Paul Kelly, rock poet, finds a new muse

After 40 years writing the soundtrack to Australian life, Paul Kelly’s well was running dry. Now he’s found a new muse.

Paul Kelly. Picture: Cybele Malinowski

Look out the window here, uphill toward the celebrated Coke sign, and the words come rushing in. Have you ever seen Kings Cross / When the rain is falling soft? So many words, nearly all of them magic. And if the rain don’t fall too hard / Everything shines just like a post card. Name a place, a time, a feeling, there’s a Paul Kelly lyric to fit. Red roofs and cricket and the stars that keep on turning and wisteria and great aunts and gravy. Sweep over to Darlinghurst now and another rush of words, darker but still magic. Standing on the corner with your dress so high. ­Slowing cars. Men with glad hands. Darling it hurts.

Australians learn these lines by osmosis. For four decades, over 24 studio albums and a remarkable 350-plus songs, Kelly has captured in words an entire country’s triumphs and heartaches, its small, important milestones. He’s ­written us into being. So when the man with all the words says the well’s run dry, you struggle to believe him. You don’t want to believe him. Yet here he is, saying it: “I think I might be running out of words.” He says it quietly, like he says most things, two hands surrounding the glass of tap water on the table before him. Out the fourth-floor window of Universal Music’s Sydney office lies the sketchy urban wonderland where, in the mid-1980s, he wrote and recorded Post, his first solo album and the one that would stake out his place as Australia’s foremost rock poet. Kelly is 63 years old now, slight of frame in his olive-green suit and very still. His coal-black eyes are appraising and steady.

“I’ve been writing songs for about 40 years,” he continues. “And words are the hardest part. It’s always pretty scrappy; scrounging, stumbling around. I get melodies and music very quickly but words were always the slowest part of writing a song.” He points to his smartphone for proof. In the early days, he’d jot down phrases, lines, crumbs of ideas on a small notepad. Now he writes them in an app on the phone. Another app is for bursts of musical inspiration. “It’s all on the phone now,” he says, “but there are a whole lot more melodies than there are words.”

Paul Kelly and the Dots, 1981. Picture: supplied

An ambivalent relationship with words is nothing new: you can love them with a fervour and still have them kick your arse. Kelly’s loved them since he was a skinny, restless teen growing up in Adelaide, writing free-form verse influenced by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, disappearing into characters and “trying to find their voice”. He began to hoover up words by Dostoyevsky, Proust, Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats, the Bible. Then all the questing males — Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse — until he landed on ­Raymond Carver, whose economy and power he would seek to emulate. Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan calls his old friend the most well-read person he knows. “I’ve seen him deliver a 10-minute soliloquy from Richard III that he’s memorised,” ­Flanagan says. “I sometimes wonder if his whole life is shaped by an idea of art — and artists — as being about the pursuit of ­experience. He likes to open the doors of ­perception in every way.”

Kelly still loves words, it’s just that he’s tired of the arse-kicking. And so he’s gone back to the poets, repurposing the writings of greats such as Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin for his new album, Nature. The idea first occurred to him six years ago, when the ­Australian National Academy of Music asked him to write a song cycle for a 40-piece orchestra with classical composer James Ledger. “I said yes before I even thought about it,” Kelly says. “But then I didn’t think I could come up with a whole set of words myself so I started looking at poems.” The resulting album, Conversations with Ghosts, drew on words belonging to poets past: Emily Dickinson, Judith Wright and long-time Kelly touchstone William Butler Yeats. “That sort of opened the door for me,” he says. “For some ­reason I’d always thought having the words first would be restrictive, but I was completely wrong.”

Soon after he turned to Shakespeare, mining the eternal rhymes of the Bard for the 2016 mini-album Seven Sonnets and a Song. The new technique had a cameo on last year’s big, bold award-winner Life Is Fine, the first Kelly album to hit No. 1 on the ARIA charts; the title song is a poem by ­Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. “It’s just become another way to write songs,” Kelly says. “I guess I always feel like I don’t have many words so it’s a relief to have a beautiful set of words before you and think, ‘Ah, I’ll put a tune to that’. ” He shrugs. “That’s just what’s ­happening,” he says. “Either I’ll keep writing both ways in ­tandem, or one will take over. But the main point is that I’m not worried if I don’t have any of my own words anymore because there are so many great words out there.”

Once he noticed the birds, he began to see them everywhere. Of course, he was familiar with seagulls; he’s lived in the same house in ­Melbourne’s St Kilda, watched them whirl above the Esplanade like paper scraps, for 25 years. But now his eyes were opened he noticed whole armies: magpies, cockatoos and lorikeets; sleek black currawongs with bright doll’s eyes and cormorants stretching their wings out to dry. “I don’t think I’ll ever become a nature person,” says the man who’s lived in the capital cities of five Australian states and one territory. “But as I get older I’ve become more conscious of the natural world.”

This heightened affinity enabled him to see a through-line in the songs he’d been assembling over several years, songs about storms and mushrooms, wolves, rivers and trees. “I realised I had suddenly half a dozen songs that explicitly referenced nature, just in the title,” he says. “That was the impetus to write a couple more and get some other songs to fit. Seagulls of Seattle was just an old poem of mine I put to music.”

Kelly has Siân Darling to thank for opening his eyes to the birds. A Melbourne filmmaker with long dark hair, she’s been Kelly’s under-the-radar partner for the past four years. “She knows a lot about trees and plants and animals and she loves birds so that’s obviously had an effect,” he says. “Suddenly I’m looking at birds ’cause she’s showed me.” Darling directed the clip for With the One I Love, the first single off Nature, and, ­fittingly, it opens with birdsong. The remainder is shot in Melbourne’s Old Magistrates Court, where Ned Kelly was sentenced to death in 1880. In the clip, another Kelly is in the dock, pleading his case to a judge played by rising star Mojo Juju. I’m going to go with the one I love / All I know is that I must / Pretty soon we’ll all be dust / I’m going to go with the one I love.

Kelly looks more comfortable in that dock than he does now talking about his relationship. He divulges that he met Darling at an experimental theatre performance organised by Melbourne writer Marieke Hardy. “I was singing a song and Siân was dancing,” he says, starting to squirm. She loves poetry. She loves birds. But then “that’s enough, thank you,” he says politely.

The word legendary has become affixed to ­Kelly’s name with superglue, occasionally swapped out for revered or iconic. Here are two more that many music writers share in private: frustratingly opaque. Ex-wife Kaarin Fairfax uses three words: a slippery fish. It’s often said the way to know Paul Kelly is through his songs and yet, apart from When I First Met Your Ma — written for Declan, the son he had with his first wife Hilary Brown in 1980 — he says “most of the time it’s way off the mark to think my songs are autobiographical. Songs come out of certain images or the way words sound together; I’m not often thinking about specific people when I’m writing a song.”

Kelly bushwalking in Tasmania with Richard Flanagan. Picture: Instagram

Flanagan laughs when I describe Kelly as less than forthcoming. “He’s a Zen mirror,” he says, “especially with journalists.” The author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North has known Kelly for 30 years, since Kelly turned up on his Hobart doorstep in the late 1980s looking “a bit like a slightly broken-down boxer”. “Look, he’s a shy, ­private man except with his nearest and dearest,” Flanagan says. “He does have an inner confidence; he wouldn’t have survived and prospered in such a tough industry without a certain amount of steel in his spine. But he’s a lovely, gentle, generous man.” Drummer Peter Luscombe, who’s played with Kelly on 15 albums over 25 years, says he’s “a really warm guy” but not one for small talk. Though he has a wide circle of friends, “he’s a bit of a loner”, ­Luscombe says. “He can withdraw inside his head pretty easily or he’ll disappear inside a book.”

Archibald Prize-winning artist Ben Quilty recently joined Flanagan and Kelly for a 10-day rafting trip down Tasmania’s Franklin River and later asked Kelly if he would sit for him. Because it was for charity the singer agreed, but Quilty found him a reluctant subject. “The most creative people always show a lack of ego, a reticence, because their art is a subject outside themselves,” he says. “Paul’s so philosophical and interested in the world but in a very private way.”

The ABC’s Kerry O’Brien came up against a brick wall in 2010 when he pushed Kelly to open up about his decades of on-and-off heroin use in an interview that defines the word awkward. It was the first one Kelly had given for How To Make Gravy, a surprisingly revealing memoir he had just released in which he wrote frankly about heroin while neglecting to show attendant contrition. “One of the reasons I wrote that chapter about heroin — I had a debate with my editors about it — was that I hadn’t actually heard people write about it in this way,” Kelly says now, describing his use of the drug as “a reward for hard work”.

“The narrative is always the descent into hell and then the redemption, or you fall into addiction, but that was not my story with it. I never was addicted.” Kelly gave it up after 25 years because, he says, “I was afraid I might be suddenly caught by it. It’s not a good drug for performing so that restricted my use of it. It’s not very good for writing because everything happens in your head. I guess wanting to be able to sing and write, that need was stronger in me than the other one.”

Two years after the memoir, Ian Darling released his documentary Paul Kelly: Stories of Me and peeled another layer from the man behind the music, mostly via the observations of others. The film is a richly textured, warts-and-all ­valentine, beginning with the singer’s birth on the floor of a Morris Minor outside an Adelaide hospital. It hopscotches from his Catholic upbringing as the sixth of nine children in a musical Irish-­Italian family to his father’s death when he was 13 to his dropping out of uni to join Melbourne’s murky pub rock scene with his bands The Dots and The Coloured Girls (later The Messengers).

Kelly, right, in the 2012 documentary Stories of Me. Picture: supplied

Both Kelly’s ex-wives appear in the documentary, talking with rueful affection about his desire to experience the richness of love in all its guises. Brown tells of the “countless” girls in Kelly’s life, “one for each song”. Actor Fairfax, his second wife and mother to his daughters Madeleine and ­Memphis, says: “He didn’t ever want to cut off any experiences of love or intimacy with people because he felt that was a big part of his creativity and his songwriting.” Kelly had ended his decade-long relationship with musician and broadcaster Sian Prior during the making of Stories of Me and she doesn’t appear in the film, although she later wrote about their relationship in a memoir, Shy.

First love, familial love, carnal love, love of country, love of nature; love lost, regained and regretted: Australia’s great troubadour places love at the centre of it all. He shifts uncomfortably in his chair when I remind him of something The Go-­Betweens’ Robert Forster said about him in Stories of Me: “He comes on like Michael Hutchence; you’d think he was Mick Jagger, six-foot-four with a mane of hair and an outrageous wardrobe.”

“I think he was talking about the lust in my songs,” Kelly says. “As WB Yeats said, there are only two things any intelligent writer should ­concern themselves with: sex and death. I think it’s really hard to write about sex or good love in songs. It’s much easier to write about love gone wrong or love unrequited or yearning love or ideal love. There has always been a lot of sex in music — a lot of modern R’n’B music is pretty much soft porn — but I find it a challenge to write about. That’s probably why I’m drawn to it.”

Kelly has always been a musical magpie, ­gathering up odds and ends of inspiration where he finds them, spinning them into concise, melodic gold with a minimum of fuss. He listens, he reads, he watches; he absorbs other people’s stories through his pores. “He’s a guy who doesn’t like wasting a minute,” says Luscombe. “When we’re on tour he doesn’t sit around a hotel room watching television; he’s out walking or at a gallery or taking in the local culture. He likes to ingest and digest everything that’s around.” Musically, that’s Lou Reed, Chuck Berry, the Kinks and the Beatles; singers such as Al Green, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and Etta James. All the greats distilled and filtered through a distinctive voice to produce well-told tales with instantly memorable tunes: Before Too Long, To Her Door, From St Kilda to Kings Cross, Darling It Hurts, Dumb Things, Deeper Water, Bradman. “Paul is a grand adapter of musical styles,” says Forster, another literate Australian singer-songwriter. “He can follow his appreciation of bluegrass, country, soul, dub, surf rock and ­traditional folk to write… great songs that speak to the lone listener as well as the national mood.”

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Dan Kelly lives with his famous uncle in the St Kilda house. “He’s got a method and it’s always worked for him,” says Dan, who has been contributing to Paul’s live and recorded work since 2002. “His ­creative approach to generating a song is to read a book, eat some pasta, have a glass of wine, go and play some sport, sing at the top of your lungs. And have relationships to add electricity to the primordial ooze of all these elements you’re putting together to make a song.”

Another way for Kelly to reboot the muse is through collaboration. Over the years he’s written songs with and for a Who’s Who of Australian artists: Nick Cave, Renee Geyer, Kate Ceberano, Kasey Chambers, Missy Higgins, Vika and Linda Bull. He’s also collaborated with nearly every significant indigenous musician in the country, including Archie Roach, Dan Sultan, Troy Cassar-Daley, Christine Anu and the hip-hop crew A.B. Original. “There’s not another non-indigenous Australian whose collaboration with indigenous people has been so intense and consistent over so many ­decades,” says director Rachel Perkins, whose 2001 musical film One Night the Moon starred Kelly in the only acting role of his career, alongside then-wife Fairfax and their daughter Memphis. “What is distinctive about Paul’s relationships with indigenous artists is that there’s a deep, enduring friendship. He doesn’t engage with you as part of a rat plan; it’s not ticking a box, it’s a real friendship. And it’s not something he does for some political purpose; I think he just really admires the music.”

And yet here we are in the age of outrage and even the man who co-wrote Yothu Yindi’s Treaty and penned From Little Things Big Things Grow with Kev Carmody feels obliged to walk on eggshells. The third track on Nature is called A Bastard Like Me and it’s an ode to Rachel’s late father, the firebrand activist Charlie Perkins. Before Kelly included it on the album, he asked Rachel to request the rest of the family’s permission. “I said, ‘Paul it’s fine’ but he said, ‘In this day and age you have to be so careful’,” Perkins recalls. “Then he told me this story about a DJ who was playing Treaty recently and someone went up to the DJ and said, ‘Check your white privilege.’” Perkins laughs. ­“People take such a moral high ground.” The ­Perkins family helped Kelly assemble archival footage, family photos and home movies, to be stitched together for a moving film clip which, Rachel says, “brings the memory and appreciation of Dad back into focus again. The family feels very privileged that Paul has acknowledged him in that way.”

Kelly refuses to be outraged by the outrage. “I think a lot of it is necessary,” he says. “I think there’s probably a lot of pent-up anger and marginalisation. I think we’ve just gotta let it happen. Bring it on.” He laughs at his own viva la revolucion stance, before turning serious: “The biggest ­danger, though, is when debate gets shut down or someone can’t have a point of view without being labelled in some way. That’s the biggest concern at the moment, but the questions are good ones.”

Kelly believes he’s hardwired for laziness, that only structure and routine save him from his instincts. But this is no more true than his claim to have run out of words. “I’ve never for a minute seen him rest on his laurels,” Luscombe says. “He’s always interested in finding out more about things, people, everything; he always wants to see what the next thing is.” Only a consummately driven man would persevere through 40 years of songwriting, finally see his 23rd album hit No. 1 and release another crowd-pleasing album a year later. ­Kelly’s a hungry, hungry man but his ambitions have never been commercial. “He believes in the power of art,” says Flanagan. “You know when you’re moved by something — a film, a book, a painting, a poem? When you work in the form you ache with the desire to make something, even if it’s only one thing in your whole life, that might affect one other soul the way that yours was affected. I think he had that ache in him and still has. For a man who complains of writer’s block he’s incredibly fecund.”

This December Kelly will hit the road with his Making Gravy tour, an annual event featuring his unlikely Christmas classic, How to Make Gravy. The song’s been a cornerstone of Kelly’s regular set list since 1996 and, because he’s changed his phrasing over the years and the lyrics are half-spoken, he always finds the “raggedy, out-of-synch” crowd singalongs amusing. Especially since he started changing some of the lyrics: I hear Mary’s got a new boyfriend / I hope he can hold his own / Do you remember the last one? What was his name again? / Ah, just a little too much cologne. No one ever sees the reworked last line coming: He never did get Nina Simone.

As a substitute summation of Mary’s new ­boyfriend, it’s pretty terrific. And very Paul Kelly: cutting, economical, yet sumptuous with meaning. Who says the man’s got no words left? “I just want to write a good song,” he says simply, folding his hands together on the table. “I’ve never thought, ‘I’ve written the perfect song, I can step away now, I’m done’. There’s always another song.”

Nature is out now. Paul Kelly’s Making Gravy tour is at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Dec 14; The Domain, Sydney, Dec 15; Brisbane’s Riverstage, Dec 21.