited, sad, profane and funny, with some of it directly addressing Arts and Culture minister Paul Goldsmith, who was seated down front at Auckland’s Civic Theatre.

It was a reminder of the twins’ activist beginnings, before their television stardom made them mainstream entertainers. Possibly the only other speech of the night that came close for being as memorable was that of Tami Neilson, who, accepting the Best Country Artist award earlier in the evening, talked about the Topp Twins’ personal influence on her own career and their political legacy.

Performing later before introducing Dame Lynda on stage, Neilson interwove the lyrics of the twins’ Untouchable Girls into a reworking of one of her own songs.

Then out came Dame Lynda, dressed in black and wearing sunglasses, making her first public appearance since the death of her sister, who lived with cancer for 22 years, last Saturday.

Despite the row of women behind her, Dame Lynda looked newly alone without her usual guitar-playing sibling alongside. Her speech was perhaps proof that grief can make us do funny things. Like, turn an entire awards ceremony on its head, tear a strip off a cabinet minister, do a merciless send-up of NZ Defence Forces, of which she and Jools had once been a part in their pre-performing days, while suggesting the guitar firepower of bands Alien Weaponry and Dick Move could take on any invaders.

This is what she said:

It’s going to be hard to be able to say a few words to you all. I’ve cried for a whole week, and a year before that, and another year to come. I performed with my sister for over 40 years. Being a twin is such a beautiful thing to be. Not once in that 40 years, did we ever rehearse. When we performed 40 years ago, there were hundreds of venues in this country. We played in cafes, in pubs, rural halls, woolsheds, house parties, and now we’ve lost so many of those places for young artists to perform in. We need support for artists in this country. We need a government that says the arts is more important than the defence budget

I see young artists struggling, not because they’ve got a gig on Friday night, because they’re trying to put through some sort of crazy motherfucker arts submission to get a few lousy dollars from the government which is not fair. It’s not fair I believe that our minister is here. Our arts and culture minister is here. We are not defined by a government, we are not defined by politicians, we are defined by people and our culture and our art.

I’ve got a message Paul. If you listen up for a little minute, I’d like you to take a message back to Wellington. I did a speed-read on the Budget this afternoon. There doesn’t appear to be any money for music, but in big, big letters in the top of the news, 2.1 billion for defence. What the fuck?