Godfather of Gravy: Paul Kelly on religion, music and curating his Christmas Train album
The man behind one of our best-loved festive songs, How To Make Gravy, on how he made a Christmas double-album | WATCH
I grew up in a large Catholic family in Adelaide. I’ll always be a cultural Catholic, I guess. We commemorated Advent, the month-long build-up to Christmas. There was a small crib in one of the fireplaces with a pile of straw beside it. Every time you did something good or denied yourself something you would secretly put straw in the crib so it would be filled by Christmas, when a statuette of the baby Jesus would miraculously appear in the crib.
The statues of the Three Wise Men started a long way off in another part of the house, secretly moving every night along mantelpieces so they would arrive at the crib for the Epiphany on January 6.
As children we’d wake up each morning to check if they’d moved in the night. They had! Just a few inches each day. That was all part of Christmas for us. It was fun and mysterious and magical. Clever parenting!
I suppose Thomas Hardy’s poem The Oxen is where I would sit now in terms of faith. Hardy grew up at a time where what he discusses in the poem was widely believed without question: that at Christmas, on the stroke of midnight, animals would start acting like humans; would start talking and kneeling before the baby Jesus. It wasn’t just a story, it was a real occurrence.
My mother inhabited that world. She spoke to the saints. When you lost something, or couldn’t find something, you’d pray to St Anthony. For good luck in exams, you’d pray to St Jude. She’d ask Mary to speak to Jesus if she wanted something to happen. How could Jesus refuse his mother? Catholicism at heart is deeply pagan.
I’m like Thomas Hardy: I don’t believe in that miracle – but I do. I’m perfectly comfortable holding the two things together. The beautiful thing about that poem is that he expresses perfectly holding non-belief and belief within yourself when he says:
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel’ […]
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
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I’ve always been interested in Christmas songs and their astonishing variety. Every year you hear the same old carols and songs pumped to you in supermarkets and malls, most of it in a homogenised pop format. But there is so much other great Christmas music to explore – secular, sacred, ancient, modern, serious, fun — across all kinds of genres and derived from diverse traditions.
We were supposed to do a Christmas record last year. But all that got foiled. Then we had a window where things opened up for us in Melbourne earlier in the year. I booked a studio, then began making a plan. I chose songs I love, which often led me to wander off the well-worn path, then chose singers I thought best suited to those songs.
It was great to get together in the studio again. We’ve had to postpone and cancel a lot of shows over the last two years. People think, “Oh, you must miss singing to an audience”, and of course we do. It doesn’t make sense without songs landing on people’s ears. But the thing I really missed was playing with my friends. Last year, we couldn’t even get in to the same room and rehearse.
So when we actually all got together in the studio, gathering at Soundpark in March, it felt very precious to us. I’m sure that’s part of the spirit of the album. It was always going to be a big collaborative record anyway, and this joy in connecting is a big part of the feeling.
The record has been brewing for a while. Some of the tracks go back a few years. I recorded The Friendly Beasts, singing three-part harmony with Kasey Chambers and my nephew Dan Kelly three or four years ago, when Kasey was in town. I’d always wanted to do this with her, so I nabbed her while she was here doing other things. I put that in the “Christmas record” folder, one of the many folders I have on my computer.
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The way I work with the band is to be open to letting other people take the lead, or lean into other people’s ideas. Our philosophy is to try every idea. Often bands can get stuck when someone comes up with an idea and they talk about it, then someone talks about why it’s not a good idea.
But we learned pretty quickly: if someone has an idea, just try it. It’s actually much quicker than talking in circles. Most of the time that shows the right way forward – but not always. Then we have to argue it out. And I like having a band that’s opinionated, and prepared to argue their case. I think a good band has to be able to learn to fight together without anyone getting upset.
In the end, it’s me who has to decide.
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No Reindeer, No Mistletoe, No Holly was the album title for quite a while as I didn’t want to have a strong focus on the Northern Hemisphere. You can’t avoid it with Christmas songs. Towards the end of recording, when I realised I hadn’t included a song about Father Christmas, musician and broadcaster Alice Keath – the sprite flitting across many tracks on this record – suggested a 14th-century Latin hymn about St Nicholas. She recorded all the parts herself at home – vocals, guitar and violin – and turned this ancient text into a contemporary folk song.
That title of the album was just a rough guide and a fun one, I thought. I was kicking it around with the band and our bass player Bill McDonald said, “Nah, it’s a bit negative. Three no’s? Maybe you need something else.” Then that song Christmas Train came along, and with it, the idea of all these different guests getting on the train.
One of the joys of this record was having a couple of my siblings sing on Little Drummer Boy, along with my daughters, Maddy and Memphis, and Vika and Linda Bull. Having my daughters sing with Vika and Linda is something very satisfying to me. They’ve known them since they were little kids, and Maddy and Memphis have always looked up to them; they are their aunties and heroes.
Then I realised much later, only when someone else pointed it out to me, that there are three generations of Kellys on the record.
That was a happy accident, as often happens in the studio. We were recording at Soundpark, around the corner from my son Declan’s place in Northcote, and he dropped in with my grandson Juniper, who is 13 now.
We were just finishing off putting the bell part on Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home). Our keyboard player Cameron Bruce was about to play it on a keyboard. He turned to Juniper and said, “Do you want to play the bells?” “Er, yes,” said Juniper. Cam showed him what to play. He’s had a few piano lessons, so he knows enough to be able to play along in time. Again, a great idea, initiated by someone else.
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You could say the record is probably half secular, half holy. The fundamental Christmas story – the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem – is often overlooked these days so I wanted to make sure that story was well represented. It’s there in Nativity, The Oxen, Christmas Must Be Tonight, The Virgin Mary Had One Child, Coventry Carol, Tapu Te Po, The Friendly Beasts, Surah Maryam.
It was important to me to include these songs and texts. To me, there’s an obvious connection between the Christian story and the Islam story. There’s a whole chapter in the Qur’an about Jesus and Mary, called Surah Maryam, which I’ve been aware of for a while. When I read it again I was struck by all the similarities: an angel appears to Mary and prophesises that she’s going to have a child and she says, “Oh, no, I’ve never been with a man – I’m going to have a baby, how could that be?!” There are various translations, but you can still sense the beautiful poetry in the text. From what I hear, the Arabic is even more poetic. But what also struck me about that story – which you don’t get in the Christian story – is the pain and the suffering of giving birth. The verses describe the agony of labour, and Mary saying, “I wish I was dead! I wish I could be rid of all this”. Like all mothers down the ages. In the Bible story, Joseph and Mary have their hardships – “No room at the inn”, etc – but then Jesus just appears. Miraculously born! The Qur’an makes it real.
That’s great, I thought. It’s the same story, but here’s another view of it. I don’t know any other Christmas records that include the Islam story. To me it’s an obvious connection to make.
So too with the connection to Judaism. Jesus was Jewish. I did a fair bit of looking for an appropriate Hebrew prayer or song. Though Hanukkah is around the same time as Christmas, it’s a whole different thing. Then my partner Siân – who’s Jewish – said “What about Shalom Aleichem?” It’s a prayer sung at Shabbat, every Friday night; an all-year-round song. I looked at the translation and thought, Peace, kings, angels? Sounds like Christmas to me! And the melody is like a carol.
So I approached Lior and said, “Do you want to record a song for my Christmas album?” He wasn’t sure at first. Like Waleed Aly, who agreed to recite the Islamic verses from Surah Maryam, he needed to understand the context. There was a lot of back and forth with both of them, but they were patient with me and open and I’m really pleased we made them work on the record.
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I was talked into including How To Make Gravy for this album. I hadn’t thought of re-recording it, but the band said, “We play it; we should record it.” Then I ran it by a few other friends, and most people I spoke to said, “You’ve got to record that. Why wouldn’t you?”
I thought, well, it’s been 25 years since it came out – it’s as good a time as any to do a new version. In my mind, it isn’t very different to the old version. That song has such a set architecture. We still play the slide guitar riff that Spencer P. Jones came up with. We carry him with us. Every time we play that song, I always think of him.
That song has all these in-built gear changes, and they sort of play themselves, so we didn’t attempt a different version that changes the engine. I understand it’s probably shifted in ways I’m not aware of; I’m probably singing it a bit differently, and my band is playing it with their own way of playing. But we still have Peter Luscombe on drums, who played on the original version! Peter’s everywhere! Like Alice Keath.
We thought, “Let’s have a go at it. We don’t have to put it on the album, but let’s record it anyway.”
We got it first or second take; it sounded good. I ran it by the record company; they said, “Yeah, great idea!” Simple as that.
I’ve been singing that changed line – “What was his problem? He never did get Nina Simone” – for a while now. The rhyme used to be “just a little too much cologne”; most of the time these days it’s “Nina Simone”. I came up in folk music, so I’m always happy to change a line here and there.
Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train is out now via EMI Music.
