Sex, Death, Family and Friends

The Drum Media - July 1994, #197
by Ross Clelland

Typical Saturday morning: Slightly hung over, Easts flogged the night before, Ren & Stimpy enthusiastically regurgitating out of the television ... oh, and Paul Kelly's just rung.

Mid-1994 finds (hackneyed phrase warning) "Australia's finest songwriter" inhabiting his old hometown of Adelaide while partner Kaarin Fairfax plays in a play there. And despite the early hour (and somewhat fragile nature of the questioner), he can juggle intelligently plugging the new album Wanted Man, the attendent tour of the same, muse on being an Australian abroad, the Adelaide Crows and keeping the kids from screaming the loungeroom to bits. A man of varied talents, obviously.

And me, still a bit furry-brained, manages to get the opening question wrong-ish, and the fully-operational model at the other end of the phone (rightly) jumps on it: "I sound like a contented man on the album? You really think so?" And he lists a couple of songs (notably, Everybody Wants To Touch Me) which are as bitter and snarling as anything ever written. And I'm awake and rapidly back-pedal and attempt to redeem myself: "Okay, how about more relaxed, then?", I offer, a little timidly. "Oh, yeah, that's fair - certainly musically a bit looser, but even that's more from the people I played with."

Wanted Man was recorded in two parts, a bunch of stuff done locally produced by Not Drowning Waving/My Friend The Chocolate Cake's David Bridie, and the seemingly somewhat more unlikely collaboration 'tween Kelly and Randy Jacobs, American guitar player and longtime regular member of Was (Not Was). The American is enthused he's returning to play as part of Kelly's touring band. "Yeah, it may look a bit odd at first, I suppose," Kelly conditionally agrees. "But it's as simple as being introduced when I was in Los Angeles - Randy was looking for someone to play with as Was (Not Was) didn't seem to be doing much at the time. He liked some of the songs and I liked the way he played them, and it went from there."

Kelly spent nine months last year living in the US, and I asked if that changed his perspective of Australia watching from the outside rather than in it? "No, that happened more the first time I went away, about six, seven years ago. What you do notice is you just get no news from here - there is simply no mention of Australia. It just doesn't make the papers."

So how does a bloke get the footy scores, then?
"Ah, this is where you say thank god for the fax machine, with that realisation that your country might not be the most important in the world you then find ways around it, and this time, with the fax, I was actually in Vancouver catching a ferry when I got the fax saying Labor had won the election - and that came as much as a surprise to me as it was here, and here I am getting on a ferry in Canada - busting to tell somebody, but realistically no-one there would know ... or care."

There's another name in the credits of Wanted Man that a lot of people may not expect: Nicholas Cave, Bad Seed. God's Hotel is a Cave song, refined by PK: "That just came out of a longer conversation with him - it was an interview The Age asked me to do with him - I rang him in Brazil and we ended up talking for over an hour. I'd seen the song in his book of lyrics, and asked him about it: 'it's just an old blues, do what you like with it' he said. So I took him at his word: his words and the chords from Bittersweet, just to complete the theft.

"He came into the studio in Melbourne when I was producing Vika and Linda's album and I played my version to him. He listened, nodded, and when it finished he thought for a moment, looked me up and down and said 'so, gunna make it a single, then?'"

God's Hotel also features a phone number in the lyrics, but for Sydney listeners there ain't no good time girl named Rosie at the other end, you actually get the spare parts department of a well-known car dealer. Kelly is amused by this: "Ha! A spares department? Perfect. Hope they don't sue or anything. We changed it once, y'know, in the original, Nick actually had his own phone number on it, I convinced him that wasn't a good idea."

Okay, sex, then. There seems to be a lot of coupling going on through this record, Paul, there's a pile of lust here: "A pile of lust? That is a very ugly image, Ross ... (thanks, I try), but I thought it was always like that. That's what some people reckon all my songs are about: Sex, death, family and friends. Maybe there's just more of the sex on this one." I can hear him drifting in attention just a bit at this point, the thoughtful pauses a little longer. Kids are getting a little raucous in the background. "Can you just hang on for a second?" Sure, I'm not paying. Steps through the house, "All right, what's happening?" Australia's leading songwriter is getting his kids to behave. Peace restored, he returns to the phone. "You know that lust you were talking about? That's dealing with the consequences right there," he chuckles.

Does the family get a bit unsettled with all the moving about?
"It's become pretty standard practice now, so they're used to it. The next year or two, we'll certainly still be travelling around a bit. The record will come out in America in a month or two, and Europe a bit after that, so you're obliged to go touring again probably. America will be a bit more organised, we had a deal with an independent label over there, but they were like three guys and a truck - we'll go for people who actually have an office in a building this time I think."

And the Canadians and Americans give you any kind of special treatment (hey, there's a good name for a song) 'cause you're Australian?
"The Canadians sometimes make a bit more of it - the English colonial connection and all that. It's pretty obvious I'm Australian when I play. But, I really only seemed to have played around the north-east of America recently - New York, Boston. A few shows in Los Angeles, but not much in what you'd probably call the heartland, where they might see the novelty in it. When we did the big college tour through the middle of America some years back you end up with the felling America is three countries: New York is one, Los Angeles is another country altogether, and the rest might be America. Oh, wait, Texas would want to count themselves as another country as well."

Touring will also include this country as will, with a full regional tour of the play Funerals And Circuses through early 1995. Kelly as both scorer and actor, wants to part of that as well. "I'll do as much of that as I can - you sometimes fell like your life is planned six months in advance, but it never quite fits together properly like you intend it to."

And how will that affect you following the Adelaide Crows in the AFL?
"Actually, I prefer to follow them outside South Australia - I've never been sure about the one team town thing. I'd much rather go to a game where there are two crowds, supporting two teams - that bit of conflict, bit of drama maybe. We commiserate about the Crows' changeable form, and he expresses real sympathy when I tell him I follow Easts in the League ("a game I have learnt to like"), and I let him have the rest of his Saturday to go back and play with the kids.