Almanac Music Review: Paul Kelly, in Melbourne, Sep 7, 2025

PAUL KELLY – a review

By Warwick Hadfield

As he made his way around Australia on this tour, other reviewers have sought to describe him: the nation’s folk laureate, its troubadour … at the end of a concert at Rod Laver Arena on September the 7th, he is simply but magnificently a bloke who sings songs about his observations of Australia with an authenticity un-matched … probably unmatchable.

I once asked Paul Hester, when I was presenting The Sports Factor on ABC Radio National, about how American audiences responded to Leaps and Bounds, particularly the lyric about the MCG and he said: “Warwick they’re not really processing it!” But with Kelly this night and apparently the others in the week before, this audience did, how could they not in Melbourne? and everything else, because he sings to them, for them, their country, its idioms and idiosyncrasies, like making gravy on a stinking hot day in December.

And he allowed the audience, packed to the Patrick Rafters, to speak louder than the idiots who had paraded through Melbourne a week before believing dressing in black, wearing swastikas and threatening peaceful protestors somehow compensated for their manifold manhood and intellectual failings. The cheer for Kelly’s Welcome to Country, echoed all the way up to Rocket’s stadium’s roof.

Before all that, as the water taxi made its putt putt way up the Yarra Yarra, there was anticipation of what was to come, and evidence that Kelly, now 70, has managed to transit generations – greybeards and blue rinses mixed with blokes not far from their first shave, and a young blonde wearing a Paul Kelly beanie. Merch, the saviour now you don’t get much for making records.

There was the pleasant discovery of a third support act, Fanny Lumsden and the Prawnstars. She sings and writes about Australia, not with – to indulge in the cliché – the spirituality of Kelly, but with a hearty laugh, as the name of her band suggests.

Then, Lucinda Williams, a support act in name only, one of Americana’s finest songwriters, her body twisted by a stroke but her voice still filling every centimetre of Rocket’s aforesaid stadium. She didn’t do Passionate Kisses or Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, but what she did, with a shit-hot band, was pretty damn good. Though she couldn’t explain why when blessed with recording time at Abbey Road she had sought to do Beatles covers. As she confessed, the originals were already the best versions ever, but her two guitarists had a fair old crack at emulating George and Eric on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Those guitarists, the bass player and the drummer gave everything in support of the women whose medical ills meant she had to hobble on to the stage, led by a roadie with a torch to make sure she reached the microphone safely. Her immobility – and her players obvious respect for their singer – added more to the performance than it took away.

Then out came the maestro, perhaps inspired by Dylan, playing his first song sitting at a piano. Seventy, pffffft, this was ageless stuff, and Before Too Long, the audience was off, as was Kelly himself, jumping off Pete Luscombe’s drum riser. 70, pffft. But obviously, despite his grand fascination with cricket, about which he spoke to the same Sports Factor as Hester, his knees haven’t suffered the vicissitudes of bowling a gazillion overs on concrete-hard Australian pitches.

Also going off for no other reason apparently than excess of the cold brown liquid, two blokes in the expensive seats having a ding-dong blue. These idiots did their dough, to use an idiom. Security pounced. Out! In that moment, the Kelly who played the rough gigs on his way to his current elevated status, and we’re not talking about standing on the drummer riser here, rallied through. There was a flicker of “shit what’s happening” in his eyes, then he played on as you did in the pubs 40 years ago, and now even in this more gentrified environment. The pugilists missed Gravy. Torch phones alight, it stirred, like the tomato sauce for sweetness and tang, the inner soul. Kelly’s capacity to make the mundane profoundly meaningful at its finest.

I didn’t miss the non-appearance of Bradman. It might have been sacrilege to do it in Rocket’s arena. Whatever I have never been quite comfortable with the song, which had the John Howard “Bradman is flawless” view of the little bloke. Bradman could be an arch prick, something which is always to be measured against his batting and his passion for Australian and world cricket, reflected in his many years as the most powerful administrative figure in the game. He did much good, but great chasms like World Series Cricket might never have happened had he been more open to innovation and paying players their due. And of course there is, in his captaincy times, the issue of the four Catholics, or the cheque from a benefactor that wasn’t shared with team-mates, but perhaps I spent too much time in the old press box at the SCG with William Joseph. There was a nano second, also, in sporting vein, to wonder about Sure Got Me, the song he may or may not have written about Wayne Carey and Kelli Stevens. Unlike Carey and Steve, Kelly didn’t go there. And any way by now, we were up to the encore and the anthemic Leaps and Bounds.

The night finished with an acapella moment with the singing members of his band, including the soaring voice of Jess Hitchcock. Kelly had a bunch of loyalists playing with him, for him. More than occasionally, they were let loose, but the night revolved around this 70-year-old man, the sun, to their solo and solar system.

Hardly a surprise. Kelly and his accustomed acoustic guitar and harmonica have a canon that stretches across time, from the Dreamtime, from sepia Australia – men in Akubra hats next to women in frocks – to the hues and heritages of the rainbow nation sensible people are happy to champion.

The water taxi back down the Yarra Yarra, when it was 11 or so degrees, was a time for quiet chat and reverence. Without descending into hagiography – St Paul on the road to Damascus Kelly this was not – it was a special evening of Australiana, its ancient beginnings to the modern, where there can still be optimism. From Little Things, Big Things Grow. And there’s now Rita. When that other Paul, McCartney, sang about his Rita, it was a bit naff. Kelly’s Rita, and the intro, “he should have been worried about Dan getting too close in Gravy”, bought a chuckle. The song itself was archetypal, the voice, the piano and guitars, the big chorus.

There was humour, there was humility. If there has been an epiphany, it is that the ambitious Kelly of years ago who might have burned a few along the way and could at times be disagreeable even with those who promoted him, even loved him, has now made it to the place that sells out Rod Laver Arena twice, and will easily do it again. 70, pffft.