Pop Music : Divinyls Face Integrity Issue at Palladium

Do clothes really make the woman? You can pick up some clues about the unfortunate change in Divinyls singer Christina Amphlett--who was once so promising a performer--from her stage apparel.

Amphlett’s schoolgirl skirt of so many years has been replaced by a racy, black little number designed to reveal as much as possible, and her once-intriguing aura of repressed danger has been superseded by a contrived sex-kittenishness that doesn’t fit her nearly as well as the dress.

Early into a perfunctory set Friday night at the Hollywood Palladium, the Divinyls rushed through their best old song, “Boys in Town,� a kind of feminist anthem that once had some fury to it. “I am just a red brassiere to all the boys in town,� she sang, in what once registered as the bitter complaint of someone feeling used but that might nearly be bragging now that she’s opted to stop being so thoughtful and just strut her stuff.

What do you suppose Amphlett thinks she is to all the boys who watch MTV? A pair of black garters?

The band, which hadn’t come on stage till 2 1/2 hours after show time, said good night after playing for a mere 50 minutes--and without yet having performed “I Touch Myself,� the recent single that was the group’s first to reach the Top 10. (That’s one way to make sure you get called back for an encore.)

When the group did get around to the hit as a generous bonus for the fans a few minutes later, Amphlett’s literal display of half-hearted, full-breasted autoeroticism was such as to make a fairly clever double-entendre song virtually single-entendre. She touches herself in this act, but she never touches the audience.

If rote and even vapid, the show was by no means a terrible one: The Divinyls still have it in them to mix catchy pop with crunchy hard rock like no one else, thanks largely to guitarist Mark McEntee, who’s wonderfully solid and no showboat, and thanks to a musical temperament that’s uniquely Australian in genre-straddling.

Yet it’s hard to enjoy the considerable pleasures the band does offer when integrity and intrigue, both of which were once present in spades, seem to be slipping out the side door hand in hand.