1989

Paul Kelly and the Messengers
Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has to be one of our most eclectic songwriters. The influences crowd in from all directions. Irish folk, American country, Dylan, Guthrie, Costello, even bands like UK Squeeze- they all seem to be in there somewhere. Not that there is anything derivative about Kelly, it’s just that he has such good attennae for all the sounds that sound good.

He has been making great pop music since the year dot. Or at least since 1981 when Talk, the first Paul Kelly and the Dots album was released, followed the next year by Manilla. Then, in 1985, he delivered Post, with what were to be the first versions of Incident on South Dowling, White Train and Adelaide. But it was the double set, Gossip, in 1986, that really showed what Kelly and the Dots, now Coloured Girls, could do. And that was no fluke either -Under the Sun, a year later, contained even stronger material with classics like Dumb Things and Same Old Walk.

Now Kelly and the Messengers (the Coloured Girls have transmogrified again) are touring their latest album, So Much Water So Close to Home, in a whistlestop tour from the East to the very West. A sizable home town crowd greeted Kelly at Thebarton Theatre for his single Adelaide concert and despite the bus trip from Melbourne and shredded vocal cords from the ‘flu, he and the Messengers showed why anyone with any taste would rate them among the best bands in Australia.

Opening with the wistful South of Germany, Kelly took a stanza or two to get his bearings while the team at the sound desk gradually got control of the airwaves. Or at least most of them – Steve Connolly’s fine guitar work got scrunched in a very trebly mix and Kelly’s vocals in the lower register disappeared into the soup as well. Although none of that actually stopped Same Old Walk, Don’t Harm the Messenger and Stories of Me, all performed in rapid succession, from sounding like nearly a million dollars. Kelly’s band -Connolly on guitar, Peter Bull on keyboards, bassist Jon Schofield and drummer Michael Barclay- play as though they share the same ganglia while Paul Kelly himself is about as unpretentious as a rock and roll maestro can be.

For the tour Kelly has added percussionist Ray Pereira and Chris Wilson, lead singer from support band, Crown of Thorns. Wilson played soaring harmonica solos all night, and breathed life into Cities of Texas and the all-stops version of Darling it Hurts, in particular. Solos blossomed throughout – Connolly in She’s a Melody and Peter Bull’s piano in Everything’s Turning to White, Kelly’s eerily truncated version of Raymond Carver’s equally eerie story, So Much Water So Close to Home.

Paul Kelly’s lyrics, always crisp and inventive, continue to astonish. His use of the Carver story is apt because many of his songs are like miniature stories using a variety of narrators- like the mother of seven in South of Germany or the young battered woman in Sweet Guy. He can capture local detail, as in Adelaide or Randwick Bells and he can sing like St Augustine with such disclosures as Stories of Me and Careless, one of the best of the new set.

He has also written some of the best political anthems around. When someone yelled out for Billy Baxter, Kelly genially suggested they go home and play the record instead. Then he played Special Treatment, a song about black oppression Woody Guthrie would be proud to own. Jundamurra followed, about the black rebel who became a legend in the Kimberleys last century. The band roared, driven by Barclay’s tireless drumming and Connolly’s guitar -one minute Duane Eddy , Hank Marvin the next. The Messengers seem to cover the Nashville Skyline, that is when they are not suddenly, led by Peter Bull’s accordion, sounding like Planxty.

Perhaps it is to his credit that Kelly presents his material with so little fuss but you rather wish he’d go for a bit more shading sometimes. For about the last third of the set the band played full-on rock and roll instead of interspersing some of Kelly’s more pensive compositions . Finishing with the Most Wanted Man in the World, he was almost out of voice for the encores. Peter Bull played a Mexican lament on the accordion while Kelly had a gargle before closing the show with an Apocalpse Now rendering of The Execution. The lighting, inventive and striking throughout, really began to shine and the Messengers finished on full throttle.
But after all this juggernaut rock, people still hung back for a bit more Paul Kelly, for something on his acoustic guitar, something a bit awkward and artless and singular, like the singer himself. Maybe nothing quite as obvious as Adelaide, but perhaps a few lines of Randwick Bells, just to ring the changes.

Commissioned by The Adelaide Review but not published. 1989.