The child inside Jodi Phillis has been an open secret since her girlhood fever dreams about Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings informed the Clouds’ first hit, Hieronymus, in 1991. With co-writer Trish Young sharing vocals, they were a sonic event befitting the grunge revolution, but with more harmonic and textual intrigue than most.

She remembers the band with huge affection – they’re reforming in December for the 30th anniversary of their Penny Century album – but “it was always a battle singing all this loud, amazing, complex music. A big part of me wanted to bring it all in and just sing folk songs.”

It was more the maddening hoops of industry that forced the Clouds’ split in ’97. Phillis was brought up in showbiz, first in Hollywood where Dad was a CBS cameraman on the Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Andy Griffith variety shows, then back in Sydney where he directed legendary soapie Number 96. But nothing – not even Frank Thring donning Mum’s bathrobe after vomiting on himself on the couch – could prepare her for the ugliness of the grunge gold rush years.

“When people give you a whole bunch of money and you sign on a contract and you lose your power, then that’s really not good,” she reflects. “So I will never do that again.” The birth of daughter Ivy in 1998 – and a second, Harmony, in 2003 – sealed her independent home-recording modus operandi with albums such as In Dreams I Live and For Lovers, Artists and Dreamers.

Sonum Vitae took her childhood dreaming obsession to extremes over six trippy tracks in 2003: Conception, Incubation, Birth, Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence. The first is sung from the point of view of a cameraman falling in love with a girl with liquid brown eyes.

“They were your typical Jewish-American family living in the valley in Los Angeles,” she says of Juni and her sisters, Denise and Arlene. “From the time Mum was five or six they were performing professionally … flying around the world supporting Sammy Davis Jr. and Tommy Steele … Their songs are just beautiful. I’ll send you some links if you want.”

The Starr Sisters’ songs are beautiful: three-part harmony reveries drenched in classic late ’50s/ early ’60s reverb and innocence. Spectoresque gems with titles such as Dancing in the Moonlight and When My Sugar Walks Down the Street bear the writing and production credits of long-gone LA greats such as Al Hazan and Jack Nitzsche.

“When she got married to Dad and then had me, she just became a housewife and didn’t really sing any more,” Jodi says. “She never talked about ‘Oh, I miss singing’ or ‘I’ll sing again one day’, it was just over. It’s like she turned the switch off. That was weird. But that was the ’50s. That was what women did.”

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Not any more, obviously. Recent years have brought Phillis back into clubs with Mia Dyson, Liz Stringer and Jen Cloher and onto big stages (with the Clouds) opening for Cyndi Lauper and Blondie. She’s touring We Need to be Free with a new quartet she describes as “alt-indie-alternative-country-pop-folk-psychedelic” before settling at last on “I don’t know … dreamy and melancholy”.

As she writes on her Patreon site, “I’m in my happy place now where I dreamt of being when I was a child, working on art and music every day. This is a wild ride for sure.”

We Need To Be Free is out now on Cheersquad. Jodi Phillis plays Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom on August 18, Archies Creek Hotel on August 19, and Sydney’s Lazy Bones Lounge on August 11. The Clouds play Melbourne’s Croxton Bandroom on December 8 and 9 and Sydney’s Factory Theatre on December 13.

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