The Australian Songwriter – Paul Kelly

I have been looking to contribute again for a while and I have this Paul Kelly project in mind. I am aware that he is largely a non-entity in the UK but I also know that this place has curious and critical people.

To Her Door

Unlike most of the music I grew up with, I have no solid recollection of how I began tracking the music, the work and life of Paul Kelly. In Australia, he is regarded as the nation’s premier song-writer and he falls into a recognisable tradition of the singing -songwriting troubadour. He has a knack for the refreshed cliché . A personal favourite is “to be good takes a long long time; to be bad no time at all.”

Of course Dylan’s shadow looms large over anybody who strums an acoustic guitar, plays harmonica sometimes solo and often with a band but Kelly has sought to make a particularly Australian version of this tradition in a way that nobody in this country has even come close to. In terms of his topical range he is closer, much closer to Springsteen: dreams, travelling, love , desire , foolishness ( he’s great on foolishness), the drama of small things, fear, betrayal, politics, God, guilt, more love, women, more desire. Musically, he writes folk, rock, folk-rock, country, country-rock. Pretty much never the blues but occasionally goes swampy. Then, bluegrass, soul, back to rock. It seems he has never made a bad record though he thinks most of them are bad in hindsight and has successfully erased his 70’s albums ( Talk and Manilla) which fetch very high prices in the dusty musty second hand record stores around the coast of Australia.

My lack of detailed recollection of Kelly’s music is because he kind of just appeared on radio in the mid-80’s. His specifically Australian voice and Steve Connolly’s guitar ( more on that soon) took their place alongside Midnight Oil, INXS, Icehouse, Mental as Anything, Hoodoo Gurus on the 1980’s FM experience. But some of Kelly’s songs have moved beyond time and into timelessness and in this way he seems more to me like Henry Lawson – more Lawson than Paterson – in his consideration of life and writing as mutual occupations. Like Lawson, too, his personal life is complex and complicated and has undoubtedly informed the depth of his work and that depth is a feature not initially obvious – partly because like all great artists he makes it seem quite easy. Surely I can do that, one might think. No. Not without the work – years of it.

I am surprised to find myself writing about To Her Door. For years it annoyed me – I almost resented it. That hokey, hackneyed country intro played shamelessly and that verse melody – that ridiculous verse melody that Kelly has the temerity to actually lean into. How can he not know that this is a tired melody even before the song is heard, tired even before he even wrote the damn thing? It’s actually half spoken – barely sung at all – and he keeps returning to the 5th ( he sings in the key of G) and so that damned D note is hit repetitively. Surely this cannot be a hit?

But the melody monotony is deliberate at many levels. The lyric is a story ( I often resist third person story songs): “They got married early/Never had much money / Then when he got laid off/ they really hit the skids.” Kelly might have been tempted to write never had no money but maybe he knows that as a white Australian man it is an affectation and he doesn’t need it. Maybe he prefers the alliteration. Maybe he knows it’s not true that they had no money – they had some – but not very much.

The payoff line is “she took both the kids” . “Skids” was a set up for that rhyme. It seems a little gauche to me still that perfect rhyme but the listener is in no doubt and Kelly needs to the setting to be clear before he really gets to the heart of the song: forgiveness, second chances and the fear of screwing it all up. Dylan rarely wrote ( I want to say never but then I’ll find one) about the fear of relationships, the difficulty of them and the way that circumstances conspire*. When I first heard To Her Door I was a kid in my very early 20’s – I didn’t know anything either about fear in relationships. Kelly’s writing deals with this again and again and it’s always fresh and authentic.

The fear isn’t one sided, either. Kelly loves women, likes women, admires them. When he writes a few years later “I’m in love with a difficult woman” he means it affectionately. Verse I finishes with the woman exclaiming : I’m not standing by to watch you slowly die, so watch me walking – out the door.” It’s easy to miss the mastery of the “watch you/watch me” couplet and the door motif. Kelly admires this woman so much, cares for her so much that he gives the most famous aside in Australian music: “shove it Jack I’m walking out your fuckin’ door.” Every listener knows that the man’s name is unlikely to be Jack.

To Her Door is on the set list of every pub band around the country and is played by every hopeful strummer and looper on a Sunday afternoon. In a pub, if the singer shies away from the explicit then the families sitting around their burgers and fired can fill it on their own and often they do. Sorry, kids… don’t say that. In Kelly’s versions, he goes further, varying it and perhaps in his 1992 version he shows his cards more clearly: “she says ‘fuck this, Jack, you’re a fucking loser.” It gets slightly nervous laughter from the audience – comedy is not Kelly’s intention.

Verse 2 is better. By this point I have overcome my resistance to the melody and now it seems to work as Kelly and his audience wrap their tongues around the lines: she went to her brother’s ( prosaic but ) got a little bar work/ he went to the buttery/ stayed about a year. Buttery? He went to a buttery? Who knows but it goes with “bar work”**. Kelly has the man write a letter – see what I mean about Lawson – this guy loves this girl so much he writes a letter but all he says is ” I wanna see ya”. She sends him the fare. Why does she? Pay your own way, mate.

It’s fantastic economy of writing but there is still room for this song to grow. The man is anxious and so Kelly slows the story down: The man travels on a bus to her door and his heart “was singin’ like a low down guitar”. It’s an audacious borrowing of a tradition in country songwriting – include the instruments in the story. It leads to Steve Connelly’s solo and what does he initially play ? That melody, of course. Connelly passed away in 1997 and Kelly has remarked that he had a philosophy of guitar solos: stick to the melody. He doesn’t stick to it, though; he starts his solo with it and then moves away from the bending, curving bass notes and then mathematically works into the higher registers and skates along his fretboard. If not the greatest of his solos, then it is his most well-known. It’s composed rather than improvised and is still played by guitarists in Kelly’s bands – it’s impossible to do anything else. In this phase of Kelly’s work, Connelly is the key collaborator but Peter Bull’s piano is central to what is always thought of as guitar song.

The song is a hit in Australia. That melody turns out to be a strength because it leads to the second melody of the song ( Part B of the verse) which resolves back to the root linking it perfectly to the theme of the song. Kelly actually doesn’t resolve the couple’s circumstances – that would be awful but he asks questions and he saves the best line of the song till the last : “Can he make a picture and get them all to fit?” For all the deliberate plotting of the story, Kelly finally opts for poetry, refusing to provide an ending. But radio doesn’t care about the poetry, listeners don’t notice what amounts to suspicion from this artist that men and women can last – they might want to but wanting is often not enough.

Kelly would return to this doubt mixed with hope throughout his writing. He is romantic but not sentimental. He knows that men cannot live without love and they want a lot of sex too. Often the latter is a price that men are prepared to pay; at least in the short term. Years ago, Bill Flanagan asked Neil Young about country music and consequences and Springsteen picked up on it. Kelly, like Springsteen, is imbued with a reluctant Roman Catholicism along with an earthy libido. Somehow, these elements found their way into this mid-80’s feature of Australian radio and eventually, I grew up enough to hear it.

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*By all means, find Dylan songs in which he recognizes the fear in not of relationships.
** By 1992, Kelly had dropped buttery and now it was simply “he went to the North Coast”.

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