Australian singer Paul Kelly insists love songs have always been his staple, and the sad ones are by far the easiest, writes Siobhán Long
He writes with a Raymond Carver sparseness and a sense of irony worthy of Elvis Costello. He's mapped both the history and geography of his native Australia with forensic attention to detail, tracing bus routes from Melbourne's St Kilda to Sydney's King's Cross, fingering old footprints across the rain-soaked streets of his native Adelaide, and casting a cold eye over the terrors of atomic bomb-testing on the Aboriginal lands of Maralinga, not to mention recording the fortitude and resilience of his homeland's native inhabitants in the deceptively anthemic From Little Things Big Things Grow.
Paul Kelly's place in Australian social history is probably safe enough, but that doesn't make him a household name north of the equator. Round these here parts, he attracts a coterie of loyal followers who traipse miles as much to hear his picaresque accounts of thwarted love as to ponder the finer points of Sydney's bus system.
With three decades of songwriting tucked beneath his distinctly ascetic belt, and more than 19 albums to his credit (many of them solo, others recorded with his various bands - most successfully, The Coloured Girls, later known as The Messengers), Kelly has recently released a double album of, wait for it, love songs, titled Ways And Means. And despite his reputation as a sometime social historian, he is insistent that the love song has been his bread and butter throughout his career. And, perhaps perversely, he admits that he's still in hot pursuit of that most elusive of creatures: the happy love song.
"It's easy to write songs about love gone wrong, love unrequited, looking for love," Paul Kelly declares, with furrowed brow, "rather than songs about good lovin'. But I guess because those songs are harder to write, they present a kind of songwriter's challenge. Lots of great soul music did it: Al Green, and all those great Motown singers. I've always loved that kind of music and it's always given me something to aspire to. There's a lot of modern r 'n' b stuff out now, but most of it's horrible: it's almost a kind of soft porn, smarmy and smug. That's our modern version of songs about sexuality."
Kelly's style has never been readily open to classification. Embracing everything from straight-up country to the most pristine pop, with more than a tincture of soul tossed in for good measure, this time round he figures that the flavour's more "country soul", influenced in no small way by the inclusion of his nephew Dan Kelly on electric guitar, banjo and fiddle, and Dan Luscombe on electric and slide guitar and keyboards.
"We tend to call it 'country soul'," Kelly explains. "You'll probably hear some late 1970's Stones in there, with some high falsetto choruses. Singers like Curtis Mayfield and Skip James. We all loved that period of the Stones: Black And Blue and Tattoo You. And even though my falsetto's not that strong, my nephew Dan can really hit those notes, so I felt supported by his voice."
He's dabbled in film, both as an actor and more recently writing soundtracks for the Australian TV series, Fireflies, as well as for the movies Lantana and Silent Partner. With such a long history of storytelling, sometimes the prospect of entering a lyric-free zone can be liberating, he admits.
"I'm pretty ambitious as a songwriter", he confesses, "and I've always wanted to write all kinds of songs. There are quite a lot of visual details in the songs. I'm interested in language and I find language fascinating but then again, I really like songs that are just about putting sounds to music. Writing for soundtracks, which is essentially writing without words, can be really enjoyable as well because words for me are the hardest part of writing songs. I always have more music than words so to have a chance to make up some music and not to have to put words to it can be a relief!"
As a standard-bearer for contemporary songwriters in the southern hemisphere, does he ever buckle under the weight of other people's expectations of him? "You know, I feel I'm part of a line of songwriters in Australia whom I've learnt so much from," he offers, "from The Go Betweens to The Triffids and The Saints, as well as American, English and Irish songwriters. I've always listened pretty widely and I've always seen myself as part of a broader tradition of songwriting rather than a particularly Australian one. Chuck Berry, for example, is such an American songwriter, but he's international as well. Most of my songs are love songs; they happen to be set in Australia, but I don't think that makes any difference to whether they get heard."
And yet, Kelly's earlier material could have come from nowhere else but Australia. Place names resonate throughout his early catalogue: St Kilda, King's Cross, Melbourne's beloved Melbourne Cricket Grounds, the MCG (where for all you born-again Olympic gurus, Ronnie Delaney bagged the 1500 metres gold back in the 1956 Olympics). His more recent songs have had far fewer geographical markers, hinting at the songwriter's wish to target a wider audience perhaps? "Maybe when I was younger, I may have been wanting to make a point," Kelly acknowledges, albeit tentatively. "Maybe I was trying to map out my part of the world, like Lou Reed did New York, or Chuck Berry did America." Chuck Berry has evidently left a serious mark on the boy Kelly.
"It all comes from Chuck Berry," he laughs, offering a rare display of emotion at odds with his more usual taciturn interview style. "He's so much of a genius that his music is everywhere, and people don't actually see that anymore. He's taken for granted. His use of language and his phrasing were phenomenal. Not only that, but he invented a guitar style. His music was dance music, as well as being this beautiful pouring out of language. So, his language, his dance style and the fact that no guitar player can pick up a guitar without some reference to Chuck Berry, is incredible. He's that good." Seeing Kelly positively ignite on stage in Dublin recently, burning up the stage in Whelan's with his nephew Dan, only the deeply comatose or the chronically chart-addicted could have failed to be hooked by his left-field humour and his picaresque tales of love in all its brutal glory.
"Being a performer is a highly repetitive process," Kelly notes, "and the good thing about having a lot of songs is that you can rest some up and then return to them refreshed. A line in a book I'm reading said something like: 'A good marriage needs to find both variety and repetition.' That applies to live performance too. I really like performing - as long as I can get a balance between it and writing. Singing is very physical, and when you sing for a couple of hours most nights, it makes you feel good.
"It's a bit druggy, you know. It's a very enjoyable physical activity. But I need to balance that with knowing that I get to write too.Because the touring, the recording, the performing: none of it would happen without the writing. That's the core."
Paul Kelly's latest album, Ways And Means, is out now on Cooking Vinyl