My Soul Went Running : From St Kilda to King’s Cross

Everygoodboydeservesfruita on Paul Kelly’s Post 1985

In 1985, Paul Kelly released his first album. Of course, it wasn’t his first: it was his third. But this seems to be how Kelly thinks of it, as he has prevented the re-release of his first two albums Manila and Talk, recorded with the Dots. Many ask him to relent and to allow their identity to be recognised, but Kelly’s desire to recommence his work as a writer has meant that he will not allow the airing of what he sees as unfulfilled and possibly callow songs. Hence, they seem to be lost — which rather matches my own experience. I had both of those albums recorded on the old C90 cassettes. I had a friend who owned both of them and, in the time-honoured tradition, I opted to kill music and record them onto a cassette. When my car was broken into, I lost about 40 cassettes — my copies of Talk and Manila went with them. Undoubtedly, Kelly would have been pleased had he known.
Years later, Kelly would write If I Could Start Again Today, a typical song that begins his Nothing But a Dream album. The song touches on the elements of hope, loss, and regret that mark so much of Kelly’s sensibility. His interesting habit of re-recording songs speaks to this desire to start over — perhaps to wish the past away. Post is the first of the one-word titles that amused Paul Kelly. The follow-up was Gossip, and then a few years later Comedy. In all cases, you can see that it is the visual representation of the word that interests him, and that they all speak to some form of communication — though it’s not clear at all exactly what that communication will entail.
Music is always a collaborative endeavour. Even Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, for all of its remarkable soloness, relied at least in the beginning on Mike Batlin correctly identifying the four-track tape recorder that Springsteen would need in order to breathe those songs into bare-boned life. So while Post is often described as Paul Kelly’s first solo album, it is like all of Kelly’s work — really a collaboration. As an artist, he is a collaborator: once he has an idea for a song and is satisfied with the lyric, it becomes a song only through his kinship with his musicians. For me, I have become almost as interested in Chris Coyne’s saxophone playing as I am in Steve Connolly’s accompaniment to Kelly’s acoustic strum and the plaintive, Australian singing style he seems to have been born with. There are no drums on this record — just one occasion of handclaps.
Post is a slow grower, yet its charms are immediate. Let’s begin where Post begins. From St Kilda to Kings Cross makes it clear, at least to me, why Kelly wanted to erase his previous attempts. The opening of the song reveals his strengths immediately. Steve Connolly anticipates the melody against Kelly’s guitar, and then that simple opening line announces the arrival of Paul Kelly: “From St Kilda to Kings Cross is 13 hours on a bus.” Kelly is not from St Kilda — not from Victoria; as he states later in the album, Adelaide is his town. But in this opening to this new first solo album, Kelly reveals his allegiance in hidden and visible ways. To Australians, St Kilda is not just a place but a football team — perennial underachievers, according to their Wikipedia page. So the opening is a wink to the listener, and to many listeners in Australia the contrast between St Kilda and Kings Cross is stark.
The reception of the album was positive — Australian Rolling Stone album of the year, etc. But some found the music to be uninspired. This was actually my response to Nebraska — for years I couldn’t really hear those melodies, and my grounding in song was achieved through obsessive listening to The Beatles. In the case of Post, there is no such difficulty. Kelly is an inspired melodist, and that gift is now fully formed on St Kilda. There is a line from the song that actually describes what can happen to the attentive listener: “I pushed my face up to the glass and watched the white lines rushing past.”
So much is in these already familiar images — change, sudden change, and its effects. I hear Jackson Browne too. And knowing what I do about the drugs circling around Kings Cross and Kelly, I hear echoes of that history. For all of the acoustic strumming in his songs, Kelly is not interested in personal revelation; his personal songs always seem universal, and that is the key here too. But the universality is not dreary — it’s mystery. “And all around me felt like all inside me / and my body left me and my soul went running.”
They are not positive emotions. What does a listener do with autobiography? We know that Kelly left Melbourne with his young son, Declan. Kelly and his wife had divorced the year before; she moved to Sydney, and Kelly joined her there to share the caring — to be a family, of sorts. So why is his soul running?
Well, this is the fascinating complication — the song isn’t just about Kelly; it isn’t autobiographical, even if Kelly thinks it is. He rarely adds anything (in interviews, etc.) in terms of specific commentary on the lyric. He hears the song and, in his own song commentary, he focuses on the circumstances of the record — who recorded it, who played on it. He notes that on most of the Post songs, there are two guitars and three voices (Michael Barclay). But on St Kilda, there are three guitars — one 6-string acoustic, one 12-string acoustic, and one electric — and Chris Coyne’s saxophone. The saxophone is a daring choice for an album by an acoustic guitar player, but it is the first example of the collaborative drive of Kelly’s art. Both the sax and Connolly’s guitars are other voices in the song.
“My soul went running…” Such a peculiar description of a new beginning. Maybe I’m making too much of it; sometimes a lyric emerges on its own, unconsciously. The writer doesn’t question it — is just thankful for the assistance from the songwriting gods. Maybe I’m not making enough of it.
Kelly switches the entire point of view of the song, addressing his listener: “Have you ever seen Kings Cross / when the rain is falling soft?” He doesn’t hang around for an answer, though, because he tells us that he “came in on an evening bus from Oxford Street / I cut across.” The move to the specific allows Kelly to sing that opening melody again — those five notes around again, the ground on which the singer strides. It’s a stable and secure melody, and the guitarist loves playing it as the introduction and then as the coda.
Buses and streets, rain and sun — it seems a fairly prosaic kind of travelling song, and it’s easy to picture a man with a beat-up hard case for his guitar and wearing all the clothes he needs. He can always buy another couple of t-shirts and some jeans at the local St Vinnies. But the bridge of the song is a typical Kelly move into something else — a critique of shallow relationships: “Fair-weather friends are the hungriest friends / I keep my mouth well shut and cross their open hands.”
This might be the most revealing aspect of the song: those who know Kelly remark that he is hard to know, keeps himself to himself, and reveals little. Kelly has eight siblings (!) so he knows something about sharing and paying your own way. This seems to be partly a philosophy about how this new beginning will play out — it’s a kind of note to self, which then finds its way into the song.
I have noted elsewhere that Kelly is a romantic but not a sentimentalist. Given the circumstances of his life and lack of success that he had in Melbourne, he had no reason to be sentimental. But he is still romantic about what he has left behind. The last lines of the song are as famous to his fans as the opening: “I’d give you all of Sydney Harbour / all that land and all that water / for that one sweet promenade.” So Kelly now declares his hand — romanticising the past (“the beach that needs reconstruction”) while very reluctantly walking into the future. He doesn’t seem to want to go to Sydney at all, despite what is there. This might explain the rather backhanded compliment that he gives to Sydney: “and if the rain don’t fall too hard / everything shines like a postcard / everything goes on just the same.”
There is another version of St Kilda on the Hidden Things album. It’s a full band version that seems entirely redundant. Kelly opts for an entirely different melody for the first verse; it sounds rather like a harmony melody sitting oddly in the mix without the original grounding melody. The sax solo is missing too, replaced by a non-descript harmonica break. Kelly would end up re-recording over half the songs on Post and in no case did he improve them. Some of them became great full band rock songs, almost party songs on the follow-up double album Gossip. So, having buried his previous albums, Kelly wanted to do the same with Post.

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