LARRY SCHWARTZ
HE sang about a woman who took her man dancing along the darkening shore. “Spun his chair `round in circles to the surf’s wild roar…’
Stephen Kearney sang with a quiet intensity. And when he had done, looked about for his musician friend, Jen Anderson, who was producing the new album.
“It was an extraordinary recording,” he says of the most autobiographical of 13 tracks on the new CD, Slackwire. “…It was very hard. There’s a lot of unusual chord changes in it. I finished my song. I thought, I’m not going to do that again. I’ve really put every single ounce of me into that
song.”
“He threw his hands out gripped hers in all his pain/ She felt his anger surge…”
Now where, he wondered, was Anderson. “I went, Jen, Jen. I can’t hear you Jen…”
He laughs. “She was out the back having a cry. She says, `How can you express all of that?’ I says, `I hope you’ve got it all on tape’. She says, `So do I'”. He mimics the violinist’s teary voice.
The New Zealand-born musician best known for the acoustic guitars he has made for the likes of Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Neil Finn and Paul Kelly, will tell you the lyrics might be interpreted in various ways. But he’ll also concede it’s a love song to his wife, “about me and Cath dealing
with this illness”.
Some say trouble comes in threes. In Kearney’s case, the first was the day in the early 1980s he fell off the roof of the three-level pole house he has built at Nungurner Jetty, near Lakes Entrance, and damaged fingers on his left hand. He had to relearn to play guitar with no sensation of the
strings.
Second, when he contracted Ross River Fever in the mid-1990s at a time when he was so much in demand as a luthier, he was working 70 hours a week or more.
A year later, doctors diagnosed a rare illness known as Psoriatic Arthropathy. “It’s like a massive arthritis but a very weird one and in conjunction with the skin psoriatis,” says Kearney, 45, who has been receiving chemotherapy treatment but says the condition is incurable.
“It’s not like osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis. It’s much more weird. It actually partakes of wherever it wants to be in your body at any one time. It just literally moves around… The thinking now is that you might have had a virus in your body for years and years. But then something activates
it. The sickness would have come with getting the Ross River and the stress. I can almost remember when it all started. I had two more guitars to do and was so tired and couldn’t get them done. It was the second one of Mark Knopfler’s and I was so tired. I was thinking, I’ve got to get this guitar
done…”
The nature of the pain – “like being banged on your arms and legs 24 hours a day on the funnybone” – inspired the title of last year’s debut album with his band Spike, Funkneebone.
“It took a long, long time before they could figure out what it was,” he says. “…It goes up and down all the time. Today is pretty good. Yesterday was pretty shithouse. Two weeks ago, it could be so bad that I’d (hardly) get out of the bed for two, three days.”
Grey-bearded in black T-shirt on which is emblazoned images of two of his heroes, Willie and Waylon, Kearney meets us outside his house. He has a marvellously crooked walking stick and good humor despite his discomfort. “I have a tendency to walk backwards,” he explains.
He can no longer walk long distances or make guitars for sale. (He works on guitars when possible but for his own pleasure). But he has learned to see some ironic blessing where others might see a curse, in being enabled to concentrate on songwriting and recording.
“The music now has a personal passion as it is what I can still do,” he says. He cites the British playwright, novelist and screenwriter, Dennis Potter, creator of The Singing Detective, a six-part TV serial on the reminiscence and fantasy of a novelist as he lies in a bed, hospitalised with psoriatic
arthropathy.
Potter, who also suffered from the syndrome, once said: “It could be said that my illness, although my enemy, is also my ally… in that it removes me from the hustle and bustle and makes me redefine myself. It makes me introspective.”
“I can draw inspiration from the torment of pain,” Kearney says, “but not necessarily in an obvious way. Like Raymond Carver’s stories, I see now the smaller things in life to write about and don’t always go looking for the big moment. It also makes me more drawn to my own voice and the
guts to do it to satisfy me.”
Had he still been as preoccupied with the guitar-making as a few years back, we would have been denied the wondrous charm of two albums so far of “rootsy ambience” recorded with a band whose nucleus is Jen Anderson, bassist Phil Kakulas of the Blackeyed Susans, and drummer Ian
Kitney from Tim Rogers Twin Set.
Weird and wonderful stringed and keyboard instruments abound around Kearney’s home. He found them in op shops, pawnbrokers, trash and treasure sales, and even bought an old guitar from from Pentridge Prison after a social worker alerted him it was being used by inmates to play
baseball. His favorite guitars, a 1959 Kay nylon string and a 1918 Martin 2; the Optigan keyboard and Hohner Camping harmonica. The music he loves from early Band albums to Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, Calixeco, The Latin Playboys and Sparklehorse.
He talks about the day he came home after working on Crowded House’s album, Woodface. The telephone rang and Nathan told him there was a “Mr Clapton” on the line. “I said, Ah shit, someone’s having me on…It took me a few minutes to work out I’m actually talking to Eric Clapton.
Oh that’s embarrassing.”
Bob Dylan. Robbie Robertson. Leo Kottke. He’s come into contact with some of the biggest names in the business, jammed with some of them. But he’s not dazzled by it all. “I can just quietly move into the background and watch the rotation of people desirous of meeting the famous and
all that. I think, Oh God, I’d hate to be in that. ..”
Kearney grew up in Gisborne, a “Mexican border town”, he says, on the “very Maori east coast” of New Zealand’s North Island. His father is a judge with a tribunal that investigates claims of infringements of Maori rights under the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.
From early, he was drawn to local Maori gangs. “These guys used to play Hendrix and I used to love blues. I got into blues when I was 10 years old. By the time I was 15, I had my own show on NZBC.”
He hung out at op shops because he had no money for a new instrument.
“My first ever guitar was a Gibson 335 for $50 in a pristine case with not a scratch on it. Not bad, hey?”
He had repaired old guitars for years when it occurred to him to make his own. “And to be honest, the very first guitar was shithouse,” he concedes.
“It was really bad. Because I didn’t have enough tools and I was really floundering. But very quickly I got the ability.
“The odd thing was, I’d been kicked out of woodwork class at school. My mum has a school report saying, `Stephen will no longer be allowed in class because he’s a liability to other students. He shows no aptitude and is uninterested completely in woodwork’. So I must have had this defiant
streak. `I’m going to teach you bastards’. So hence guitar making.”
Kearney thinks back now to the early days touring New Zealand with rock bands. “I was at the age where I wanted to do something on my own, but I didn’t have enough confidence. Songwriting opened that confidence for me. I realised I’m a half-way decent songwriter. I don’t have to be
the virtuoso guitarist behind this. The other people I play with are really really good at backing for me. I’m amazed at those guys. I’m really, really honored that they’d play with me.”
He finds it difficult to play live these days. He gets cramps if he sits too long. But he says: “My music means a lot to me. I can finally open the doors that I wanted to open in my youth…I don’t know if this would have happened without the illness and its effects.”
The Sunday Age 02nd of April 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 