44 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com September, 2017
LIVING^ L
EGEND
A
slight, bald, wiry figure in
jeans and an Elefant Traks hood-
ie unlocks the gate to the weather-
board cottage in St Kilda that he’s
called home for 25 years. He off ers
a fi rm, warm hand and a grin that makes
light of the fact that he is, against all odds,
Paul Kelly. “Really, I’m not that conscious of
any expectations,” says the man who might,
outside of the sports arena, be our most uni-
versally revered public fi gure. “I still hold
my heroes in my head. Al Green. Curtis
Mayfi eld. Sam Cooke. Leonard Cohen. Bob
Dylan. Hank Williams. That’s the measur-
ing stick, for me.”What stories did you love as a kid?
I mostly remember family stories, like
my dad being sent to the shop at the age of
fi ve to get a pound of butter. He’s walking
home and he has a little bit to eat. It tasted
good, so he had a bit more. Halfway home
he realised he was gonna get in trouble so
he ate the rest to destroy the evidence. His
parents said, “Did you get the butter?” He
said, “No, they didn’t have any.” Then he
threw up.
Describe your fi rst songwriting attempt.
The first one I wrote when I was 21.
I wrote it in open G tuning. It had two
chords and four lines and it was pretty Van
Morrison-ish. I can still sing it, roughly:
“It’s the riding of trains that takes you/It’s
the going down that wakes you/It’s falling
apart that makes you/It’s... something else
that breaks you.” It’s not a terrible song.
Worse followed.
Who are the critics in your head? Can you
name them?
I don’t have a particular judge and jury
up there. Playing songs to the band can be
a way of feeling out whether a song is good.
They’ll always do the best by a song, but
you pick up which ones they really like. The
inner critic is not that reliable. You like a
song one day and you don’t like it the next.
Did you always have a sense of music as a
force for social justice?
I came up listening to a lot of folk music
so those historical events songs were al-ways there. And I do have a natural bent
for telling a story, so when I hear a good
one... some just demand to be written.
But the demand is not “I have to right the
injustices of the world”. With “Maralinga”
for instance, it was all about the imagery. I
remember reading about the big black mist
[from the British nuclear tests in South
Australia] rolling and roiling along the
ground towards them. “From Big Things
Little Things Grow” started with the image
of Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the
hands of Vincent Lingiari. So those potent
images sort of tell me to write. It’s more of
an aesthetic drive, rather than “I need to
set the record straight”.For a couple of decades the image of Paul
Kelly was of a fairly shy, reluctant pub-
lic fi gure.
That’s pretty accurate, yeah. I don’t like
talking about myself much. I’m happy sing-
ing. I fi nd talking a bit harder. I think I’ve
got better at it.
But then you laid yourself bare with your
book How To Make Gravy and the Stories of
Me documentary. Did they comprise a wa-
tershed for you?
Maybe they did. The memoir happened
by accident. I was thinking of ways to
write notes to this A to Z set of recordings
and I stumbled on a method, which was
to take the lyrics of the song as the start-
ing point to write about anything I want-
ed. But once I realised it was going to be
a memoir, I knew I had to be frank be-
cause I believe a memoir that holds things
back is a failed book. I had to stay true to
the genre.Culturally you’re one of Australia’s most
unifying fi gures. Is that important to you?
That’s all accidental. It’s not something I
seek. A lot of my favourite performers are
polarising. I don’t try to be all things to all
people. I couldn’t think of anything worse.
It would make you a really good candidate
for something. Have you been pressured in
that direction?
I’ve never been approached for public of-
fi ce. I get approached to do various causes
but I don’t do much. The rest of my family
are much more politically active and vocal
and full of more conviction than I have. I’ll
stick with Yeats: “The best lack all convic-
tion and the worst are full of passionate in-
tensity”.
In the last decade you’ve
performed Yeats, Shake-
speare, the Merri Soul revue,
funeral songs... have you
deliberately distanced your-
self from pop?
It wasn’t conscious. Pop
songs are my métier; they’re
what I like to write but
they’re hard and they take
me time. Other things catch
my attention. I wish I could write more
pop songs. I’m pleased to have this new re-
cord where I’ve got... well, they’re my ver-
sion of pop songs. They’re punchy, they’re
short, they have riff s, they’re upbeat.
Life Is Fine sounds like an old-school Paul
Kelly record, from the Eighties or Nineties.
Was that as easy as it sounds?
No, I’ve just been slowly plugging away
until I had enough. You write songs and
you put them aside like odd socks in diff er-
ent drawers and fi nally you fi nd a few that
seem to match. When you’ve got four or
fi ve songs that start talking to each other,
then you can get a vision of the record and,
“Oh, I’ll try and write a few more like that.”
Give us your best songwriting trick.
You can’t compose unless you improvise.
After being in the room for a few days with
the band, playing music, I usually come
home and something pops out. So just go
and play.PAUL KELLY
‘Life Is Fine’ is Paul Kelly’s first “normal” album in a decade.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
✦By Michael Dwyer✦
PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT COYTEI WISH I COULD
WRITE MORE POP SONGS.
I’M PLEASED TO HAVE
THIS NEW RECORD.”