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August 05, 2005

Paul Kelly – For the Record

Filed under: Archive,Music

2005

In Adelaide for the Foggy Highway Bluegrass Tour, Paul Kelly talks to Murray Bramwell about recent projects.

The A-Z Solo Concerts

They were the opposite of a retrospective for me. I had to do some shows in the Spiegeltent in Melbourne last December and I wanted to do something special. It was always going to be mainly solo. I had one of those middle-of-the-night ideas – four nights, a hundred songs, A-Z with no repeats. Then I realised,  God, I’ll have to practice, I can’t remember all those songs. It was a really good thing to do because I went back and met some of my old songs again.

I did those shows in Melbourne then Julia Holt invited me to Adelaide for the Cabaret Festival in June and I am going to do them again in Sydney in December. My idea now is to make it a regular thing, the way Weddings Parties Anything used to do their Christmas shows.

It has been a revelation because it’s given me a whole new way of working. It is the performer’s dilemma – always between the new songs you want to play and the old songs the audience want to hear. I hadn’t realised until I’d done it that this A-Z format totally short-circuits those problems. It takes it out of chronology  and totally into the alphabet. It gives the audience something to play with – will I go the first night and miss Wintercoat  or To her Door  ? or go to more nights ?

It was hard work and I had to do a fair amount of rehearsal. For Melbourne I spent about a month. I realised the show needed some storytelling. I had to write some script. I’m not a naturally off-the-cuff person.

And still to come  ?

More bluegrass shows in Tassie, the Gympie Muster and Tamworth in January. But this month I have to work on the score for Ray Lawrence’s new movie Jindabyne. It’s based on this Raymond Carver story that keeps following me around – So Much Water, So Close to Home. I met Ray not long after he made Bliss. He asked me about the song based on the story – Everything’s Turning to White and I lent him the Carver collection.

We lost touch and fourteen years later he called me and said “I’ve got this movie, Lantana,  do you want to do the music ?” Since then he has got the rights to the Carver story and the film has been shot – Jindabyne features Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Leah Purcell, John Howard and Chris Haywood. I’ve seen the rough cut, it looks great. The music will be built around voices – keening, humming, women’s voices, men’s voices, lots of drone. There’s a strong landscape presence in the film and it’s going to need a really good soundtrack, so the pressure is on…

The Adelaide Review, No 274, August 5, 2005, p.18.

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