TALKING WORDS & MUSIC

He's playing five gigs at The Talk of London from Friday August 30 to September 3, with supports from fellow Australians Mick Hart and the Waifs.

Kelly is currently in the Flinders Ranges, north of Adelaide, on the edge of the vast central desert. It's a desolate, beautiful place, with massive, ancient ground-down mountains and bluffs and high arid plateaus. He's there to film One Night The Moon, a short film he co-wrote with Aboriginal musicians Kev Carmody and Maread Hanna.

"The story's told through music and song," Kelly elaborates. "It's the story of a child that goes missing on an outback property, and when the child goes missing she follows the moon.

"It's based on a true story; a search party is organised which includes an Aboriginal tracker, but the father doesn't let him on the property 'cos he's black. I play the father.

"The search party never finds the child and the father kills himself. Then his wife invites the tracker back on the property and he finds the bones of the child. So it's a happy little story. There's songs all through it so it's like a musical, but it doesn't have the lightness you'd expect from a musical."

The film's been in production for over two years, with Rachel Perkins directing. It's scheduled to be screened on Australia's ABC next year and will probably do some cinema runs and travel to a few festivals.

It's Kelly's first cinema acting experience, but not his first brush with the industry.

"I also scored a film earlier this year, a bluegrass style soundcheck, so it's been that kind of year, I've done a couple of unusual things. I was gonna do a record this year, a solo record, but these things kind of took over, so I won't get to do my own songs till the end of November. I won't have a record out 'till next year."

Kelly has also written an instrumental film score, for the 1994 Alkinos Tsilimidos film Everynight S Everynight, and songs for theatre and television series, notably The Seven Deadly Sins. At the 1992 Adelaide Festival, he played a petrol station attendant in the critically acclaimed Funerals and Circuses, to which he also contributed songs.

His book of song words, Lyrics, published in 1993, prompted Dr Imre Salusinszky of the Newcastle University English Department to describe Kelly as "our best songwriter and one of our finest poets".

It's characteristic of Kelly to swing from film-making and theatre to bluegrass to solo acoustic music, part of the diversification that has distinguished his career since his early days as an errant folk singer.

He arrived in Sydney as a nobody from Adelaide and recorded the landmark album Post, that established Kelly and band The Dots as a force the country would have no choice but to reckon with.

That band went through various metamorphoses to become the Coloured Girls, until Kelly decided it was time to move on again. He shed his traditional rock style and moved into dub with Professor Ratbaggy.

Meanwhile, he engaged some of Australia's greatest musicians, including Shane O'Mara and Spencer P. Jones, in another side project, an all-star band that focussed on groove and released the awesome record Words and Music.

Typically, Kelly is unassuming about his prolific output.

"I did a bluegrass album last year with (Melbourne band) Uncle Bill called Smoke, and the director of this last film really liked that and when he made his film he said 'can you write this in that vein?'

"So I did it with Gerry Hale from Uncle Bill. He's a multi-instrumentalist so he played guitar, banjo, fiddle and mandolin - I just pressed the record button in his backyard."

I witnessed Professor Ratbaggy, his esoteric dub outfit, play their first gig at the Newtown RSL earlier this year. It was a polished, startlingly danceable fusion of dub's pounding groove, inflected with hip-hop and reggae atmospherics.

"That first show we were trying to figure out how to play the record," Kelly laughs. "We sort of evolved out of a live band jamming, but then when we made a record we had to take it one step further and we had to work out how to play the songs.

"I've always liked a wide range of music. It's just a matter of getting the opportunity, evolving amongst people that you play with.

"I've always tended to write with a guitar and take the songs to the band and then they arrange it, but I like starting from the other end a lot more. Get together with a bass player and a drummer and write songs from what they come up with.

"I guess that's what any writer does, try to find new ways to write; you get sick of yourself. In Professor Ratbaggy every song was written by the group rather than me taking them in, which is similar to the way I work anyway, fairly collaboratively. I'm not the kind of writer who says 'this is how the drums go or the bass goes'.

"I write fairly open, so if one of the guys in the band can come up with something sometimes it just ends up being a jam, other times it turns into a song.

"Professor Ratbaggy's taking some of the things on Words and Music a bit further. There are songs that are less traditional song structures, two chord things that don't change and there's not a bridge. I call them the circle songs. I love those kinds of songs where there's something unchanging, you sit on it, work on the groove. Careless is one, From Little Things, Big Things Grow is one."

The Professor Ratbaggy style is not a new thing for Kelly. It's refers back to feelings he toyed with in his early recordings and reflects the music he's been listening to of late.

"There was a period with my very first record which was a pretty horrible record, or my second one in the early '80s that had a lot more reggae-type influence, but when I formed the Coloured Girls and the Messengers, that was a band that had a certain style and those kind of grooves didn't suit that band, and I tended to write for that band. But now those styles have come back again."

Melbourne is exploding with atmospheric dub and dance fusion bands these days, including the rampant experimental lunatics, the Crazy Baldheads, who played with Ratbaggy last year.

Meanwhile he's into "people who are mixing it up all over the place. Full Fathom Five, Sonic Animation and the Avalanches, Wicked Beat Sound System. There's a bloke called Kutcha Edwards in Sydney, I've been involved with him, working towards his first record."

The political sensibility evident in One Night the Moon is not a new theme either. The song Little Kings, from Words and Music, demonstrates dissatisfaction with the status quo, in this case cronyism in the Victorian Kennett Government.

"I never really see myself as a political writer," Kelly demurs, "but in the sense that everything you do is political - I'll own up to that. The songs for this movie have a political element. It's a political story, knowledge offered and knowledge rejected and the consequences that flow and it has resonances for the whole history of Australia and the relations between black and white Australia. But I mostly write love songs."

As for the upcoming London gigs, Kelly is once again low-key.

"I've got a few new songs I wanna try out, but I guess people will call out for stuff. I guess it'll be a mix of old and new as usual.

"I've got enough songs now to be able to have older stuff that I can go and play that maybe I haven't played for a while."