A way with words and music

The Age (Melb), 17/07/98
By Melissa Fyfe

There was a man on the radio today talking about the young people, said they're a victim of conspiracy
The young people, Jesus! What's that supposed to mean?
I never did one damn good thing till I was over 30

-- Paul Kelly's Nothing on my Mind

Journalists always complain about Paul Kelly's unwillingness to engage in interviews. They end up answering their own questions, Kelly just says "yeah" and the conversation dies at the bottom of a deep canyon of silence. Yes, Kelly is hard to interview, and no, he won't be drawn to interpret his lyrics. But who cares? Paul Kelly could sit mute and it wouldn't matter. His songs say it all.

On an overcast winter's day, amid the hurly burly of Mushroom's Albert Park headquarters, Kelly enthusiastically shares some choice pizza and coffee he'd picked up in St Kilda. He is shy, understated and modest, and in Paul Kelly, these qualities make sense. You imagine he was one of those kids always standing back a bit, quietly watching.

He talks - reluctantly - about Little Kings, from his latest release Words and Music. It's a song he performed at last year's Aboriginal Reconciliation Convention; a lament for his country: In the land of little kings/There's a price on everything/And everywhere the little kings/Are getting away with murder ... They're so busy building palaces/They don't see the poison in the wells ... Profit is the only thing.

Someone had suggested it was about Jeff Kennett. Perhaps it was more about Aboriginal reconciliation under a Howard Government?

"Sure, yep, a lot of things fell into that song," he says. "I mean, They want to improve my neighborhood could be about St Kilda or it could be about pastoral leases. It could be a number of things."

There had been a real sense of hope at the Aboriginal Reconciliation Convention, despite the Prime Minister's refusal to officially apologise for the stolen generation. Did he think that, since then, hope had diminished? "I don't know," he says, carefully. "I think it's getting worse under this Government, and as soon as we can change that the better." Although he's clearly uncomfortable talking about his lyrics, there's one more new song I can't help but ask about, Gutless Wonder:

Here he comes now, gutless wonder ... He's a nimble fella, better watch your step/With the old soft shoe/Bet your bottom dollar he will suck your prick ...

"No I can't (tell you what it means), you've got to figure it out yourself," he says, then seems to have a change of heart. "I've always wanted to write a song called "Gutless Wonder". It's been kicking around as a title for a long time. What do you think it's about?" he asks.

Record company executives?

He laughs. "I'm not sure. It's one of those songs that became like a cluster of images. There's a lot of leech-like images in that song," he pauses. "Suck your prick is a leech image, prick, as in a cut and blood. It's a Shakespearean pun," he jokes, then laughs again. "I don't really know. It could be the media, I guess I had a TV crew in mind at one stage. (Stepping lightly, smiling brightly, those big eyes on you). It's not that nailed down."

Kelly, who grew up in Adelaide, has an impeccable musical pedigree. His grandparents founded the first Italian grand opera company in Australia, in the early 1920s. His grandfather, Count Ercole Filippini, was a leading baritone for the La Scala Grand Opera Company. Contessa Filippini was the first woman to conduct a symphony orchestra in Australia. Their daughter, Kelly's mother Josephine, was also a singer, but too busy bringing up children to concentrate on artistic pursuits. And who could blame her? Nine kids would have been quite a distraction from one's artistic pursuits. Kelly was the sixth.

He came to Melbourne in 1976 and, after more than two decades of dabbling in his words and music, still feels blessed and relieved with the birth of each song. He has always said songwriting is a fluky, chancy, mysterious process, yet his lyrics have been dissected and admired by academics and poetry buffs. If Australian songwriting had a Hollywood-type hall of fame, Kelly's handprint and star would be there - understatedly, of course - alongside those of Nick Cave, Don Walker and Neil Finn (if we could claim him from the Kiwis). All this from a guy who says he knows only a few basic chords; who wanted to write simple boy-and-girl love songs, but ended up writing about little things, big things, dumb things.

Words and Music showcases all the fine ingredients of Kelly songwriting. There's the urban familiarity - love and lazy mornings, pool tables and pubs: Set 'em up Max, it's my shout, sings Kelly in Nothing on my Mind. Just as long as I can keep ripping the scab off those cold little vicious ones as they keep coming right across the bar.

There's also Kelly's sentimentally sweet sense of history - school yards in 1965 and grandmother's house. And Little Kings continues Kelly's narrative of Australia, joining songs such as Bradman (about Sir Don), Maralinga, Special Treatment, From Little Things Big Things Grow (about the Gurindji people's eight-year land rights struggle, written with Aboriginal songwriter Kev Carmody). Another chapter will be added when Kelly releases a bluegrass song, co-penned with Michael Thomas from Weddings Parties Anything, about another famous Kelly, Ned.

There's a musical shift in Kelly's latest album: it's more about groove than chords, and the songs are built around three guitars - Shane O'Mara's (Rebecca's Empire), Spencer P. Jones's (ex-Beasts of Bourbon) and, of course, Kelly's own. His "samples, stealing, sources" for this album range from Friedrich Nietzsche to Ernest Hemingway to Edgar Allan Poe. It's a list that hints at Kelly's ravenous literary appetite.

The night before the interview, he'd presented a new suitcase of songs under the twilight-blue eggshell ceiling of the Forum Theatre. The crowd, like almost all Paul Kelly crowds, were devoted disciples. But because Kelly stuck mostly with the new, the punters seemed impatient and a little dissatisified. They were craving his anthems, his classics - St Kilda to Kings Cross, Darling It Hurts, To Her Door, When I First Met Your Ma. After all these years, does it bother him that his fans always hanker and heckle for his old stuff?

"No, it's a natural thing," he says. "When I go to hear someone play, I want to hear their old stuff as well. As a writer, you're always wanting to do new things. But, as a performer, you want the crowd to get off in some way, and throwing in an old song helps, so you're always in a bit of a bind."

How does it feel having to constantly do songs that are from another era of his life, written with feelings long gone? "If I can't do an old song, if it doesn't work for me anymore, I won't do it. But some songs I don't get sick of as much, and it's usually the songs that can be done in different ways you can always find a fresh way to play it. Songs like Dumb Things and Careless are songs you can always find a new way to play.

"Songs like To Her Door, there's only one way to do it you can't really change it, I've tried to play it in other ways, but there's a certain tempo it has to be. That's a song we have to rest. People will call out for it, but the audience has got to understand you don't want to sing a song and not mean it."

Then he said something surprisingly frank. "You don't want to please an audience, you're not out there to please the audience. You want to please them a little bit, but not too much."

Kelly has just completed a month-long, bus-and-band tour of America, a place he loves. "America's mythical to me. I guess there's so much of America in our subconscious. So many American things have had an influence on me. The country is so deeply familiar. I remember the first time I went there and it's still exciting to go there."

Making it overseas, he says, is important only so he doesn't have to rely on local record sales. "The great thing about America is that, without being in the top 40 or chart of any kind, you can still make a living there because the country's so big, and there's a market there that's interested in what you're doing. It's very hard for Australia to support regional music. If you're not on commercial radio it's very hard to make a living."

Before his recent American tour, Kelly was having a bit of a domestic problem. It seems there was a debate raging at his house about whether the Spice Girls were better than Hanson (Kelly has three children: Declan, now in year 12, with first wife Hilary Brown, and two young daughters, Madeleine and Memphis, with second wife, Kaarin Fairfax).

"I think the Spice Girls are better than Hanson," he confesses, "And Victoria is my favorite Spice Girl." He says he's been listening to Radiohead, Beck, some jazz and reggae. "I used to hate Radiohead, I used to hate that song, Creep. But Shane O'Mara was into them pretty early on, and I resisted it, and now I'm sort of walking backwards now. I started listening to Radiohead's OK Computer. I love it. I thrashed it and I haven't played it for a while now."

Kelly is in his early 40s, but still has no career goals. His plan is to not have a plan - the very reason he got into music. "I'm not that far off 50 but ... I just want to write songs and there still seems to me to be an awful lot to do in that area. Still lots of things to explore.

"When I was younger, my ambitions were to play test cricket for Australia or to play league football for Melbourne. I'm past that. I'll never do that now," he says, laughing at himself.