Larry Schwartz
Paul Kelly tells Larry Schwartz that Kev Carmody’s tribute album is long overdue.
IN THE late 1980s Paul Kelly spent several wonderful days kayaking, fishing and making music around a campfire at Lake Wivenhoe, west of Brisbane, with his son Declan and friend, singer-songwriter Kev Carmody.
According to Kelly, Carmody kept playing a certain phrase on his mandolin.
Kelly, who had a tentative title in his notebook for a song he thought might be apt for a love song along the lines of the Temptations’ It’s Growing.
But some songs don’t go to plan. Talk turned to the struggle for land rights and the historic 1966 strike at Wave Hill cattle station, in the Northern Territory, where Gurindji stockmen led by Vincent Lingiari walked off the job in a dispute over wages and conditions. Instead of a love song, Kelly
realised he had something quite different.
At the campfire that night, neither he nor Carmody, son of a Murri woman and a man of Irish descent, could remember the details of the Wave Hill strike. Back home in Sydney, where he lived at the time, Kelly read up on it in Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians and added a few words.
“I faxed it off to Kev and we finished it over the phone.”
Little did they know their From Little Things Big Things Grow would be a classic Australian song, up there with Shane Howard’s Solid Rock or Neil Murray’s My Island Home.
“You just don’t know with songs,” Kelly says. “You make them and you push them off the shore (like) little paper boats and some of them sink and some of them just keep sailing.”
Kelly and his then band, the Messengers, included it on their 1991 album, Comedy; Carmody featured it two years later on his album Bloodlines.
They sang it this year with a cast including Missy Higgins, Steve Kilbey, Tex Perkins and Sara Storer at a tribute concert to Carmody at the State Theatre in Sydney that Kelly rates among career highlights that include singing to 70,000 people with Neil Finn at Sydney’s Domain in 2000.
Kelly first met Carmody at festivals in the 1970s and was struck by the older man’s “great attack and rhythm on the guitar”.
“He spat his words out,” says the Melbourne-based musician when we met to speak about a documentary on Carmody and his music that airs on SBS at the weekend.
“It was a mix of prayer and politics. There’s a lot of poetry in his lyrics. There’s lyricism mixed with anger and commentary and storytelling.”
A longtime admirer of Carmody’s work, he approached other musicians, including his nephew Dan Kelly, Claire Bowditch, the Herd and the Pigram Brothers to contribute to last year’s two-CD tribute album, Cannot Buy My Soul, which took its title from a song that Kelly says “sums up Kev’s
writing at its best”.
“It’s strongly political and it’s also a hymn,” he says. “It’s a beautiful song. That’s why Archie (Roach) was the first choice to sing it on the album.”
The 32-track album has sold up to 20,000 copies and helped raise awareness of an artist sometimes overlooked since he first recorded nearly 20 years ago.
“Kev’s recordings have probably been rough and his singing isn’t that polished,” Kelly says, speculating on why Carmody is not better known. “He’s got his own style. He has written a wide range of songs, from really didactic, political ones to the songs like Moonstruck (by Sara Storer on the
album) or I’ve Been Moved (Dan Kelly) that I call hymns. Then you’ve got great story songs like Droving Woman (Augie March, Missy Higgins and Paul Kelly) and heaps that didn’t get on the record.”
He’d first discussed the project with Tex Perkins.
“I said I was thinking of getting various people to do Kev’s songs and Tex just said, Darkside (a song Carmody had written for Perkins). Once Tex had said that I just thought, OK, I have got one and now I’ll go and get some more.”
Some, including Missy Higgins, hardly knew of Carmody’s work. John Butler (Though Shalt Not Steal), among others, was more familiar. Dan Kelly had known him “since he was a little tacker”. Kelly, who notes there has been a special connection between his family and Carmody, had
written a series of songs, including Darkside, at workshops he’d held at a Brisbane school run by Dan’s father Martin and another of Kelly’s brothers, Tony.
“Kev’s been part of my family as well,” says Kelly, who is performing with Paul Grabowsky at the Sydney Festival this month and has a second volume of his greatest hits, Songs from the South, due later this year. He says the Carmody tribute show is slated for the Brisbane Music Festival next
winter.
“I’m hopeful it will get a rollout over the next few years in different cities,” he says. It may well. As the song says, from little things big things grow.
The Age, 02nd of October 2008
Larry Schwartz Writer