Kelly’s Heroes

Rip It Up, Issue 133, 1 August 1988, Page 16

Kelly’s Heroes

Profiles in Courage

by

Chris Bourke

Paul Kelly’s Gossip didn’t make the front pages, but people are still talking about it. The double album by Australia’s most eloquent songwriter was full of sagas and confessions, and struck a chord with everyone who heard it. In turn they passed the word on down the line.

In March last year Paul Kelly toured New Zealand with his band the Coloured Girls. Over his three nights in Auckland the Gluepot crowds got bigger and bigger as word spread about these assured players and their unassuming, earnest frontman with his songbook of gems. While in town Kelly delved into New Zealand writing, emerging from ' second-hand bookshops with works by Baxter, Frame, Duggan, Gee, Fairburn, Sargeson, Morrieson, Hulme.

..But the literate songwriter proved a reticent interviewee, .. his - answers rife with pauses and almost.never complete. He didn’t find stage patter or interviews easy, he said: “I don’t have ... my convictions are ... I sort of doubt things too much ... most of my songs are ambiguous anyway. I always wished I had the ability to talk. To bring an audience into a song more, and give them the key to it. I’m a bit better than I was a year ago!”

He opened up when the tape clicked off and the conversation turned to topics other than himself. He articulated his enthusiasm for the intensity of Robert Johnson, the writing skills of Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, the passion of George Jones’s singing. He’d watched Jones record a TV show in Nashville, and sent a tape of his songs to the country legend. Eighteen months later, Kelly is back here for another tour, and in that time the word has spread further afield. He’s been back to the States twice, and- done a lengthy tour there. 30,000 Americans bought Gossip, and Under the Sun, its more focused followup, has just been released there. He returned

to Nashville for another pilgrimage, but hasn’t heard back from George Jones.

Big Country me songwriter with the vivid portrayals of Australia hasn’t been disappointed by the big country that produced most of his idols: “America is a country, that doesn’t let you down, it’s larger than life. I think it’s got something to do with the fact that we’re so familiar with it. It’s not like you’re going somewhere totally' new. Every place you pass through reminds you of a song.” Nashville reminded Kelly of his hometown, Adelaide. “You have an image of Nashville as being just a country and western town. But there's much more going on than that.” However it lived up to its reputation as a music Mecca, every bar and restaurant featuring aspiring songwriters. The Coloured Girls were impressed by Desert Rose (with exFlying Burrito members) and Delbert McClinton, and they supported Gregg Allman — “most of the audience had beards.” They’ll probably record their next album 200 miles southwest in Memphis, where their record company A&M have a studio. The intended producer Scott Lipp is currently working there with REM.

You would have heard the song 'Memphis in the Meantime’ by your A&M stablemate John Hiatt ...

"Yeah, I’m. not that crazy about him," replies Kelly. “People rave about him a lot.” Current listening? Ahh ... the Latin salsa king Willie Colon. Reading? American writers Saul Bellow, Tom Wolfe, Raymond Carver and Ethan Canin. , ' . “You don’t read to confirm your own ex-

perience, but to learn about someone else’s. My experience over there isn’t from an American perspective at all. That’s one of the reasons I want.to record over there, to be stuck in one place for more than a few days." . Hello, Possums

Current hype says there’s a passion for things Oz in the US, from INXS and crocodile jockstrap Paul Hogan to Olivia Newton John’s koala bear shop ... “They’ve been talking about America’s love affair with Australia for the last 10 years. I think it’s had its day now. There is a fascination, and there have been waves of it in the past. Before, there was Little River Band, then Air Supply, then Men at Work. But it all focused on one band. Now there’s more of a general awareness that there really is something going on down here, not just ‘Here’s this wild and wacky band from Australia’.’’

Since March, Kelly’s been laying low in Sydney, catching up with his reading and

writing songs: “I’ve written one called ‘Cities of Texas,’ which is based on the impressions of Texas from a bus window. I’ve also been writing a few songs for women that I’ve been singing on stage. Songs from a woman’s point of view: ‘Hidden Things,' and “one called ‘What Makes a Sweet Guy Turn' So Mean’.” This shift came about when New Zealander Jenny Morris.asked Kelly for a song. “She intends to record a song of mine at the end of the year, with one of the Farriss brothers [INXS] producing. It’s called ‘Beggar on the Street of Love’.” I ’ ■ Strine

In America, Under the Sun comes with a glossary to explain such Strine colloquialisms as the Barcoo (Western Queensland river), the Buttery (where alcoholics dry out) and station (“can mean a railway station or a ranch”). In the most unaffected way, Kelly’s songs are as quintessentially Australian as the writing of Eric Bogle or Banjo Paterson.

► The recent single '4O Miles to Saturday Night’ is a case, in point. An acoustic guitar driven lads’ celebration, of the weekend, it recalls the seminal Australian movie of the 70s, Sunday Too Far Away, about a shearing . gang west of Barcoo: "My singlet fresh and my sideburns shaved ...I open my first beer since yesterday ... and we kiss goodbye to two weeks’ pay." Is the rural pioneer still a popular Austra- . lian image? .“I think it’s always been a myth,” says Kelly. “Australia is one of the most urbanised societies in the world. Eighty-five percent of . the people live in five major cities on the coast. They’ve never seen the outback. “But there are a lot of people who at one time or another spend some time working in . the country. In the cities people don’t drive 40 miles. But if you live in the city or not, you know what it’s about — the end of the week, . and how good it feels. Everyone knows that. “So it seems to go down alright. It’s a bit of a rousing song, so it works. The source of that song was from a painting that I saw in '■ America, in the Santa Fe Museum. It was a painting of three men on horseback in the early 20th Century. One of them is playing this violin, there on this ridge. The painting was called 10 Miles to Saturday Night. So I just added 30 miles and put them in a pickup truck.”

Growing Pains Kelly enthuses about The Year My Voice Broke, the Australian film screened here at the festivals last month (with a young hero who’s the dead spit of Nick Cave at 14). “That film’s as much about growing up as it is about living in the country. You can understand all that without having a country experience. I wasn't brought up. in the country. I was brought up in what I thought was a big city, Adelaide.”

Once described by Kelly as a city “famous for its churches, parks, and bizarre murders — and for Cooper’s Ale, one of the world's finest beers,” Adelaide is also the title of one of Kelly's finest songs. From the opening lines "The wisteria on the back verandah was still blooming" the. listener is instantly taken to the mythical Australian childhood of barefeet, backyard cricket, and Bradman and Kingsford-Smith for heroes. “Oh, yeah,” says Kelly. “With five boys and three girls, we played a lot of backyard football.” But as often happens in his songs, suddenly the cosy images turn dark: "Dad’s hands used to shake, but I never knew he was dying /1 was

13, I never dreamed he could fall.” “That's probably the Irish combined with the Robert Johnson,” he laughs. .. ' Such graphic writing is easily interpreted as autobiographical. Springsteen once commented'about songwriting, “a story is only any good if it’s your own story.” Do you go along with that? “Not necessarily. I don’t think he’s saying you can only write autobiography.-You can only write something if you can enter into an experience. If you can imagine how it is clearly enough or strongly enough, you can make up a story. You just have to understand the emotion of it. Some songs are obviously not autobiographical.” • ■ Do you ever have people saying, ‘Hey you wrote a song about me?’"... More people trying to guess.” - , '

A song like ‘I Don’t Remember a Thing’ [in which the hungover narrator wakes up to the police telling him he’s committed a murder] — maybe that’s from a newspaper story? “That’s not even out of the paper, that one,” says Kelly. “I don’t know where it’s from.” (In last year's interview he said, “What happens in dreams is just as good as experiencing something. If you kill someone in a dream, you know what it’s like to have killed someone. Most people have done that.”)

Protect the Innocent Have you ever thought a song was getting too personal, so you’ve changed things around to blur the details? “Yeah, I shift things round a bit. The very fact of writing a song changes things. You change things so they don’t implicate, ah, innocent parties. But that’s more with songs I wrote in the past, which were more directly related to my own experience. That’s not so much the case now.”

Last year, Kelly talked about Dylan, who has often written behind masks or characters. “I don’t use much symbolic or allegorical imagery. Probably that’s why the songs seem autobiographical.” Shifting to talk about Dylan’s playing with metre, his “mangling of language,” Kelly became animated, describing how the “wisteria” line has to be sung stressing the first syllable, w/s-teria, to work. “It didn’t feel right at first. Dylan does things like that. Rhyming ‘traffic’ with 'half-sick' is one of the greatest achievements of the English language! ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie,’ isn’t it?” He sings it to explain. Like Dylan, Kelly uses a notebook to record ideas when they happen. “I write things that I hear that strike me. If you’re waiting around for inspiration ... for me, anyway, it

doesn’t work like that.” In his teens, Kelly aspired to be a short story writer. Since his early days of songwriting, for bands such as the Dots, he says his lyrics have improved. “I think I’ve got better at putting more information into a song but still keeping it clear. I want to have it clear on one level,, and simple. I don’t like writing obscure songs. But I try to write them so they’re not all consumed in one listen.”

Conversation He’s been reading the books he bought here last year; the conversation livens up. “I’m taking a couple away [on the July Australian tour] so they’ll be fresh in my mind when I come back to New Zealand. I liked the James Baxter. Last year, had I read Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame? I liked it better than To the Is-land, the pace of that was a little pedestrian. Faces is an account — I don’t know how autobiographical — of a woman and her time in and out of a mental institution. It’s a very good book. I thought The Bone People was fantastic. It took a while to get into the rhythm of that, but it was a real heartbreaker. I sent it to my sister, who loved it. But that book’s done the rounds a bit.”

Apart from his songwriting, Kelly has also written some newspaper features. “I wrote three articles on football last year for the Melbourne Herald. My team is Victoria, Melbourne. I wrote a story about a player called Robert Flower. It wasn’t a profile, it just described about three.seconds of action watching him on a Saturday. I also wrote one about barracking; what it means to barrack for a team, how you don’t have any choice, it’s how you’re brought up. And there was an article about following the finals of Victoria while touring America — how the news filtered through.” Real news isn’t broadcast, it filters through by word of mouth. A bit like the best music — you won’t often find it on the radio, and Paul Kelly hasn’t been overwhelmed with airplay. “Radio’s gone all conservative in Australia,” he says. “It always: has been, but now it’s even more so. They’re shifting to old hits, classic hits.”

Aah, another American influence coming through: the Reagan era’s head-in-sand, re-member-the-good-old-days, ignore-the-present philosophy. “Yeah,” says the songwriter. “Then they won’t have any hits in 20 years time, because they won’t have made any!” ©