Paul Kelly: One Day at a Time

Paul Kelly's back in town. I meet him at a King's Cross hotel where his daughter, Madeleine, is turning her slice of cheese into a jigsaw puzzle that makes sense only to her.

On his new album, Deeper Water, Kelly has named a song after her. The chorus? "Madeleine - you never let me sleep." Fathers everywhere will empathise.

While the four-year-old tugs persistently at his hand, Kelly's two-year-old daughter, Memphis, is in another room recovering from carpet burns to the face after she dived off a hotel lounge headfirst onto the floor.

Actor Kaarin Fairfax is, meanwhile, seeing an old friend, the portrait photographer Wendy McDougall, out the door. Kelly met Fairfax in 1988 when she starred in Sam Shepard's Lie Of The Mind. "We were just hanging at the bar," Kelly recalls, throwing the memory to Fairfax like an old joke.

The pair married in 1993. With two young children and stretches of time in Los Angeles - where Kelly has been based kick-starting an American career - Kaarin Fairfax hasn't had much time for acting. That's changing now the family is back in Australia.

"I did Correlli," Fairfax says, acting tough, pushing words out the side of her mouth, "playing a criminal's goil-friend."

At the centre of all this, Paul Kelly just hangs back quietly. Despite the hyperactivity, it's clear his family life protects him - that Kelly pulls it around him like a warm blanket. Seeing him on the couch with Madeleine when I arrive, he's oddly calm, oddly vulnerable.

As he will say later, when discussing his returns to Australia after overseas jaunts: "I like to come home. It's OK here."

Kelly's manager, Rob Barnham, starts ticking off the day's media itinerary with Kelly. I'm tagging along for the afternoon to get a closer look at one of Australia's favourite songmen.

Late last year Kelly toured Europe and America and he's playing at home this month. In typical Kelly fashion, the songs from Deeper Water have become part of our lives.

"That's why you write songs," Kelly says, as if it's nothing special and certainly obvious. "You want them to be in people's lives."

With the Helen Demidenko/Darville controversy still percolating, Kelly's eager to say The Hand That Signed The Paper “is good writing. But all the Jews in the book are communists. So it's bad history." It's a crucial distinction for Kelly, whose poet of the common man credentials are built on both good writing and accuracy - whether it be something as subtly textured and local as allusions to "a Silvertop" taxi (‘To Her Door’) or Randwick bells (‘Randwick Bells’), or a turning point in the history of the land rights movement (‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’).

"I've always liked concrete writing with pictures and details," says Kelly with relish. "Chuck Berry was a great example of that. I'm very conscious of it. I wanted to map where I came from the way Chuck Berry mapped out America."

Dressed in a brown bomber jacket with a blue T-shirt and jeans, Kelly's hair is close and short. I'm sure he has dressed this way for ages, rock 'n' roll basic, nothing too flash. As he says of writing: "Simple is always best."

But the 40-year-old seems slimmer than a year ago, somehow sharper than the sated, middle-aged bloke who last toured. Wanted Man, from 1994, was a critical low point for Kelly. Despite some great live shows, the album sounded like a songwriter falling off the face of American FM rock with a dull thud. Was the guy losing his touch, or getting soft because of family life and success?

Ask Kelly about Wanted Man's artistic failure, ask him about Deeper Water and its profound return to form - his best form ever - ask him if he sees Deeper Water as more coherent, more feeling on every front, and he just shrugs his shoulders.

"My friends like this record better," he finally admits, under pressure. "It's more of a band record I think." Then he laughs. "All my records feel like they're scraped together. Deeper Water is just what I did this year."

Rather than shy or aloof, Kelly's just a quiet guy. Stillness is one of his most potent qualities. It makes him easy company. Strong company, too.

Back when he was the socket-eyed, leather jacketed poet of the early '80s Melbourne music scene with his band The Dots, that stillness simmered with self-destructiveness.

Listen to Post, his stark account of heroin use, inner-city relationships and people dying, hear ‘From St Kilda To Kings Cross’, and you'll get something of the world he left behind when he came to Sydney to live for a few years.

Kelly prefaced his book of lyrics, (called Lyrics) with a quote from Chekov: "I don't have what you would call a philosophy or coherent world view, so I shall limit myself to describing how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die and speak."

On Deeper Water parenthood is Kelly's dominating theme. But Kelly's propensity for mawkishness is absent, and his spare eye never lets the colloquial slide into cliché. Deeper Water's take on family, growing older and love also has a dark edge to it, something in the territory around the songs, that gives the album an unusual intensity and warmth.

Kelly weighs up what I'm trying to say with that observation, weighs it quite considerably.

"I have a pretty good life now," he finally sighs. "But it ... feels like it's endangered. Or precious, or fragile - maybe that's what I'm trying to say. Maybe it's to do with having children or something but, as a parent, you have to be prepared for disaster."

He starts to talk about his song ‘Gathering Storm’. "It sounds like someone waiting for a lover. What was at the back of my mind when I wrote it was a parent worrying about a child. And how there's so much ... a lot of danger."

If Kelly deals with parenthood and the powerfully related theme of mortality in songs like ‘Deeper Water’ and ‘Gathering Storm’, he also deals with sex with unusual rawness and heart. His song ‘Blush’ exalts to the summer beach lyric: "When we kiss she tastes so salty/On her cheek and her neck/I can't wait till I get with her/So I can kiss her salty breasts."

"It's really hard to write about good sex or write straightforwardly about sex without being banal about it," he says. Citing Motown music, Kelly adds "the great thing about a lot of soul music is that they wrote about sex and joy really well. Whereas the singer-songwriter tradition is about things that went wrong, the complications and the unrequited."

He shakes his head. "When I was last in America I was listening to modern r'n'b, urban radio. They played rap, hip-hop and they'll have balladry, but horrible songs all about sex and "doing it', and always the singers doing vocal gymnastics that are very explicit and ... well, just horrible."

At Soundcom, an organisation responsible for Ansett's in-flight music as well as in-store sounds for the likes of Just Jeans and Woolworths, Kelly's asked to play a couple of songs, and it turns into a free concert for the staff, who file in smiling, waiting nervously for him to begin. The intimacy in the small conference room between Kelly's performance and this audience of 20 is absurdly reverent and close.

He chooses ‘Blush’, then ‘Queen Stone’, a thinly disguised paean to heroin, the dark muse, written by his old guitarist Maurice Frawley. Then he follows with ‘Difficult Woman’, which he wrote for Renee Geyer - "I got my hands full with a difficult woman."

Overall it's a sweet, gently intense effort. Everybody claps, absolutely beams appreciation. The love is palpable. Kelly puts his guitar down, embarrassed. "If I'd known you were all coming I'd have practised more."

Outside, in the daylight, Kelly says the experience was "a bit strange". He seems quite rattled, then he laughs. "During the last song I suddenly got a flash of one of those Elvis Presley movies." I tell him about a saying I heard at a party a few months ago. "Scratch an Adelaide person, find an Elvis." Kelly snorts, keeps laughing to himself, then finally says between fits of chuckling: "I'm from Adelaide, you know."

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published as ‘Poet of the Common Man’ in the Sydney Morning Herald Metro, January 12, 1996.

"What will survive of us is love": Isabel Fonseca's Attachment

It's 10am in Primrose Hill, London. The author Isabel Fonseca sits in her kitchen, "tanking up on coffee". An American by birth and a New Yorker at heart, she says, "I can't believe I've lived in England for over 25 years or whatever it is. It's payment for my sins. Or maybe I just forgot to leave."

Her tone has a throwaway flash to it; just joking, right? Fonseca corrects me immediately. "I'm not, you know."

Why such resentment towards her adopted home? After all, England made her, so to speak. From a philosophy, politics and economics degree at Oxford to her role as an assistant editor at The Times Literary Supplement and the publication of Bury Me Standing in 1995, a non-fiction study of the gypsies of Eastern Europe.

That book involved five years of participatory journalism, living and breathing her subjects' lives from Albania to Estonia. Upon publication Salman Rushdie called it "a revelation: a hidden world"; Edward W. Said praised its "profound sympathy and brilliant insight".

In the meantime, Fonseca was making other news over her affair with Martin Amis. She had already picked up the nickname "Funseeker" on the London social circuit, as well as a slew of admirers that purportedly included John Malkovich, Clive James, Bill Buford and, yes, Salman Rushdie.

Men fairly wilted before Fonseca and to this day, at age 46, there is not an article on the internet from The Sunday Times to W Magazine that does not still remark upon her beauty. A formidably intelligent brunette, her dark looks reflected the heritage of her Uruguayan father, a highly regarded sculptor, and her Jewish American mother, a painter and heiress to the Welch grape juice family-company fortune.

Amis would eventually leave his first wife, Antonia Phillips, and their two sons; get a hotshot American agent, a seriously big American publishing deal and even get his teeth fixed. Fonseca was the scarlet woman behind this scandalous Americanisation of a British icon, a cliche that ignored Amis's long-running transatlantic obsessions, not to mention the fact Phillips was an American academic. Fonseca and Amis would go on to marry in 1998 and now have two daughters, Fernanda, 11, and Clio, 9.

When I ask Fonseca about her antipathy to England, she's quick to refine it into something more good-natured: "Oh it's all right. London's just too expensive to be loveable … Actually we just spent a few years living in South America. And it was wonderful, charming, heaven. But I don't mind being in the wrong place. I think for a writer being in the wrong place is often a very good thing."

Back in 2004 Fonseca and family decamped to Uruguay for 2½years in the wake of her father's death. There Fonseca attempted to write and then abandoned a major non-fiction work on her extended family. During that time she turned to "what was, I thought, a short story at first" before it evolved into the highly intimate book she now calls Attachment.

Attachment is not only Fonseca's debut novel it is her first major work since Bury Me Standing. In it she quotes these crucial, if ambiguous words from Philip Larkin's An Arundel Tomb: "What will survive of us is love."

Like the Larkin poem, Attachment takes a somewhat anti-romantic view of romance, before leaving us with a bittersweet and defiantly fragile ending. The book's central character is Jean Hubbard, a syndicated American health columnist married to a high-achieving British advertising executive called Mark. Mark is described as "six feet four in bare feet and striking with his grayed hair swept back, wind-eroded dune grass above the expanding beach of his face". This alone sounds like an awfully good depiction of Amis with a height boost, not to mention a more commercialised slant on his and Fonseca's literary preoccupations.

Like Fonseca, Hubbard has a background that includes having once worked as a paralegal for the summer in New York; she similarly buys pot as a teenager in Washington Square; studies at Oxford; is shadowed by a brother who has died tragically young; deals with a father who is critically ill; and copes with the unexpected appearance of a young woman who might be her husband's daughter (Amis discovered he had an unknown daughter called Delilah Seale in 1997). That the opening of Attachment is set on the imaginary island of St Jacques - supposedly located somewhere near Mauritius, but also a hot, exotic place not unlike Uruguay - brings it even closer to home.

When Attachment begins, Hubbard discovers a sexually provocative letter that leads her to a secret email link and an affair her husband has been having. To find out more about it Hubbard begins writing to "Giovanna" as if she were her husband. This incites Hubbard to abandon herself to a night of infidelity back in London, and to later flirt with an old lover in New York while her father hovers on the critical list in hospital. "Everything was sullied and she was rotting from within," Hubbard reflects as she delves into a world of internet affairs and online pornography. Later, as she embraces a path of disillusionment to license her own betrayals, she admits "this was the consequence she most feared: her own revulsion for her world, for all that she had. Auto-eviction."

Britain is already abuzz with Attachment as an adulterous and confessional insight into a less-than-happy marriage - as well as the critical complications of dealing with a work that may or may not be a roman-a-clef. Attachment is a novel of great promise but it ebbs and flows in its intensity according to the proximity one feels between the author and her "truths". In short, the things Fonseca seems to have experienced are powerfully evoked; the things she appears to have imagined feel forced or contrived.

Fonseca runs a nice line in self-deprecating humour and frankness. But in the course of an hour's conversation she puts herself to the test of her own thinking repeatedly and seems to find herself wanting. Talking on the phone there's that strange, floating sense you have not so much entered her home as her headspace: an inner world so thoughtful and honest it can leave you feeling cowardly by comparison.

"There's a long period of merger in the beginning of any relationship," Fonseca says. "Then with children you sense you have to keep a united front. My daughters are nine and 11 now. Old enough to get your space back a little. You see that you still have a long way to go - I hope! That I'm only halfway … But you also ask, 'Is that it?' Not as a matter of complaint, more as a matter of stupefaction." Fonseca almost laughs. "Here I am, I've made babies, but who am I now that I am on my own again?"

She's adamant "adultery is not the subject of Attachment, but ageing is. There's this disappointment about your decrepitude, this realisation you are going to die which you have never quite accepted. Adolescence and middle-age actually share a lot of parallels. The unease about the body and the sexual awareness that's associated with it, only you have this death awareness that gives it a particular pungency in middle age. Things like the way your parents suddenly demand your attention with their mental or physical fragility or both; or something as simple as the way your children won't do what they're told any more."

Coincidentally Bury Me Standing and Attachment both resound with a quest for home. "Whenever you write it is to investigate some anxiety. Writing about the gypsies there was some public anxiety with identity. Fiction is more about scratching about in a silent anxiety. And your sense of identity often relates to what home means, I guess. I didn't set out to do that. But I see now there's a lot of homesickness in the story [of Attachment] … Maybe it's a cliche of fiction that the past is another country. But this nostalgia for the time before is so often identified with place as much as time."

"You know I still go to New York about four times a year for various reasons. One of the real, but less legitimate reasons I do it is you can imagine life before it happened to you, when things could have gone 19 different ways. I think that's why I'm lucky to be a writer. Because you can think about and write about such things, just to see how you feel."

-                  -  Mark Mordue

·                  *  First published as ‘Well written in the Wrong Place’,

    Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, June 14, 2008

Moves on Silver: You Am I and the recording of Hourly Daily

Tim Rogers is a white ghost in a window; nothing there but the discernible rub of a bodyshirt in reflected light, and a sweet, croaky voice singing about milk and love. Through the double-plated glass of a recording booth at night, his torso shines. The lead singer and guitarist with You Am I is deep inside, finishing off vocals for the band's next single, 'Mr Milk'. It's a sweet song. Later, Rogers will say: "It was about time. There's always a reticence to do an unabashed love song. I didn't want to do it for ages. But why not sing about things that are real ... or can be?"

Along with You Am I bassist Andy Kent and drummer Russell Hopkinson, Rogers has written and recorded 21 songs so far for a prospective album the band is currently calling Hourly Daily. After working with Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo as their producer in New York - both on their 1993 debut Sound As Ever, and this year's Hi Fi Way - You Am I are making this one at home in Sydney, just down the road from Taylor Square and a giant neon sign that says: "Know where you are going."

Third albums always have something big inscribed in their DNA, particularly when you're as widely respected as You Am I. From blistering live shows to ARIA awards, and getting taken on a US tour by "fans" like Soundgarden, You Am I are the feted sons of 1996.

They've picked two producers to work with this time: Wayne Connolly, from Knievel and The Welcome Mat, and Paul McKercher, best known for his work on Triple J's Live In The Studio. Rogers says they did this "to create arguments and violence".

Ostensibly, Metro is here to get the inside story on Hourly Daily. But, when it comes to the crunch, I spend my time in an annexe, blocked out of the studio and You Am I's jumpy privacy. Even when we do talk, their headspace floats through the walls and back to the task at hand. They seem permanently "on".

Coming out of the studio, Rogers presents himself in an eager lanky fever, reaching out elastically to greet me - something about his "skinny arsed", sawn features calling to mind a young Ray Davies or Pete Townshend. Maybe it's the brown corduroys Rogers seems to permanently wear, the band's fondness for side-levers, or their constant allusions to everyone from The Zombies to the Andy Partridge (XTC) biography, but You Am I exude '60s classicism - or what Rogers yearningly calls "simplicity, with a little bit of style".

As a writer, Rogers has become interested in "ordinary situations that can be romantic rather than mundane". In how songs can "make you put on a silly pair of pants, walk a different way, cut your fringe, or just change you. That's brilliant".

He refers to another new song, 'The Count to 4', "about a boy and a girl who get married because there's nothing else to do. I can't believe I wrote a song like that. It's such a Springsteen thing to do". Then he whispers, as if its part of the tragedy, "Nebraska's all right."

Rogers may document the small times, everything from the Courthouse Hotel to fatal kisses, but there's a zing to his hopeless, sometimes bitter-tongued, romanticism. It's called the history of pop music. Rogers is the ultimate fan, with an astounding and encyclopedic knowledge.

"There's nothing better than late at night, writing a song, and thinking: 'Wow, this will be unreal! I can be like Roy Wood when I play this,'" he says, zooming into an air guitar posture. "I just want to make a record I can listen to and love. I want it to be like The Move, The Zombies, Nick Drake. I want it to be an Action record, a Creation record, a Small Faces record. But maybe it won't sound like any of those and I'll just be disappointed. I just don't want to make a typical one.

"We could have invited all our friends in and got really drunk and done Exile On Main Street again," he adds, referring to the famous Stones romp that produced a definitive album. "But we thought we may as well make this an experience for us."

Rogers admits: "We've always been a pretty close unit." Soon though, You Am I will be expanding to a foursome on stage, with the inclusion of guitarist Greg Hitchcock, formerly of The Verys. Yet only six months ago it seemed as if You Am I were falling apart; that Rogers in particular was freaking out about success.

Bassist Andy Kent emphasises: "We shared a room on our last tour of America. We'd travel on the bus together, wait in the band room together, play together, go to a bar and drink together, then go home together and wake up to have breakfast together. It was incredible; it was ...," Kent starts laughing, "preposterous!"

Kent eyes you like he's watching something inside you. It's a typical You Am I trait. That closed ranks quality again, the feeling that outsiders aren't let in easily, even when they want to let you in.

"But the rock can actually save you," Kent says, emphatically, of the great nights on stage. "The thing that has been driving you insane can actually save you. After all the frustration, all of a sudden we're at the bar afterwards with beers grabbing each other," he says, making Viking sounds. "The funny thing is in Sydney when you're not getting on well with someone, you just don't see them for a while. But on the road it's like you have tell them, 'hey we're getting on good again'. You share it."

Interestingly, Kent adds that "silverchair have got a lot to do with taking the heat off us. Australia is a small place for a band to be successful. It's left us a lot freer".

While they mess about with everything from zithers to xylophones and a terrible keyboard sound that Connolly compares to Flash & The Pan, You Am I have also called on the talents of jazz man Jackie Orszaczky to help with brass arrangements. Hopkinson says that "in some songs there's going to be an R'n'B blast of horns, in others that psychedelic lone trumpeter".

Hopkinson talks about "Garry Usher and hot-rod music. He was one of these maverick producers who was looking for the ultimate teen exploitation hit in the '60s. He'd write about hotted-up cars, and get people like Glenn Campbell (then a session musician) to play guitar, and Hal Blaine, the drummer (best known work was with The Beach Boys). It was very naive music in a way," he says.

"Tim has really gotten into all this freak-beat stuff from the '60s, too. Glam rock actually came out of a certain kind of psychedelia from the '60s, but it was a more punky, garage sound. We want to follow that line from the '60s into the '90s, that hippie naivety, but with a real garage rock grunt in it."

Lighting a fag off a toaster, Hopkinson observes that this melting pot attitude was just as true of the black funk master George Clinton. "He was as much into the Stooges, the Amboy Dukes and the MC5 as he was into James Brown and all the Stax stuff."

Warming to his theme, and trying to track it all back onto You Am I's album, Hopkinson proclaims: "It's a revolutionary hippie vibe. Like Chocolate City. Another land. Not a race thing - an attitude thing."

It's not just 'love is all you need', however. You Am I continue to make pop with edges, whether it's in Tim Rogers's stage attitude or in his writing.

Hourly Daily, the provisional title track, is set to piano and cello. It was inspired, says Rogers, "by a couple of specials I saw on Skinheads and the right-wing revival in Europe on the ABC. I started to think how their mums felt," he adds, rushing to a lyrical burst that sounds like someone quietly spitting: 'Does your mum dig your jackboots or does she polish them for you?'"

He admits that success didn't rest well on his shoulders earlier this year. And he talks about doing a tour with Kim Salmon and The Surrealists, and "how Kim pulled me aside to say 'Love it while it is happening!'"

Rogers says Hourly Daily is "pretty much on the same track as the last record, but less self-referential, less woe, less teenage angst. Travelling lots like we have been, just looking out the window of a van, maybe that affects your view. I dunno. The songs seem to be more about what you see rather than how you're feeling.

"There's lots of aggressively played rock 'n' pop on this, but it's more fanciful, more vaudevillian almost. Just trying to give it a jauntiness. Then there's some r-o-c-k.

I'm just trying to write better," Rogers shrugs, finally.

"In a way, to be ill at ease with yourself and what you're doing is a definition of an artist, isn't it? As soon as you've got a pattern set, that's when you're in danger."

Rogers then apologises for the exclusion as he guides me out into the night, but the recording process is private to all of them.

"Studios can do that to you," he says, reaching out affectionately but already running back inside. "You're aware of things when you're putting your moves on silver."

- Mark Mordue

* First published as 'Private Sessions' in the Sydney Morning Herald Metro, Friday December 1, 1995.

Smoke Signals: Tex Perkins' Dark Horses

It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon and Tex Perkins is still in bed. "I've been doing interviews on the phone all day," he says. "Thought I may as well make myself comfortable. It's freezing up here. Absolutely pissing down. About time I got up, I guess."

Somewhere in the heavy green hills above Byron Bay, the 38-year-old singer is alone on his property, "40 acres of scrubby bush backed onto a rainforest. If you don't want to see people, you don't."

This rustic isolation absolutely oozes out of Perkins's third and latest solo release, Sweet Nothing. He has called it a move from "portraiture to landscape" in comparison to past recordings, as well as "smoke signals from the subconscious", a description that especially pleases him.

"I just didn't want to make another record that sounded like there was trouble at home," he says of the moody, love-damaged material for which he is known. "Inevitably, you invite speculation when you write songs of that nature.

"I'm very aware that people are obsessed with that thinking." What Perkins calls "the Woman's Day approach - that songs are windows into your personal life."

"I don't intend to write songs that are advertisements for how I'm feeling. I don't think they're relevant till they're out there in the world being a soundtrack for their listener," he says firmly, before acknowledging, "That said, you do reveal yourself unintentionally to a certain extent."


What's clear from our conversation and an earlier meeting in Sydney is that Perkins has come a long way rom the archetypal bad man of Oz rock who clobbered a guy with a beer bottle for harassing his girlfriend at a post-ARIA party a decade ago. This was the "Tex is sex" rock star of whom Henry Rollins once said, "Mick Jagger wishes he was Tex Perkins."


He had a loutish charisma on and off the stage back then, fiery and leanly brutish with the Beasts of Bourbon, lightened and poised with the Cruel Sea, while the Tex, Don & Charlie venture provided him with enough bar-stool reflectiveness to show what a great storyteller he was. It seemed he could do anything.

And what he did do, unconsciously perhaps, was slowly disappear: to the North Coast, to family life as the father of two girls, to a music immersed in atmosphere. Perkins's modern take on country-and blues-shaped rock has grown across all three of his solo releases - Far Be It From Me (1996), Dark Horses (2000) and now on Sweet Nothing - whatever he might say about the finer points of self versus landscape.

Indeed, he says what he may have done "is finally form a group", ending the idea of a solo career altogether. That this "might be the last release I do contractually under the Tex Perkins name. After that it could just be the Dark Horses [currently his backing band]."

This dissolving or surrendering intensity that dominates Sweet Nothing is hard to pin down. "One thing I did do intentionally was try to take out evidence of domestic artefacts in the lyrics, like cigarettes or cups of coffee, things that humans have. I didn't want to tie it down to talking about the human condition. These songs could be about bees," he says, with a slight smile.

"I was actually toying with calling this record Great Apes (after a track on the CD), with ape theme packaging and everything. But none of my female acquaintances thought that was a great idea," the smile grows. "I'm actually fairly obsessed with anything to do with our closest relatives on the evolutionary chain."

That said, human love still emerges. Midnight Sunshine gives the recording a bright charge of it early on, with cryptic, somewhat cosmic lyrics evocative of the film Betty Blue as Perkins celebrates how "we build a fire beneath the house" and burn off all the "things that rust". It was written quickly, then interpreted by the Dark Horses "just the way I imagined it. It's one of those rare songs you can't imagine being played any other way".

"Apart from the mood, though, I couldn't explain what that song is about," he says. "I usually start with the music first, when I'm writing, and a theme is already inherent in that when it comes to lyrics. Sometimes it's not till much later you know what a song is about. It can be long after it's written. Sometimes years." 

"With Midnight Sunshine there is this idea that a tangible energy is created by or from ..." Perkins hesitates. "I guess you can call it love. But it's not really love on that song. It applies to everything. Again it's not just about human relationships."

The record's physicality is obvious, as is the influence of Perkins's surroundings. "Even though I've been up here for five or six years," he says, "it hasn't been till this record that it's been evident in the music." He's careful to distinguish this local energy from the town itself. 

"I think Byron has a horrible vibe. The town is meaningless to me. It's just a constant procession of backpackers. Where I live is 45 minutes away. I don't think Byron Bay should get any credit."

The last sentence drips with typical Perkins contempt. But the subject is quickly dropped. Writing and recording Sweet Nothing last year, he found himself alone on the property while his partner was away in Melbourne working. Birds, dogs and horses were "my company".

"The isolation does affect you. Up here you are acutely aware of the elements, too. All your activities depend on the weather. You can go mad if you're stuck indoors and it's raining."


It's this curious blend of the elemental and interior that makes Sweet Nothing something of a voyage. "I will say it's a progressive record," Perkins says. "Almost like a day. The first couple of songs are morning time and it's up and bight. Then it gets progressively darker and darker."

A Name on Everyone, which comes towards the end of the record, has an epic weight reminiscent of Neil Young circa On the Beach. Perkins admits he's been listening to "a lot of '70s rock. Neil Young has been one of the cornerstones. And Bob Marley. With everyone else thrown in for variety. I think I returned to my childhood roots with this record. I must be getting old, I guess."

"You were asking me about the title Sweet Nothing when we met in Sydney and at the time I didn't have a great answer," he says on the phone. "But now I've had time, I think it refers to my idea of spirituality. Most religions and spirituality that humans involve themselves with is connected to this whole idea of something beyond life. That this is just a stage before the real deal. I completely reject that. God is here. God is life," he says with surprising passion. 

"That also connects with what I wanted to say about Great Apes. We are great apes. We are creatures of nature. We're not connected to God. We're creatures of the earth. And we are here."

- Mark Mordue

* First published in the Sydney Morning Herald, July 26, 2003

- Portrait shot by Krystina Higgins

Gil Scott-Heron: The Questioner

Gil Scott-Heron greets me genially. He's slightly spidery in his dangled movements, surprisingly slight and aged. At 45 the man oft referred to as The Godfather of Rap is an undeniably emaciated figure.

Sitting on opposing beds in his modest hotel room, he asks if I mind if he smokes. Tender, even tentative, his gentlemanly persona and attenuated physicality are at odds with a ferocious political reputation as a songwriter, though not his dry dismissal of the O. J. Simpson case buzzing on the television. "I've just been watching the questioner question the questions of the other questioner," he laughs.

Exposing internecine political realities, attacking the absurd and the downright stupid, has always been Scott-Heron's forte. On his new album, Spirits, his first release in 12 years, he lambasts the Gulf War ethos and America's techno-Disney chauvinism:

"Yeah, there was some smart bombs. There was some dumb ones, too." He laughs. "Oh, I love that line!" Struggling to overcome a fit of chuckling, he says between gasps: "See, we don't want to get too heavy with our politics. We want to let people know we're here, not just tell them things all the time."


It's impossible to underestimate the significance of Scott-Heron in the history of contemporary black music. As one American newspaper observed: "If rap, as Chuck D. (of Public Enemy) said, is the CNN of the black community, then Gil Scott-Heron was its first anchor."

His music, however, is far broader than affinities to rap music via Beatnik poetry might suggest. Scott-Heron's soulful, smokey baritone, a little drier now but still like syrup at the bottom of a glass, his piano-based compositions and his potent grasp of bluesy jazz and soul can take seductive flight.

"I don't know about all this Godfather of Rap business," he says dismissively, hands trembling, legs trembling. "I just think people say that because they haven't listened to the people I was listening to; they just don't know about them."

On a song like 'Message To The Messengers', on Spirits, Scott-Heron takes rap, or more particularly gangsta rap, to task for its negativity. "And the media loves to use these 20-second grabs that perpetuate these violent images of our community, these sound bites. But they don't look at a guy going off to work, watch him coming home, trying to put food in the mouths of his children. They don't tell that story, which is the real story of 95 per cent of our community."

Scott-Heron lives on 125th and Lennox in New York, "right in the middle of Harlem. It's no heavier than a lot of places. Most people are just trying to go about their business, get on with living. We've got more than our fair share of depression, of unemployment, of poverty, but that ain't so different either from a lot of places I've seen in the world."

Understanding the heritage of hate that can take root in any oppressed culture, he tries to explain that "it's hard to act like you're equal when you've been oppressed for centuries. See, we're a colony of people who were transplanted through slavery into America - we don't have a claim on the land to bind us like the American Indians. But what we are as a culture was born there. Rap, jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, these are the things people think of when they think of America, but not many black people have profited greatly from them. When people see a lot of money being made out of their culture, but not by them, they don't feel very equal either."

Nonetheless, his debate with gangsta rap stems from a need to say they represent "1 per cent of what our community is".

Despite his proud emphasis on constant live gigging, the gap of 12 years between studio recordings before Spirits and highly mixed reports of his live abilities have been associated with rumours of drug and alcohol problems and snide references to "Gil Scott-Heroin".

That his physically imposing stature - in the '70s he was as lean and tough as the proverbial "black panther" - has given way to such a frail, middle-aged man only adds weight to those stories of dissipation and squandered talent. Scott-Heron boldly shows me his arms. "I ain't no junkie. You don't see trackmarks on my arms. I'm afraid of needles! I'm a diabetic and I still won't use needles.

"It's like Robert de Niro in Raging Bull or Taxi Driver. He's an actor. But while he's doing those parts, we believe him. That's because he does it so well. So when I sing a song like 'Home Is Where The Hatred Is' ("A junkie walking through the streets at night, I'm on my way home") it's a story. But I can't really blame people for saying all those things about me because it just means I told the story so well they believed it."

You don't have to be an addict to suffer foibles. And pay for them. Scott-Heron certainly looks well worn in. Glasses perched on a gaunt face with a greying, straggly beard, a beautiful smile, teeth tobacco crooked, everything about him hurting with kindness. Something most definitely catches in the image of the man before you, in the many years away from the studio, in the live shows that veer from sublime to average: Drugs? Maybe not now. Ill health? You can't escape the thought, but whether it be diabetes or some unspecified illness ravaging him, who can say.

Born in 1949 in Chicago, Scott-Heron was raised in Tennessee by his grandmother. He was one of the first black children to be used in the experiment of integration, one of three children brought into Jackson elementary school. It's been said that after the cursing and abuse from white children became unbearable, his mother moved him to New York City, to the Bronx, then the Hispanic-dominated Chelsea neighbourhood.

It was Scott-Heron's grandmother who bought him an upright piano from the funeral parlour next-door after it closed. "People see me as a writer who discovered the piano, but I'm really a piano player who discovered writing." Given his deep musicality, his writing skills cannot be overlooked: a published novel at age 19 called The Vulture; a book of poetry, Small Talk At 125th and Lennox, by 21.

The poetry led to recordings and music as a way to reach the masses at that point in American history in the early '70s when the civil rights movement was losing momentum and Black Power was showing its hand.

Not surprisingly, Spirits is about the spirits behind these movements. The tune of John Coltrane's 'Equinox' forms a trace-line beneath the Spirits title-track, a tribute "to balances. Coltrane was born on the September equinox, when night and day are equal." He likens this coincidence to a spiritual politic. "And the spirits have always helped me." Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela - they're all there among his muses. But you'd be a fool to mistake soul for cosmic naivety in Scott-Heron.

When a friend suggested his 1975 song, 'Johannesburg', came too early for the Nelson Mandela fever that much later gripped the world, he said: "Well, by the time my song was out Mandela had already been in jail for 12 years. I don't think he would have thought it was early."

Having broken out of a decade of obscurity, Scott-Heron is now working on an autobiography due later this year. It was inspired when he toured the United States with Stevie Wonder, who was working to get Martin Luther King's birthday established as a national day of celebration. Wonder succeeded. "Stevie always sees the positive in things." Spending time with Gil Scott-Heron can do the same.

- Mark Mordue

* This story appeared under the title 'A frail Godfather' in the Sydney Morning Herald dated 01.03.1995. Gil Scott-Heron played two shows at the Metro Theatre in the city: an extraordinary first night at the height of his powers, and a free-jamming and seemingly endless second night where people left wondering what the fuck was going on.

Giving Up The Ghost

IN one of his greatest poems, People, Yevgeny Yevtushenko says, "In any man who dies there dies with him/ his first snow and kiss and fight".

Part of an intense recognition of our mortality, the poem also deals with the power of memory and the role of art as Yevtushenko admits: "The secret worlds are not regenerated./ And every time again and again/ I make my lament against destruction."

Having encountered the loss of three people in the past year -- all by suicide -- it's no wonder the Russian's poem should speak to me. At the same time I was struck by a recent viewing of Clint Eastwood's film Hereafter, and its focus on George Lonegan (Matt Damon), a spirit medium trying to escape the burden of his relationship with the dead. "A life that's all about death," he says, "is no life at all."

Yet the need to negotiate death's place in our lives has re-emerged in all manner of projects lately: from a mainstream supernatural entertainment such as Hereafter (one of the top 10 grossing films in the country) through to art-house drama Rabbit Hole, with Nicole Kidman as a mother who has lost her child, and Biutiful, featuring Javier Bardem as a small-time criminal and struggling father trying to put his affairs in order before he dies.

The sensational opening of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, showcasing a mercurial collection assembled by founder David Walsh that has a strong emphasis on the themes of sex and death, may be connected to this larger inclination towards morbidity. MONA also points to another obvious fact: this subject matter has been around in art for as long as we have reflected on our own natures. Even so, it's hardly original to add that while we celebrate sex with an advertorial heat in almost every facet of our culture, we more usually prefer to keep death out of the picture.

You would expect literature to meet this theme in braver and more complex ways. But in the case of authors such as W.G. Sebald, Roberto Bolano and Cormac McCarthy -- whose books The Rings of Saturn, 2666 and The Road have towered over the past decade -- the connections between creating a novel, the feeling of being in a dream and an atmosphere of death are overwhelming. These men write like titans at the end, rather than beginning, of something, focusing on subject matter that suggests the respective cultural histories of Europe, South America and the US are traumatised, decayed and passing away.

Stunning debuts such as David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and late Philip Roth works Exit Ghost and Nemesis only add to the outpouring of terminal narratives today. As does Patti Smith's US National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, a eulogy to her former lover, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: "I was asleep when he died."

As our rock stars age, modern masters Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Lou Reed are all delivering their own existential blues, too. Dylan gave the end some resigned bar-band fatalism on one of his most recent songs, Beyond Here Lies Nothin': "Beyond here lies nothing, but the mountains of the past." Young, meanwhile, sounded as if he were haunting himself on his latest album, Le Noise, a recording that played like an electrified ghost raging against the dying of the light. As for Cohen and Reed, they continue to offer their own somnambulant observations in song as if they are ferrying us to the other side personally.

It's a stretch, but one could even argue the Twilight phenomenon and the darkening shades of the Harry Potter saga are part of this movement. Recent Australian television programs such as Laid (a comic twist on the black widow story) and Spirited (Claudia Karvan's update on The Ghost and Mrs Muir) indicate death is so commonplace to the zeitgeist there's enough material for two new series, if Alan Ball's Six Feet Under were not black-humoured evidence enough.

IT'S hard to pinpoint why this deathly current has intensified. While the symbolic reverberations of September 11, 2001, and the continuing tremors of the global economic crisis appear to signal everything from the end of US imperial hegemony to that of the Enlightenment era itself, there are more intimate cultural pressures, too. A bottomless obsession with youth culture and the corresponding industry in anti-ageing technology is part of that, as well as the irony of an ageing population in the West and ethical debates over euthanasia.

There is also the decline in formal religious practice, along with the pressures of constructing our identity publicly in an aggressively commercialised and digitalised world. Michael Jackson emerges as an off-kilter Jesus in this mediated ether, having introduced an entire generation of our children to the dark fairytale of death and continuing presence as everything about his miserable end and his re-canonisation at the top of the charts puts him at the centre of family entertainment again.

It's my suspicion all these elements may be sparking a retreat to an internal frontier, an intuited notion of the soul as "the person within person" where we can feel something sacred or mysterious at work that has little to do with how we appear out there. Certainly we are learning that fame is cheap, and often crass. Privacy, by contrast, is taking on a magic aura, a profound and elusive value. To upend Andy Warhol's tired dictum, we may yen soon for a world where everyone can be private, rather than famous, for 15 minutes.

There is, of course, a difference between privacy and being alone, between spiritual integrity and feeling atomised. In a secular culture, art provides a key to the door between those worlds, if not the kingdom once promised us in the Bible (let alone by Facebook). It also can pre-empt the dangers of premature withering, of being dead inside long before we are buried or burned.

In reminding us of our internal universe, of that person within the person, art marks us with mystic residues and consolations and a degree of consciousness that dilates our being with what might be described as a renewing vividness. As Bolano so wisely observes in his novella The Skating Rink: "We all have to die a bit every now and then and it's usually so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive."

WHETHER or not you believe in an afterlife it's true to say most of us end up speaking to the dead. The depth of those conversations may differ and fade, though time itself is no barrier as those long forgotten return to us with unexpected aliveness. One can feel haunted without seeing ghosts. A place, a song, a sea breeze, almost anything can open up a dimension through which a presence is felt and corresponded with, if only internally, nostalgically. It's as if this communication is native to us as human beings.

It seemed important to speak to some artists who traversed this space between the living and the dead in their work, and to ask them what that communication might mean.

"I lost my father and my mother, and more recently my brother," 75-year-old poet and author Antigone Kefala says. "And each time this happens, there is no getting used to it. Every time, it is a new event, a terrible happening. I don't think you can ever become that familiar with it. And yet we are predisposed to speak with the dead."

Kefala's poem Absence concerns itself specifically with this: it is a dialogue with her mother, whom she found herself talking to again "while doing the dishes just the other day". At that she laughs and says brightly, "This is normal, it is nothing to apologise for. You feel that you are talking to friends," she explains. "Not that they have become something else in death. You feel that you have some connective thing with them, not that they have gone. Of course people do not want to hear negative things. But it is a double issue -- yes, the end of life is a negative thing, but then people who have been in our life, that attachment does not just disappear. So it would be a negative thing not to communicate with them still, if this is how we feel."

Unfortunately, Kefala believes "death is not a subject people like writing about in Australia. Everyone here is trying to escape the issue." She describes this disdainfully as "an English thing", and speculates that "we Greeks, and the more 'primitive' races of Europe in the south, in Italy and Spain, we have more rituals and are closer to the phenomenon than the northerners. The same is true of North and South America. Look at Mexico and its Day of the Dead."

For Kefala this relates to an absence in Australian literature. "There is a lack of intensity here. People are not fully engaged with what they are writing. A lot of it is journalistic, I feel. But serious writing must have passion, must have a tenseness to it.

And we must not be ashamed of passion," she says. "I write about death -- and many other things -- oh, they must see me coming and think: 'Eh, her again! Oh no! What about some jolly business this time, please Antigone!' "

Kefala roars laughing this time, but she laments the way we continue to deal with death "through a certain type of fantasy, running away from or around a more immediate involvement. So these 'ghosts' people like to read about, they are not immediately involved with your life, it's something less real and light and approachable. But if we are to write seriously, we have to also write about what is not easily approachable, and there is something about poetic language that deals more fundamentally with such issues than a journalistic, surface language."

She goes further and implies we shy away from these depths in our literature because of something in our history. "You feel it when you go out bush, these forces that unnerve you in certain landscapes. It is a very powerful landscape, a magnificent landscape, a country full of light and colour, as well as a place full of terrible things that no one wants to confess to. The two things go together. Whether we can come to grips with that and produce something magnificent."

Her thoughts trail off as if that task might be beyond her. But Kefala begins talking again in a way that seems tinged with her own migrant odyssey into this antipodean world she has long called home. "In a discussion of spirits I know I am always moved when Aboriginal people look into a landscape and ask permission to come in," she says. "Deeply moved."

IT is hard to imagine a more Australian-sounding record within the rock 'n' roll idiom than Gareth Liddiard's Strange Tourist. Best known for his work with the Drones, Liddiard imbues his debut solo album with a Spartan intensity -- voice and guitar only -- that suggests he is the missing link between Paul Kelly and Nick Cave.

As a picture of contemporary Australia its vernacular feel for character is startling, as good as any short story collection we have. But the album tends to leave a listener lost in space. There is that final feeling of sitting with a storyteller around an open fire as it ebbs into darkness. A line from the record's most beautiful song, High Plains Mailman, leaps out like a lonely spark: "He knows you don't have to die to reach the netherworld."

Liddiard thinks critics who have tried to come to grips with Strange Tourist by alluding to painters Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan are reaching towards "something about the outback that is primordial, real and unforgiving. And that's there in the music maybe." He admits: "The way you see a landscape depends on your state of mind. A rainforest can be a very lovely thing to experience. Unless you're Joseph Conrad, then it becomes hell. But there's a real truth in depression when you experience it," he adds. "You get what a dingo would go through. A world that is tough, brutal, where you can feel what it might be like to starve."

Combined with a garage-rock-meets-folk sound that has brutish colonial overtones intensified by the singer's broad Australian accent, Strange Tourist comes off as a supremely existential record rooted in this tormenting world. It becomes clear that Liddiard's ghosts are living among us, be it the amphetamine dealer of the title track or the David Hicks figure who inspired an eight-minute piece of biographical song voodoo entitled The Radicalisation of D: "D finds a one-room flat that overlooks an underpass . . ."

Reared by atheist parents, Liddiard thinks we have a tendency to hide from the fact "the universe does not give a shit". He believes civilisation allows us to mask the processes behind the way we live, from how we get the meat we eat and the petrol we use. "Everything you do is brutal and cold, but we are built to deny all that, to keep the universe at bay.

"The place I tend to go is where all that [civilised] resilience and denial is rubbed away. I'm not doing it to be downer," he emphasises. "And even though I'm not spiritual at all I am not saying I am impoverished. There's this ritual thing in rock 'n' roll, something in it from a long time ago. It's like a guy banging bones in a cave. That's not so different to seeing [Iggy Pop and] the Stooges play.

"All the real stuff has that ritual. There's some need for it in our head, so in that sense it's not spiritual but it is deep. You just need somebody to transport you. Jim Morrison was good at it. Warren Ellis [from the Dirty Three] is, too. Whatever you do, you have to take them away. Hendrix did it, Coltrane, Samuel Beckett. Beethoven was maybe the greatest. It's transcendental."

Liddiard smiles to himself. "It's why people travel. It's to do with an internal wanderlust. And that part of our brain seems connected to the part that needs to be spiritual. An artist just takes the vagueness out of it and makes it into an experience."

AT 43, Melbourne novelist Chris Womersley admits, "I haven't had that much actual experience of death." Then he checks himself and mentions "an ex-girlfriend of mine who died two years ago from a heroin overdose. We had not been in touch for 20 years but for some reason she has come into my mind again lately."

It makes him consider whether an element of remembering the dead is connected "to longing them back into existence. And a nostalgia that maybe casts them in a better light than they deserve, I don't know. It's more pertinent with someone who is young. That sense of waste. People who die in their 70s and 80s, it's a shame, but you think they had a good run."

Womersley sighs. "It's hard being human. It's hard getting by and doing the right thing and living. Art and literature are vehicles that can help us understand the metaphysical, that can show how we deal with death and loss and sex, how one ages gracefully, how you make a transition."

His first book, The Low Road, opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding: "And what the dead had no speech for, when living / They can tell you being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued by fire beyond the language of the living."

The author says he conceived of that novel "as an underworld journey", whereby it operated as a noir thriller and something more spiritual that occurs in "a mythical space. I've always been interested in myths and fairytales. It's a subconscious thing, and it's profoundly a part of our being for some reason," he says. "Look at Dante or the tale of Orpheus, there's something primal there. It just seems impossible to believe you die and that's that."

Yet despite a somewhat obsessive interest in death and the supernatural, Womersley firmly describes himself as an atheist. "I guess I'm just interested in the immersive experience of literature," he explains. "I like my reading to take me to a whole other realm. That's an aesthetic thing. I'm not interested in the domestic but something striving towards the ineffable."

Accordingly he set his second novel, Bereft, in the immediate the aftermath of World War I during a time of plague in Australia when entire towns were quarantined as Spanish influenza spread across the country. At a seance a young soldier is passed a note by a psychic that sparks his return home to deal with a family murder he was accused of committing as a boy. "It's a semi-ghost story," Womersley says, "but it's all about love really, about someone who is gone and is no longer with you."

Womersley explains the historical context for the ideas he developed in Bereft: "The Victorians were not so much obsessed with death as with mourning. They had mourning costumes and mourning jewellery, it was an elaborate process. With the discovery of radio waves and photography, things of a spiritual dimension got tangled with the scientific. So you have this onset of a secular century where belief in the great faiths are waning and it's being replaced by the quasi mystical. Then you have World War I and a million dead, and where did they go? Where did they go? That scale of mourning was unprecedented. I read one story of a mother who lost all four of her sons. You can't deal with that scale of grief rationally."

As if to reach for a parallel between that era and the present, Womersley tells me an anecdote. "There was this co-worker of mine who died tragically, both her and her baby," he says. "I suddenly saw her pop up as one of my friends on Facebook recently, and I was a bit surprised, and bothered by it. I would feel unethical somehow to delete her. So I feel I can't do anything about it. But it struck me there must be many cases like this now where people continue to exist in this weird digital life we now have."

IT seems to me the communications revolution we're experiencing may be prompting some neo-Victorian surge in our fascination with death and mourning again. And that there are indeed parallels between that previous era -- which was exhilarated and traumatised by the industrial revolution and a countervailing passion for gothic and romantic sensibilities -- and the great time of technological change we exist in today.

There's an intimacy and connectedness available to us across time and space that is somehow bodiless and eerie. It may be that our digital life is taking on the vaporous qualities of our ghostly superstitions; that the texture of the communications alone is awakening something in us. It's certainly an odd coincidence that, like Damon's character in Hereafter, Bardem's dying criminal in Biutiful is also a figure of psychic abilities. This ability intensifies a need to prepare for where he is headed, as a fellow medium indicates when she warns, "You and I know the dead suffer when they leave debts behind."

In dealing with death, the guides we most seek for wisdom or consolation are indeed the dead themselves -- along with the way art can bring us closer to them and ourselves if we're lucky: Womersley's acts of mythical transition; Liddiard's primitive transcendence; Kefala's intense conversations.

It takes me a while to realise these three people I have interviewed match the three friends of mine who killed themselves: a male journalist of great literary ability; a brilliant male guitarist; a fine female painter who adored poetry. So who was I really talking to here?

I find myself listening to Give up the Ghost on the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs. The way Thom Yorke sings a final haunting refrain of "I've been told to give up the ghost into your arms". Yorke could be talking about the end of a relationship, or the problem of addiction, or personifying death itself, along with evoking a ritual in song that suggests Yorke himself is fading to end, and trying to come to terms with this mortal inevitability. In a voice double-tracked and smudged against his own it's hard to make out what he is saying in counterpoint to the main lyrics. Either "don't haunt me" or "don't hurt me" or "don't worry" or more likely all those things.

Listening to it is rather like being involved in a strange prayer where I feel as if I periodically appear to, and disappear into, myself in some kind of dream of life. Don't haunt me. Don't hurt me. Don't worry.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Weekend Australian Review on April 9th, 2011