Casey Bennetto - Notes from Pig City

Paul Kelly: “I never heard back from Warnie”

Music / June 8, 2023 / 5 minutes of reading

For a brief moment in the mid 1980s, when huge crowds packed Australian sporting stadiums for 50-over cricket matches, signs reading “Like Wow – Wipeout!” began appearing in the outer, usually when a six sailed into the crowd. It was a reference to the hit song by the Hoodoo Gurus. Singer Dave Faulkner told an interviewer that he was touched, because Australia’s real rock stars were, in his view, our sporting heroes.

Paul Kelly, a longtime admirer of Faulkner, would agree. On his new album People – part of an ongoing series of thematic compilations of the singer-songwriter’s work – there are no less than four songs about athletes: Every Day My Mother’s Voice tells the story of Indigenous AFL champion Adam Goodes; Every Step Of The Way honours his peer Eddie Betts; and there are odes to cricketers Shane Warne and Don Bradman.

Kelly, a genuine sporting tragic, admits that he can get as starstruck meeting athletes just as others might get starstruck by musicians. Once, he spied tennis champion Venus Williams at Prahran pool in Melbourne. “She was sitting on a bench and it was like a goddess had come down from heaven and was just sitting among the mortals for a while,” he says.… Read more..

Paul Kelly: “I never heard back from Warnie” Read More »

Paul Kelly: “Christmas music gets a bad rap”

To understand why Paul Kelly would make a Christmas album nearly 30 records deep into his career, it helps to know how he spends his own festive season. Kelly is one of eight siblings and, traditionally, the gatherings feature a large and diverse cast; “the odd stray, new and old flames, gossip, singing”, as he wrote in his memoir, How To Make Gravy, “and much discussion and planning of food”.

Branches of Kelly’s family extend through Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. “We’ve all got our children and our children’s children, so if we all got together now it might be too big,” he says. Usually, there’s a get-together on Christmas Eve, where carols will be sung, before people drift back to their own camps and to in-laws for the day itself.

But this year Kelly’s eldest brother, Martin – father of nephew and bandmate Dan – won’t be there. He died on 4 December last year, aged 69, after a short illness. “We were fortunate to get up to Queensland last year just before the borders closed,” Kelly says. “It was a really close call, but we saw him two days before he died, and stayed on for the funeral, so we were very fortunate to be able to do that.”… Read more..