Two Paul's & Some Sweet Songs

If you notice the odd wince or grimace from Paul Kelly when he takes his acoustic guitar onto the stage at the Lyric Theatre to play a few of his songs, old and new, please excuse him. It's not actually the passion in the songs but the pain in the playing that's quietly hinting through.

"Right now I'm nursing a broken finger!" he informs me, calling in from Adelaide. "It's healing. It's the middle finger of the left hand, which is probably the most important finger on guitar. I broke it a month ago and I went to the doctor this morning and he says it's doing all the right things. He took it out of the splint and I'm just flexing it, trying to get a bit of movement back in it. Meanwhile I've been working out some Django Reinhardt-type chords on the guitar!"

If you don't know the gypsy guitarist from the legendary Hot Club in the Paris of the 20's and 30's who played with Stephane Grappelli and the fact that he played guitar with a hand that only had bits of three fingers you won't get the Django joke. But that's alright. It just means Bruce Haymes, who will be accompanying Kelly on this short acoustic tour will be working overtime filling in the holes.

Another player who will be accompanying Kelly as special guest is the Irish singer/songwriter Paul Brady, best known within folk circles as one of the members of the most influential band out of Ireland in the 70's, Planxty, who revitalised the whole scene, bringing traditional and contemporary music together and pushing it onto the world stage. Outside folk circles, he's best known for the fact that Bonnie Raitt not only covered a couple of his songs on a couple of albums but one of those songs, Nick Of Time, provided the title for the album that swept the Grammy Awards for Raitt a few years back. And how did Paul Brady come to be touring with Paul Kelly?

"A chance meeting. We were both playing a folk festival in Edmonton in Canada. One of my favourite records of all time is one he made in 1972 with Andy Irvine. We just got to talking over a couple of pints and he'd never been to Australia before, so I told him I was thinking of doing some solo shows around November and asked if he'd be interested in coming out. And he was. So it just went from , and 'his people talked to my people'.

Kelly will be performing a number of new songs he's been working on as well as some songs he hasn't played for a while, "as well as songs I always do!" One of those new songs is his first crack at a Christmas song, which he wrote for a benefit compilation Christmas album that Myer Grace Bros puts out annually, and which apparently includes a recipe for making gravy as part of the lyric. It's also included on an EP he's putting out for Christmas complete with cover art by Spencer Jones whose in the Beasts Of Bourbon when he's not doing the odd session on guitar, as he does on the EP. And Spencer has also toured with Kelly.

"I was invited to these two fairly major festivals in Canada - the Calgary Folk Festival and the Edmonton Folk Festivals - and fold festivals over there are broad in scope, everything from African music to blues. So I was asked to do them and put some in western Canada around those dates, and did that with Spencer, as a duo. And then did two weeks in America with Peter (Luscombe, drums) and Steve (Hadley, bass), who met us on the East Coast and then we just drove across America as a four-piece bar band. Ended up in LA. The live album had just come out over there, so we were promoting it."