MAPPING AUSTRALIA THROUGH HIS MUSIC

By JAMES BUTTON
The Age - 15th May 1999

A few years ago, Paul Kelly was grilled by a Belgian radio announcer about his song Summer
Rain. ``But why would you want rain in summer?'' the man asked. Kelly tried to explain: the great Australian dry, the long, hot build-up, waiting for relief. But the announcer was insistent: "Rain is for winter. Why do you want rain in summer?''

For a long time Australian rock musicians didn't consider trying to explain this country. Even in
the early 1970s Brian Cadd set a song in Memphis, John Paul Young in Pasadena. But in 1974, Skyhooks cut the cord: from then on, it was Lygon Street not Sunset Boulevard, Balwyn not Beverly Hills.

That year Kelly, at 19, made his live debut in Hobart, singing an Australian folk ballad, Streets of Forbes. Soon he was writing songs of his own. But while American rock inspired him, it didn't colonise him. "I was a big Chuck Berry fan,'' he says. "I was very conscious of the way he mapped America. I wanted to do something like that here.''

In the past 20 years, Kelly has made 14 albums and written hundreds of songs.

This week the Australasian Performing Right Association - the songwriters' guild - honored his achievement by naming him songwriter of the year.

The award was created in 1991 and previous winners include Neil and Tim Finn, and songwriters for Savage Garden and silverchair. Renee Geyer, for whom Kelly has produced albums and written songs, says the award is late, because, with the exception of Nick Cave, it has tended to go to
writers with big commercial success. Despite an intensely loyal following, Kelly has never topped the charts.

Yet last year, for the second year in a row, he won the Australian Recording Industry Association's top performer award.

Kelly is pleased by the belated recognition, but shrugs it off too. "After you turn 40 you start to get awards. They're awards for still being around, still going strong.''

Kelly once said that his mark of failure was for someone to think, "That's a real Paul Kelly song''.

Getting older has made him more resistant to definition. He's still writing love songs, and political songs, but the theme of the road and the restless movement that marked his work in the 1980s has subsided; a few songs on his last record, Words and Music, suggest a growing interest in memory and childhood.

Today he writes often for other performers, including Vika and Linda Bull and Kate Ceberano, and his music has expanded to embrace styles that suit them.

Geyer first asked Kelly to write for her in 1993. Within three days he had produced a song, Difficult Woman. "Paul has always been a great understander of the way a woman would put a song across,'' she says.

Why have all the other performers that Kelly has written for been women, never men? The question pulls him up for a moment. In part, he says, it's an extension of the songs told by female characters in his own work. "I might not know what women feel, but I know what they say.''

Kelly's recent albums don't have the packed, evocative narratives that once defined him. As he gets older he finds himself using fewer words, he says - one of his next two albums, to be released later this year, will be half songs, half instrumental.

How will his fans respond? He is an artist who shifts and experiments, seeking the jolt of the new; often the audience clings to the joy of the old. Kelly acknowledges the tension but says that while "some of the real hard nuts get upset that you have done something differently, most people have been good. You should never give an audience exactly what it wants ... unless you're Barry Manilow.''

He is sure Australia will remain central to his work. The title of a recent song, Gutless Wonder, shows he's still dipping into the vernacular.

His words come from anywhere: I've Done all the dumb things was a line he overheard, Darling It Hurts a piece of graffiti he saw in Darlinghurst. He's always been a magpie, picking carefully over the chaos of the everyday.

In 1994, the music editor of American Rolling Stone, David Fricke, named Kelly as "one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise''.

Kelly's urban map is not just of cities and streets but of moods, late nights and lost mornings. It's peopled by a galaxy of characters: Gough Whitlam, Don Bradman, the Aboriginal resistance fighter Jandamarra.

Kelly's map is painted with light brush strokes so you can wander freely within it, imagining, as with all the best songs, that the words have been written for you.