Bio

Amanda, born Amanda Leigh Cohen in Cape Town, South Africa, began at 11 years old singing and playing her guitar, along with her cousins, for children in orphanages around her hometown.

By the age of fifteen, having left home and school and living in the Hout Bay mountains with musician/artists friends, she was asked to join the band H.A.M.M.A.K. that soon rose to national and critical acclaim.

The South African music scene of the early seventies was a richly diverse breeding ground of multicultural cross-pollination. She was credited with bringing the songs of Neil Young to the Cape Town stage.

H.A.M.M.A.K. released a live album in South Africa in 1971 and in 1972 Amanda released a solo album on Warner Brothers England titled Medusa.

Along with original H.A.M.M.A.K. members, Keith Lentin (Producer/guitarist) and Anton Fig (Letterman Drummer), Amanda moved to New York City in 1977 and formed the band Spider.

Known as Amanda Blue at the time, Spider was a hard rock band, discovered by KISS members Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons and signed to Nikki Chin and Michael Chapman's label "Dreamland Records".

They recorded 2 albums for Dreamland, one in 1980 and one in 1981. Tina Turner who tipped her hat to Amanda's singular vocal style and performance on "Better be good to me" covered this recording off their second album.

Spider disbanded and Amanda went on to record an album with the band "Shanghai" for Terry Ellis's label, Chrysalis, in 1982.

After a series of turns on the career road, Amanda decided to retreat from the performance side of the music scene. She became primarily a studio singer/songwriter, wrote and recorded many songs with her husband at the time, Anton Fig, and devoted herself to raising her 2 children, Chay and Austin.

In 1992 she went on to record with the band "NativeLand", made up of South African exiles, Robit Hairman and Ron Kunene (Lion King), and Rupert Hine and Kevin Godley placed one of their tracks in "One World, One Voice", a video compilation celebrating Earth Day. The project included cameos from Peter Gabriel, Sting and Robbie Robertson, among others.

She also worked with Noel Redding (Jimi Hendrix) on a band project during the early 90s.

At the beginning of 1993 she met writer/visionary Sir Laurens Van Der Post through a family friend.

He in turn introduced her to writer/visionary Helen Luke who lived and worked at the Apple Farm community in Three Rivers, Michigan.

She spent the next 4 years traveling to London to counsel with Sir Laurens and to "Apple Farm" to counsel with Helen and her fellow spiritual brothers and sisters there.

These great spiritual teachers and mentors changed her life. Their gifts lovingly nurtured and restored her spirit to work in music and healing, bringing them together in a new way.

Over the next 11 years she studied and trained as an energy healer/worker. She is a qualified practitioner/teacher in both Core Energetics (John Pierrakos) and the Energetic Clearing Process (Judith Johnson).

She also recorded 3 solo CDs with Producer Godfrey Nelson.

Her latest solo CD "OneLove" (2007) was recorded with producer Keith Lentin in NYC.

Amanda and her husband, John Slicker, are both currently teaching at the Core Energetics Institute in New York City. They now spend half the year in California and plan to continue their Core work and host special events there.

Amanda believes that her music and her emotional/spiritual healing work help support a new world.

"We are spiritual beings in physical form and the suffering we bring upon ourselves and our world is created by our unconscious, disowned, wounding, patterns and belief systems.

We need to become aware of how we bring suffering into our lives through these ways and how this poisons our minds, bodies, emotions and spirit and especially our relationships, all our relationships at home and in the world.

If we're not aware of the suffering we cause in ourselves first, we cannot shift into a new way of being in the world. We cannot begin to create a world of peace.

It does not matter what culture you belong in, how old you are, how beautiful you are, how talented and smart you are, how much you weigh nor how rich you are. Your heart is truly precious. You have great value and your life has meaning. It is how you surrender to your pain and whom you believe yourself to be that will make your life what it is.

It is when we allow ourselves to admit, acknowledge and feel our own wounding, without pushing it away or blaming others, that we begin to open our hearts, release our fears, moment by moment. We will never 'get rid of our negativity', we are not made to, but if we become aware of these feelings and become compassionate with ourselves, we will become clear about who we are and be able to manifest our deepest longings and dreams in all our relationships, our work and most especially in the world".

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