Paul Kelly (Australian musician)
Paul Maurice Kelly AO (born 13 January 1955) is an Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has performed solo, and has led numerous groups, including the Dots, the Coloured Girls, and the Messengers. He has worked with other artists and groups, including associated projects Professor Ratbaggy and Stardust Five. Kelly's music style has ranged from bluegrass to studio-oriented dub reggae, but his core output straddles folk, rock and country. His lyrics capture the vastness of the culture and landscape of Australia by chronicling life about him for over 30 years. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly "one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise".[1] Kelly has said, "Song writing is mysterious to me. I still feel like a total beginner. I don't feel like I have got it nailed yet."[2]
Not to be confused with the American musician or the Irish musician.
Paul Kelly
Paul Maurice Kelly
13 January 1955
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Musician
- singer-songwriter
- producer
- poet
- Vocals
- guitar
- harmonica
1974–present
After growing up in Adelaide, Kelly travelled around Australia before settling in Melbourne in 1976. He became involved in the pub rock scene and drug culture and recorded two albums with the Dots. Kelly moved to Sydney by 1985, where he formed Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. The band was renamed Paul Kelly and the Messengers, initially only for international releases, to avoid possible racial interpretations of the word "coloured". At the end of the 1980s, Kelly returned to Melbourne, and in 1991 he disbanded the Messengers.
Kelly's Top 40 singles include "Billy Baxter", "Before Too Long", "Darling It Hurts", "To Her Door" (his highest-charting local hit in 1987), "Dumb Things" (appeared on United States charts in 1988) and "Roll on Summer". Top-20 albums include Gossip, Under the Sun, Comedy, Songs from the South (1997 compilation), ...Nothing but a Dream, Stolen Apples, Spring and Fall, The Merri Soul Sessions, Seven Sonnets and a Song, Death's Dateless Night (with Charlie Owen), Life Is Fine (his first number-one album) and Nature. Kelly has won 14 Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Music Awards, including his induction into their hall of fame in 1997. Dan Kelly, his nephew, is a singer and guitarist in his own right. Dan performed with Kelly on Ways and Means and Stolen Apples. Both were members of Stardust Five, which released a self-titled album in 2006. On 22 September 2010, Kelly released his memoir, How to Make Gravy, which he described as "it's not traditional; it's writing around the A–Z theme – I tell stories around the song lyrics in alphabetical order".[3] His biographical film Paul Kelly: Stories of Me, directed by Ian Darling, was released to cinemas in October 2012.
In 2001, the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) listed the Top 30 Australian songs of all time, which included Kelly's To Her Door, and Treaty, written by Kelly and members of Yothu Yindi. Aside from Treaty, Kelly wrote or co-wrote several songs on Indigenous Australian social issues and historical events. He provided songs for many other artists, tailoring them to their particular vocal range. The album Women at the Well from 2002 had 14 female artists record his songs in tribute.
Kelly was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2017 for distinguished service to the performing arts and to the promotion of the national identity through contributions as a singer, songwriter and musician.[4] Kelly was married and divorced twice; he has three children and resides in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne.
Early life[edit]
Paul Maurice Kelly[5] was born on 13 January 1955 in Adelaide, to John Erwin Kelly, a lawyer, and Josephine (née Filippini), the sixth of eight surviving children.[6][7] According to Rip It Up magazine, "legend has it" that Kelly's mother gave birth to him "in a taxi outside North Adelaide's Calvary Hospital".[8]
Although Kelly was raised as a Roman Catholic, he later described himself as a non-believer.[9][10] He is the great-great-grandson of Jeremiah Kelly, who emigrated from Ireland in 1852 and settled in Clare, South Australia.[11] His paternal grandfather, Francis Kelly, established a law firm in 1917, which his father, John, joined in 1937.[12]
John Kelly died in 1968 at the age of 52, after having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease three years earlier.[13] Paul Kelly was thirteen years old when his father died.[14] Kelly described his father: "I have good memories, he was the kind of father that, well, I missed him when he died very much. The older children were growing into him at the time he died. He was not well enough to play sport with me."[15][16]
Kelly's maternal grandfather was an Argentine-born, Italian-speaking opera singer, Count Ercole Filippini, a leading baritone for the La Scala Opera Company in Milan.[17]
Filippini was touring Australia in 1914 with a Spanish opera company when World War I broke out; Filippini stayed and later married Anne McPharland, one of his students.[11] As Countessa Anne Filippini, she was Australia's first female symphony orchestra conductor.[15] She sang the role of Marguerite in Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio Perth's performance of Faust in 1928.[17]
Kelly's grandparents started the Italo-Australian Opera Company, which toured the country in the 1920s.[18]
Josephine raised the younger children alone after John's death, but found time to assist others in need.[14] Paul's oldest sister, Anne, became a nun and went on to write hymns, while a younger sister, Mary-Jo, plays piano in Latin bands and teaches music.[19][20]
An older brother, Martin, works for Edmund Rice International,[21][22] with another brother, Tony, a drug and alcohol counsellor, who ran as an Australian Greens candidate in the 2001 and 2004 federal elections.[23][24] Josephine Kelly moved to Brisbane, where she died in 2000 at the age of 76.[25]
Kelly attended Rostrevor College, a Christian Brothers school, where he played trumpet and studied piano, became the first XI cricket captain, played in the first XVIII football (Australian rules), and was named dux of his senior year.[26][27] He studied arts at Flinders University in 1973, but left after a term, disillusioned with academic life. He began writing prose and started a magazine with some friends.[28]
Kelly spent several years working odd jobs, travelling around the country and learning guitar before he moved to Melbourne in 1976.[29][30]
Studio albums
Films[edit]
Paul Kelly: Stories of Me (1 October 2012) is an Australian documentary by Shark Island Productions.[197] The film is an intimate portrait of Kelly that follows his 40-year career as Australia's foremost singer-songwriter.[197] The film won the Film Critics Circle Award in 2012 for Best Documentary, and the ASE Award in 2013 for Best Documentary Editing. Nominations include the ADG Award in 2013 for Best Documentary Feature and AACTA Award 2013 for Best Sound in a Documentary. The film was part of the Official Selection at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2012[242] and the Canberra International Film Festival in that year.[243]