INTERVIEW:A set of liner notes became a memoir and the memoir inspired a concert series. SIOBHAN LONGtalks to Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly
AS SLOWLY UNFOLDING accidents go, which is how Paul Kelly describes his “mongrel memoir” How To Make Gravy, the experience has left him with precious little in the way of bruised ribs – but with a raft of picaresque tales that shimmy out from beneath the covers of his songbook.
This Australian singer/songwriter brings that songbook to Dublin (September 7th-10th) for a four-concert series titled The A to Z Recordings.He will be performing 100 songs from his vast back catalogue alphabetically over four consecutive nights, and giving his fans a rare chance to savour their own particular favourites and get some insight into the influences that shaped his writing.
What started as a set of liner notes for an A to Z CD project gradually morphed into a doorstop of a memoir. In person, Kelly is a taciturn individual, rarely given to revealing much of the detail behind his music. But now that he has discovered this alternative form of writing – memoirs demand personal revelation where songwriting is all fiction, he insists, even if the genesis of a song might lie in fact – he has taken to it with gusto. Each chapter starts with a song lyric followed by a story. It’s a simple formula that yields rich pickings for the reader.
“I wanted each chapter to work as a totally self-contained piece of writing,” Kelly says, hoping to draw a distinction between what might be simply an extended alphabetical set list and a biographical work that would stand the test of time. “I wanted the architecture of the book to work, but I also wanted to make sure that if someone wanted to jump ahead to the songs beginning with W or M, that wouldn’t be a problem. They might just miss a couple of running gags here and there.” Kelly seems to have satisfied the hoary old chestnut that inside each of us lurks a book – with the added bonus that others would want to read it.
Having had to steel himself to the discipline of sparsely-populated lyric sheets for so long (comparisons have been made between his bare writing style and that of Raymond Carver), he revelled in the unexpected delights of prose writing. Maybe that’s because he admits to sharing Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that “a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order”.
“Songwriting is so elusive,” Kelly says. “You scratch around all day and at the end of the day, you might have nothing. Writing the book, I set myself a target of writing 500 words a day, and most days I got there, or even wrote more. I sensed the book building up brick by brick. It was a much more graspable, solid type of work. I also realised early on that this memoir was non-fiction and I needed to honour that.”
A virtual musical GPS system, Kelly has written extensively on the geography and history of his home country of Australia. Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney are described from buses, trains, planes and automobiles. Aboriginal land rights, nuclear testing, and his abiding sporting fixation of cricket have all been given a forensic treatment. All are characters taken not so much from central casting, but from the margins where extras lurk, their tales all the more compelling than those of the romantic leads.
With three children of his own, and soon to become a grandfather for the second time, Kelly sees the value of leaving something behind for generations to come. There are stories of his maternal grandparents, the intriguingly-named opera singer count Ercole Tonti Filippini and his conductor wife, contessa Nance Filippini. There are wry observations on how language has morphed (sometimes to his chagrin and at others to his delight), and three-dimensional tales of something life tosses in most people’s path: loss. “Life over time is a series of losses: of parents, friends, love, the loss of possibility, the loss of innocence,” he notes in his memoir, with characteristic pragmatism.
Taking stock is another welcome benefit of writing, he admits. “The longer you live, the more precious life becomes. You appreciate life and savour it more intensely. And time adds power to things. If songs are working, and have been around for 20 years, they develop their own power as well. And that’s why I think memoirs will be more interesting in years to come than they are now, because they describe a world that’s gone. Just look at how the world has changed over the last 50 years.”
As a songwriter, eternally on the quest for the happy love song, the arrival of grandchildren offers a fresh start that he admits to relishing. “There’s an old proverb,” Kelly recalls with a smile, “that says that grandchildren offer you another chance at perfect love. I’d go along with that.”
Paul Kelly performs The A to Z Recordings, 100 songs over four nights, at The Sugar Club, Dublin on September 7-10th. His memoir, How To Make Gravy, is published by Penguin. The accompanying eight-CD boxset The A To Z Recordings is out now on Dramatico Records. See paulkelly.com.au
