A Shirt on Sunday: Paul Kelly – 9/6/2002 – Mean Fiddler

The finest songwriter you've never heard of, in a gig described by someone who can't remember it.

Visitors to TwickFolk’s singarounds and singers’ nights will have heard me sing songs by Paul Kelly. He’s one of the finest songwriters on the planet yet barely known outside his own country.

Kelly grew up in Adelaide then moved to Melbourne to get into rock’n’roll and eventually drugs. His heroin habit informed a lot of his early work although he was mostly clean by the time he became popular. There are love songs, story songs, party songs, and impressionistic songs all filled with normal, fallible people often caught in a trap of their own making. Many of the songs are funny, while some are achingly sad, and it’s not unusual that when aiming for one, Kelly achieves the other. There’s a similarity there to Paul Heaton’s writing for the Beautiful South, and Billy Joel over in the States.

I first heard Kelly when I was in Australia in the late eighties and he broke through to the mainstream with ‘To Her Door’ and ‘Dumb Things’ from the ‘Under The Sun’ album, which was also the first place I heard Woody Guthrie’s ‘Pastures of Plenty’. It took me years to understand the link he was declaring back to the dustbowl years in America, both musically and culturally. While not a prolific writer of political songs, there are a few; most famously ‘From Little Things Big things Grow’ written with Kevin Carmody about the Aboriginal Land rights movement of the sixties and seventies.

Back home, I was able to find Kelly’s CDs in the long lost Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus and thus followed him into the nineties and a series of breath-taking albums. Moving to Australia with Janet I was finally able to catch some concerts and I’ve now seen him more than a dozen times but only have two t-shirts to show for it.

This tour was probably his height of popularity in the UK, fuelled mainly by the Australian gap-year students who’d grown up listening to him on Triple-J. Sadly, I remember nothing of this concert. I hadn’t even realised I saw Kelly at the Mean Fiddler (now the Forum)! I do remember that when the album ‘…Nothing But a Dream’ came out, I was very disappointed. It lacks the hard edged guitars of the previous records and I felt it was a downwards slide. Nowadays it’s an album I keep coming back to for some of his finest songs, so what do I know?

Paul Kelly is also notable for writing one of the strangest autobiographies of all time. As part of an arts festival commission he produced a 4-night event of his songs performed in alphabetical order. From that came a book wherein he writes about his songs and his life, still presented in the same alphabetical song order. Unsurprisingly, it’s called ‘Paul Kelly A-Z’ and is well worth a read.

I do remember another gig in the now-demolished Astoria 2. We were upstairs next to a couple of young ladies who were yelling for a greatest hit. Instead, Kelly whipped out ‘Other People’s Houses’ (achingly sad story song; written to be funny) and they and the rest of the crowd went crazy. The band looked more amazed than the audience at this reception. The two women next to us sang along to this obscure B-side as if it was the hit they’d been waiting for.

There aren’t many songwriters that consistently good over a thirty-year career. And fewer who can claim multiple classics about cricket.

For the last 3 years I've been posting pictures of t-shirts on a certain social media platform. The series is designed to answer a question often asked of me in my role as sound engineer at TwickFolk in West London: "Why is a bloke in a Slayer t-shirt volunteering at a folk club???"
All the videos are lovingly ripped off the internet, and any credit lies with Paul Kelly. I just wear the t-shirts.