Paul Maurice Kelly was born on 13 January 1955 in Adelaide, South Australia, to John Erwin Kelly, a lawyer, and Josephine Kelly (née Filippini), as the sixth of nine children. Paul Kelly has been acknowledged as one of Australia’s best singer-songwriters. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard – Australian or otherwise.”
Legend has it that Kelly’s mother gave birth to Kelly “in a taxi in North Adelaide. In the lyrics for the song, “It’s All Downhill from Here” Kelly wrote; I was born in a crowded taxi, Daddy scooped me right up off the floor, And he carried me up the path through the big swinging doors.
Josephine raised the younger children alone after his father died from Parkinsons Disease when Kelly was 13. In his song, “Adelaide”, Kelly wrote:
Dad’s hands used to shake but I never knew he was dying
I was 13 I never dreamed he could fall
And all the great aunts were red in the eyes from crying
I rang the bells I never felt nothing at all
All the king’s horses all the king’s men
Cannot bring him back again
In Kelly’s school years, he played trumpet and studied piano. He was a cricket captain, and became was also dux of his senior year. However becoming disillusioned with academic life, he began writing prose, travelling around Australia and learning guitar before he moved to Melbourne in 1976. Kelly made his first public performance in 1974 in when he sang Bob Dylan’s “Girl from North Country.” His first published song, “It’s the Falling Apart that Makes You”, was written after listening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
Paul Kelly has been acknowledged as one of Australia’s best singer-songwriters. His music style has ranged from bluegrass to studio-oriented dub reggae, but his core output comfortably straddles folk, rock, and country. His lyrics capture Australia’s vastness both in culture and landscape; he has chronicled his life for over 30 years and is described as the poet laureate of Australia. According to music writer Glenn A. Baker, his Australian-ness may be a reason Kelly has not achieved international success. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard – Australian or otherwise.”
Fellow songwriter Neil Finn (Crowded House) has said, “There is something unique and powerful about the way Kelly mixes up everyday detail with the big issues of life, death, love and struggle – there’s not a trace of pretense or fakery in there”. However, Kelly has been quoted as saying “Song writing is mysterious to me. I still feel like a total beginner. I don’t feel like I have got it nailed yet”.
Kelly has also described his songwriting as “a scavenging art, a desperate act. For me it’s a bit from here, a bit from there, fumbling around, never quite knowing what you’re doing … Song writing is like a way of feeling connected to mystery.” He has resisted the label of ‘storyteller’ and insists that his songs are not strictly autobiographical; “they come from imagining someone in a particular situation. Sometimes a sequence of events happens which makes it more a story, but other times it’s just that situation”. Sometimes the same character is found in different songs, such as in “To Her Door”, “Love Never Runs on Time”, and “How to Make Gravy”.
Kelly has written songs with and for numerous artists, including Mick Thomas, Geyer, Kate Ceberano, Vika and Linda Bull, Nick Cave, Nick Barker, Kasey Chambers, Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach, Gyan, Monique Brumby, Kelly Willis, Missy Higgins, Missy Higgins, and Troy Cassar-Daley. He has described how some songs he writes are suited to other vocal ranges. “Quite often, I’m trying to write a certain kind of song and it’s more ambitious than what my voice will get to. That’s how I started writing songs with other people in mind”.
Kelly and Carmody’s “From Little Things Big Things Grow” was analysed by Sydney University’s Linguistics professor James R Martin. “[They] render the story as a narrative … with the familiar Orientation, Complication, Evaluation, Resolution and Coda staging”. Martin finds that Kelly and Carmody made the point that when people exert their rights with support from friends, they may defeat those with prestige.
Kelly understands that co-writing with other songwriters lends power to his songs. “You often write songs with collaborators that you would never write by yourself. It’s a way of dragging a song out of you that you wouldn’t have come up with”. In 2010 Carmody and Kelly’s “From Little Things Big Things Grow” was added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia Registry.
Paul Kelly’s first marriage (1980–1984) was to Hilary Brown, and they had one son, Declan Kelly. Kelly’s second marriage (1993–2001) was to Australian actress Kaarin Fairfax and they had two daughters together. His most recent relationship has been with Sian Prior (2002 to 2011) who is a journalist, university lecturer and opera singer. In his memoir, Kelly credited Prior with inspiring him to give up his long-term heroin addiction, “I got lucky, I met a woman who said: ‘It’s me or it’. She gave me the number of a counsellor … I thought about ‘it’ every day for a long time. Less now”.
