1999

Paul Kelly

with Bic Runga

Heaven II

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly is going on a summer holiday. It seems like we all are  when he plays a full tilt set of songs from the South. Words and music from the Australian dry season, songs from the beaches and the Torrens end, from car trips on long, straight roads, or sitting on the porch waiting for the nights to cool.

It’s a Tuesday night and Heaven is as hot as hell. The place is full and the smoke extractors are working overtime. The crowd is in early-  for Bic Runga, for Kelly, for the Coopers, for the lot. To get, as the poet said in very different circumstances, the beauty of it hot. This is quite a contrast with last year’s shows at Her Majesty’s. Back in the winter, with the crowd stark sober and waiting for the Greatest Hits they got for Father’s Day. The CD had already gone bananas. Now there are two hundred and seventy thousand of them out there, on shelves, in other people’s houses. And Kelly came on stage with three guitars and Don Walker and played a lot of new stuff about somebody called Charlie Owens and he doesn’t even sing Bradman.

In Heaven there are many mansions. The young pub crowd, kids with dodgy IDs who were hardly born when Randwick Bells was written. The old pub crowd, Kelly freaks who go all the way back to the year Dot, and Post, and the Messengers and all that historical jazz.  And the Bic Runga crowd. Sitting close in, waiting for the Christchurch chanteuse with her urchin hair, and her sixties shift dress, and her gorgeous youth. She sings from her remarkable debut album, Drive. It is no wonder that it has outsold everything in New Zealand and now here. It oozes talent and poise. She has arrived ready-made, like Tracy Chapman or Rickie Lee Jones. Her plaintive vocals have echoes of Everything But the Girl but these torch songs are all her own work.

Standing three quarters on to the microphone, Bic Runga is every atom the young diva. We get selections from the album – those one word titles. Drive. Delight. Sorry. And the Hit.Sway. Ashes to Ashes is different, a smartly retro reading of Bowie. The band is lean and as jagged as her phrasing. Colin Brooks is solid on drums, Alan Gregg, alumni of the Mutton Birds, the most under-rated band in Australasia, provides a sinewy bass, while guitarist Peter Minn chugs about and then lets rip on Hey.  The crowd wants More. Bic says Sorry. There’s Kelly and the band to get gaffer taped in before ten o’clock.

The band opens up with long chiming chords. Rattatattat from Luscombe, sepulchral handfuls from Bruce Haymes, Hadley’s bass  climbing up somewhere deep in the ground and Spencer P. Jones winding up his Fender. Kelly sings it slow and long. I was standing in a schoolyard/ I guess it was sometimes in 1965/ Just me and my friends listening to the radio/ And a song came on called I Feel Fine.Words and Music. Spencer extrudes the riff from Norwegian Wood. It’s heavy and hot and the crowd sways like steam.

The list is all recent. I’ll be Your Lover Now, not a favourite but structurally very sound. She’s Rare., the beat throbby and Kelly’s vocal climbing effortlessly. Then, Careless. Spencer dressed in his SP best -jacket and fedora- glides the pedal steel while Kelly steps lightly through lyrics that go a long way back and a long way down. Except not any more. It’s a Sinatra song now. My Way. There is much more invested in Gutless Wonder, its bitter lyric given a sinister drumbeat, slow and mean. Haymes is full of invention, the guitars are spare and hard. Shane O’Mara is currently back with the Empire and, significant as he has been for Kelly’s sound, Spencer is doing more with less.

After some Kelly standards- I’d Rather Go Blind, Love Never Runs on Time, a rapturously  received When I First Met Your Ma – the singer picks up a dobro for Charlie Owens’ Slide Guitar and then switches to an open-tuned acoustic for a new song with a melting  melody. Was it called I Only Want One Day ? Whatever, it is a beauty and there is certainly no wondering what From Little Things … will lead to. The crowd is in full anthem. It is a great song and it is now part of our national literature. So is The Boys Light Up of course. But the difference is that this song may actually Overcome.

Nothing on My Mind, a minor opus gets the major treatment. The band opens out and starts to fly. I am standing right by the mixing desk. Behind the bowler’s arm. The sound is huge and handsomely proportioned. Even better for the Bic and Paul duet. Not Melting, even though we all are. Instead, brilliantly eclectic.West End Girls .The Pet Shop Boys, with the band laying clubland beats at our feet like a Neil Tennant tribute group. Kelly returns to Words and Music and a pulsing Beat of Your Heart,  Peter Luscombe’s bass drum invading our chest cavities while Spencer scatters long ribboning solos. Gravy, a narrative worthy of Raymond Carver, is followed by To Her Door, a raunchy Tease Me and the old Messengers rick-burner, Pouring Petrol on a Drowning Man.

For the encore the crowd croons Dumb Things, then Kelly makes like Junior Murvin forWe Started a Fire before closing with an unblemished Blush. He and the band have blazed through twenty three songs, all Kelly originals. Plus the Pet Shop Boys. There’s nothing for it now but to head out into the night. The summer  night with its starry canopy. Big enough  for all of us.

The Adelaide review, No.185, February, 1999. p. 30.