Dame Jools Topp, the country singer, yodeller and comedian who made up one half of the Topp Twins, has died at her home aged 68 after living with breast cancer for 22 years. Her twin sister Dame Lynda Topp, brother Bruce and a small group of close friends were with her, alongside what the family described as all of her fur-babies.
The Topp family confirmed the death on Sunday, with Lynda releasing a written statement that was carried by Radio New Zealand and 1News. “It is with deep sorrow and unimaginable grief we announce the passing of my beloved twin sister Jools,” Lynda wrote. “She lived bravely with breast cancer for 22 years. Now she is finally free to ride on Pegasus, her winged horse, and round up sheep again with our dad Peter and all her precious dogs.” Bruce Topp added that his sister had shared “all the joy and love and special times that a brother needs”, and said he would hold her in his heart forever.
Jools and Lynda Topp were born in Huntly in May 1958 and grew up on a Waikato dairy farm, where they learned to ride, work sheep and sing in harmony before they were teenagers. They began performing together as children, and by the early 1980s they were a fixture on Auckland’s Queen Street, busking on Friday nights to crowds that often spilled across the footpath. In 1989 they were arrested for the act after a council bylaw dispute, an incident that only sharpened their reputation as performers who would not be told to be quiet.
That reputation was built as much on activism as on yodelling. The twins were openly lesbian from the 1970s, at a time when that took real courage in small-town New Zealand, and they used their stage to campaign for homosexual law reform, for a nuclear-free Pacific, for MΔori land rights at Bastion Point and against the 1981 Springbok tour. They sang at union pickets, marriage-equality rallies and farm-gate meetings with equal warmth, and audiences who disagreed with them on the politics tended to like them anyway because the songs were genuinely good and the comedy was always aimed at themselves first.
The characters they wrote became some of the most loved in New Zealand entertainment. Camp Mother and Camp Leader, the two slightly bewildered scout instructors with the moustaches and the whistles, ran through three seasons of the television series Do Not Adjust Your Twinset in the late 1990s. The Bowling Ladies, in their stiff white skirts and tight perms, sent up suburban club life with deep affection. Ken and Ken, the cross-dressed pair of typical Kiwi blokes propping up the bar, gave the twins a way to write about masculinity from the inside. Jools once explained the method by saying the pair made themselves look ridiculous so that the audience could laugh with them rather than at someone else’s expense.
Their 2009 documentary The Topp Twins, Untouchable Girls, directed by Leanne Pooley, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and became the highest-grossing New Zealand documentary of its time, taking more than 1.8 million dollars at the box office. The film took the twins back to the family farm, to the busking pitch, to the cancer ward, and finally on stage at a sold-out homecoming concert in Huntly. It is the work most New Zealanders now reach for when they want to explain to someone overseas what the Topp Twins meant at home.
Both women were made Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004 and elevated to Dames Companion in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to entertainment. They were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and given honorary doctorates by the University of Waikato in 2011. A 40-year tribute concert was staged at Auckland’s Civic Theatre in late 2022, with a long line of New Zealand artists from Don McGlashan to Anika Moa volunteering to share the bill. The twins published a joint memoir, Untouchable Girls, in 2023, having worked on it through pandemic lockdowns and chemotherapy sessions.
Jools was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 and underwent a double mastectomy, and she folded the recovery into the stage show rather than retiring it from view. The cancer returned and in 2022 the sisters revealed publicly that both were now living with the disease. They chose to undergo separate courses of treatment so that if one caught Covid-19 the other would not lose her support network at the same time, a decision that said a lot about how carefully they had always looked out for each other.
Tributes began arriving within hours of the family statement. The twins’ long-time manager Arani Cuthbert, who has worked with them for 34 years, said in a tribute reported by 1News that “a mighty totara of the NZ arts world has fallen today”. Messages from politicians of every party, from country musicians, drag performers, farmers and former protest organisers all landed in the same place, which was that the country had lost one of the very few entertainers who had genuinely belonged to all of it.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced. Lynda has asked that those who want to mark her sister’s death do so by playing a Topp Twins song loudly, by checking on a friend with cancer, or by going outside and looking after an animal.
Did the Topp Twins shape your idea of New Zealand humour, or did you see Jools and Lynda live on stage somewhere along the way? Share your memories in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
Leave a Reply