Music is filled with love stories, from big ballads to remarkable relationships such as John & Yoko, Paul & Linda McCartney, Johnny Cash & June Carter, and locally Dave Graney & Clare Moore, and Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier.
But when it comes to music’s greatest love story, it’s hard to top this tale.
When night fell on her band Have A Nice Day – who released two albums on Mushroom Records in the early ’90s – Fiona Lee Maynard met guitarist James Lomas when he borrowed a Nursery Crimes CD from her brother Glenn. “It took almost a year from our first meeting for us to get together,” Maynard recalls. “A bowling night with a ‘pants down if you bowl less than 100’ rule may have helped.”
The couple relocated to the US, where they started a band called In Vivo, releasing a self-titled album produced by Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. An LA Weekly review stated, “James Lomas is brilliant and broody and a chap you’d like to call mate.”
Maynard and Lomas married and became the proud parents of a daughter, Juanita Rose. And after coming home at the end of the ’90s, they became mainstays of the Melbourne music scene in bands such as Dalicados, Fiona & Her Holy Men and Tijuana Souvenirs.
Fun fact: Maynard and Lomas even sang and played on a number-one hit – Chris Franklin’s comedy smash Bloke in 2000.
Then, in late January 2021 – as the world continued to battle COVID-19 – Lomas was confronted by his own personal battle. A rare autoimmune condition led to sudden onset kidney failure: his kidneys shut down in just ten days.
He was placed on dialysis and the deceased donor transplant waiting list. As he lay ailing at Melbourne’s Monash Hospital, Maynard was struck by the thought: her husband may never play the guitar again.
“It just freaked me out.”
So Maynard started writing songs. She entered the studio with producer Warwick Thomas. In between dialysis sessions, Lomas contributed guitar and mandolin. “It took everything for him to play on the record,” Maynard says. “He was really struggling. Most people have heard about dialysis, but they don’t realise how gruelling it is.
“I was quite concerned, so every time he could put a guitar part down, I was just so grateful.”
While Lomas was doing his dialysis – three five-hour sessions every week – Maynard wrote a song called Meaning Of Flowers. “We can be cut and still bloom,” she explains.
When the singer heard Jack Howard’s trumpet part, she burst into tears. “It just captured the essence of the longing but also the triumph when you realise that everything’s going to be okay.”
As the album took shape, Lomas’ condition was not improving, and no kidney donation was forthcoming. With things looking grim, Maynard discovered that she was, remarkably, a suitable match.
In July last year, Maynard gave her husband her left kidney. “I gave my heart to James in 1993,” she smiles. “And in 2023, I gave him my kidney.”
The transplant was a success, and Lomas has been off dialysis since the operation. “We feel very blessed,” Maynard says.
A friend of the couple, Painters & Dockers singer Paulie Stewart – who received a life-saving liver transplant in 2007 and started a band called The Transplants – remarked when he heard the backstory to this record:
“All you need is love.”
Nine months on from the kidney donation, Fiona Lee Maynard is launching the album Junction at Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom on Saturday, April 27, with James Lomas and a little help from their friends, including X’s Kim Volkman, who contributed some dobro and hurdy-gurdy to the record, The Olympic Sideburns’ Cal McAlpine on drums, and Hunters & Collectors’ Jack Howard on trumpet and flugelhorn.
Howard wrote about Maynard and Lomas in his autobiography, Small Moments Of Glory. “Fiona is a dynamo – a brilliant and sexy figure onstage, a gun bass player and an expressive singer. James is a brilliant guitarist, a fine songwriter and is one of the rudest and most foul-mouthed men that I’ve met – in an endearing way … born performers both.”
Maynard has had a wildly diverse career, from power pop to rock and cabaret. She even once covered Weezer’s debut album live, changing My Name Is Jonas to “My Name Is Lomas”. Now, she has returned to her folk-pop roots with Junction.
There’s another poignant element to the new record. Maynard road-tested the songs on her mum, Kay Nancy Maynard, who was battling dementia. Whenever she came up with a new song, she would sing it for her mum at her aged care facility.
“It was really nice to have that bond with my mum at that time, and that really informed the process of making this record,” she explains.
“Of course, it wasn’t a venue where I could rock out, so it was all acoustic guitar, which actually took me back to all of my earliest influences, which were folk musicians, folk songs, and songs of the protest era.”
It was an emotional experience for Maynard. She remembers one resident who hadn’t spoken for a long time coming up to her and saying, “Can you play a bit louder? We can’t hear you.”
“I was worried I was disturbing the other residents,” Maynard reflects. “But their reaction made me understand the real core of music. They were just loving the sound of someone singing in the room.
“The beauty of music isn’t in the perfection that you can achieve in multilayers or Auto-Tune. It’s the fact that someone writes a song, and someone listens to it. It’s very special.”
Maynard had hoped that her mother would be able to sing on the album, but she died before the recording started. As well as giving a big shout-out to the Monash Transplant Clinic and the Moorabbin Dialysis Unit, Junction is dedicated to Maynard’s mum, “who instilled in me a loving respect for the power and joy of music and a fun folk singalong”.
“The power of music is certainly something that got us through the more traumatic things that happened,” Maynard says. “Just before the transplant, things were touch and go. But even though James couldn’t play live, he could still pick up the guitar. It meant so much that he still had that outlet. And to me, it’s lovely to have captured that on this record.”
Junction concludes with a song called Then I Saw You Cry.
Fiona Lee Maynard sings:
We all get kicked and winded
In the end we’re still beginners
If you can love then you’re the winner
Some albums are more than just the music. Whatever way you look at it, this record is a triumph.
“’Cause when we’re all stripped down to nothing, if you can still love, you got something.”
Fiona Lee Maynard is launching ‘Junction’ at Brunswick Ballroom on Saturday, 27 April. You can buy tickets here.
