Gossip – Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly’s formative years fall into three distinct periods – growing up in a large Catholic family in Adelaide as an inquisitive and thoughtful kid mad on sport; moving to Melbourne to pursue a career in music and having a brief dalliance in the world of pop (including an appearance on Countdown with the Dots); before finally finding wide recognition and success after moving to Sydney in the mid 80’s. By the time he’d turned the corner in his career with the release of Gossip in 1986 he was 31. It was a long apprenticeship.

At that point in Kelly’s life his first marriage had broken up and he was sharing the responsibilities of raising his young son Declan. As a struggling musician with little money keeping odd hours and a heroin habit it was anything but an ideal scenario. After Kelly landed in Sydney he shared a flat in Randwick with drummer Michael Barclay and guitarist Steve Connolly. Both would play on his solo album Post (1985) and then become members of the Coloured Girls (later changed to the Messengers), along with Jon Schofield (bass) and Peter Bull on keyboards as Kelly’s band for his next 4 albums.

With Kelly struggling to reboot his career he borrowed the princely sum of $3500 from friends to make the stark and stunning album Post. It’s stripped bare arrangements made it sound at times like a demo and while the album failed to make a dent in the charts it drew praise from critics, including Australian Rolling Stone who named it album of the year.

The following year Gossip was released as a double album. For an artist with no track record of success to release a double album on a major label shows an extraordinary vote of confidence from Mushroom Records, though label supremo Michael Gudinski wasn’t sold on the band and only agreed to the deal after Mushroom’s Head of PR Michelle Higgins convinced him to take the band on. The story goes that she locked herself into a hotel room for the best part of a week with Gudinski and refused to go until he’d signed them. All it takes is one believer…

Last Train rolls out on track one with a mournful harp courtesy of Chris Wilson. It’s a classic album opener, an invitation to get on board for the journey, though in this case it’s the very last train – after years of waiting for his due recognition maybe Paul was telling us to get on board or risk missing out altogether. It’s a blues number with a deceptively slow, loping, funky rhythm driving the verses with Steve Connolly’s guitar picking up the melodic tempo in the bridge.

According to Paul Kelly Leaps And Bounds had been kicking around for a long time as a song and is essentially about nothing, but I disagree – like the disingenuous Seinfeld the song is very much about something. It has to be because it resonates with so many of us. It extends beyond the idea of nostalgia overlooking the MCG (Melbourne’s home of cricket, Australian Rules Football and the ‘56 Olympics) because even for us non-Melburnians this song invokes a kind of longing. Kelly of course is a huge sports fan, particularly cricket and AFL, so it’s an obvious connection – but he’s also lived in at least a couple of houses that have overlooked that colosseum providing plenty of impetus to write the song.

Paul was just 13 when his father died of a heart attack, to suffer such a monumental event at a tender age it seems odd that it might give rise to an up tempo song such as Before The Old Man Died. Kelly though likes to approach his topics from a range of perspectives, in this case a song brimming with youthful enthusiasm and possibility in the days before his father passed away. In contrast the second song on the album to deal with the subject Going About My Father’s Business is a more reflective take on Paul’s relationship with his dad. This time viewed through the prism of his own parenthood with Paul considering his responsibilities as a father. 

Down On My Speedway is a straight out no nonsense 60’s rocker driven by Steve Connolly’s slightly distorted guitar. White Train keeps up the album’s momentum, though it does it through the rhythm of Paul’s acoustic guitar. Michael Barclay’s kit keeps the 4/4 beat, but at its heart it’s really a fast country song.

Randwick Bells is one of Gossip’s standouts. There’s something about this song that really encapsulates a Sydney that no longer exists. It harks back to a time when we all seemed to have time for the little things, like lazing in on a weekend. That flat where Paul lived in Randwick was around the corner from a church where the bells were always playing on the weekend and always out of tune. For something that would have annoyed the pants off most of us Paul manages to romanticise it, no doubt helped by the new love in his life at that time that was helping him find other ways of losing his pants. But there’s something more to Randwick Bells than just the lyrical tone. What really makes the song is the space in the arrangement of the rhythm in the acoustic guitar and when Chris Coyne’s stunning sax kicks in it sounds like the afterglow of sex on a Saturday morning. Now really, was that the intent? I’ve no idea, but it sure as hell feels like it to me.

Before Too Long was the first single off the album and the song that finally gave Paul his first hit. It’s a beautifully constructed tune centred around Steve Connolly’s guitar. With this catchy, upbeat piece of pop clocking in at just over 3 minutes it sings out loud and clear: “Hello radio, I’ve arrived!”

Adelaide was written on the grand piano in Don Walker’s King’s Cross home where Paul bunked down when he first arrived in Sydney. It’s one of 4 songs from Post that Paul reworked with the full band for Gossip and it’s a song that got him into a bit of trouble. While virtually all of the lyrics are true, the two lines that aren’t made claims about his “insane aunts” and that “all of the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t drag me back there again”. His friends and family back in Adelaide didn’t take too kindly to those lines, but why let the truth get in the way of a good lyrical lie?

Somebody’s Forgetting Somebody is a melodic waltz with a gentle Hawaiian guitar, but as always with Paul it’s our flawed humanity that comes through. It’s a song that ponders a broken relationship (his marriage perhaps?) as he wonders who his ex is sharing her most intimate moments with now. Like all great songwriters it’s the subtle moments in a song that can make all the difference, when Paul sings about something as innocuous as the keys to the car and puts his emphasis on the word “useless” it spells out his defeat. Then that lonesome harmonica of Chris Wilson chimes in like a howling prairie dog to drive the point home on this beautifully sad and reflective song.

With So Blue Kelly dips his lid to Paul Cezanne after viewing the Lac d’Annecy and while Kelly makes it clear that Matisse and Picasso owe Cezanne a debt it’s something both those artists had already acknowledged. There’s another sly reference to Cezanne on Gossip with the back cover of the album featuring a painting by Peter McGregor entitled “The Chess Players”, clearly a nod to Cezanne’s “Les Joueurs de Cartes (The Card Players).”

The Execution is a fabulous sonic guitar journey for Steve Connolly that drifts in and out of intensity, ultimately building with a rousing chorus with Michael Barclay’s drumming thumping in behind it. It’s one of the buried gems on this album.

Incident On South Dowling is one for the engine room of the band with Jon Schofield’s bass and Barclay’s drumming carrying the song. Connolly once again gets to exercise his lead guitar chops with Chris Wilson’s honking harp in a showcase for the talents of this tight band who at times threaten to leave one of Australia’s greatest songwriters in the back seat, but then it’s just a set up for the album’s most poignant song.

Maralinga is one of the saddest, sorriest and most haunting songs Paul has written. Maralinga was the site of the late 1950’s British nuclear tests in the South Australian desert, exposing the local Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people to the fallout along with a number of Australian servicemen. The land was supposed to be unoccupied and for decades secrecy surrounded details of the tests. Kelly talks about discovering the truth in his insightful tome How To Make Gravy after reading an expose by Bob Ellis in 1985 and then provides details on the two indigenous Australians who feature in his song.

Yami Lester was a member of the Yankunytjatjara people who later revealed his experiences of living there as a young boy at that time. He spoke of the ground shaking and the black mist that rolled across the desert covering the land. He told of the horrible illnesses and painful deaths his people suffered as a result of that exposure. Edie Millipuddy was also exposed to radiation. She and her husband were forcibly washed down after the tests in humiliating circumstances. Edie miscarried twice afterwards and later lost her husband. To prove to the soldiers she understood English she sang: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so.”

This is where the brilliant song craft of Paul Kelly comes in, taking two perspectives of the same event and seamlessly combining them to create a much bigger picture. In this case he does it by becoming the voice of both the song’s victims. Maralinga is underpinned by a hypnotic rhythm guitar evoking the endlessness of the outback with singular electric guitar sounds cutting into the soundscape like anguished cries of pain. He sets up his lyric with the refrain “this is the rainy land”, but against this desert backdrop it’s a reference to the most hideous kind of precipitation – a burning poison that never dies. Kelly then borrows the indigenous Dreamtime imagery that the locals used to try and understand what was happening as the bombs went off. As the story unfolds he takes Edie Millipuddy’s line of “I know that Jesus loves me I know, because the bible tells me so” and builds it into the rhythm of the song. Its repetition gives it the feel of an indigenous chant sung like a Sunday School choir and in doing so Paul Kelly creates a much deeper implication. Surreptitiously it becomes a representation of the historical push by Europeans to bring Christianity to indigenous Australia while at the same time inferring that indoctrination was an excuse to both abuse and absolve them at the same time. Genius.

Darling It Hurts kicks in with the dirtiest guitar riff ever heard on a Kelly song. The song deals with a man trying to come to terms with his ex girlfriend working as a prostitute on the streets of Darlinghurst in Sydney’s red light district. Darling It Hurts is a play on words with Paul inspired by a piece of graffiti from Toby Zoates who’d painted the phrase in the area some time earlier. Kelly also plays with the language when he uses lines like “men with glad hands” looking for working girls and then drops the line about “the man with the Glad bag” as a reference to the zip lock bags used by drug dealers. References most likely lost on overseas audiences, but that still didn’t stop the song from becoming a hit in the U.S.

Stories Of Me is a classic Kelly tale of woe with Dianne Spence’s sax and Peter Bull’s keys echoing the sentiments of the lyric. The song concerns a remorseful drunk who turns to the bottle after splitting with his girl and is then forced to listen to tales of his dubious behaviour from his mates the next day. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of the subject isn’t that dissimilar to Sweet Guy which surfaced 4 years later on So Much Water So Close To Home, a song written from a female perspective living with an abusive partner.

Stories Of Me was such a sobering tune that I always thought it should have been the last song on the album, but as there were numerous versions of Gossip released with varying numbers of tracks depending what format the record was on and what market the album was released in – the USA for instance only had 17 tracks on the original CD release, whereas Australia had 21 tracks (ending with Don’t Harm The Messenger), while the original double vinyl album contained 24 tracks (ending with After The Show) so it’s a futile argument.

Regardless of the format Paul Kelly had at long last proven beyond a doubt that he was one of Australia’s finest songwriters – a man who could write so poetically about the mundane minutiae of everyday life to make it interesting, relevant, and more importantly, Australian. Kelly gave us a sense of identity like no one had before or since and did so in a way that gave us pause to reflect on who we are and where we’ve come from. He distilled the essence of our identity. One of Australia’s most celebrated indigenous artists Archie Roach, put it simply when he said: “Paul Kelly is our bard”. Given Paul’s love of Shakespeare I think he’d be pleased with that.

Here’s a few Paul Kelly faves from Sound Distractions: