In 1984, Paul Kelly packed up his few belongings, borrowed his father-in-law’s Holden and made the 13-hour drive from Melbourne to Sydney. He had barely a dollar in his pocket and no place to lay his head.
Don Walker, who was taking a breather from the music business after the breakup of Cold Chisel, offered him a temporary refuge in his Kings Cross double-storey terrace. He had a white grand piano in the front room.
Not quite 30, Kelly wasn’t even on his last chance. In industry terms, he was done. He’d made two failed records with his band the Dots, long since disavowed. Michael Gudinski dropped him from Mushroom and washed his hands.
Still, the grand piano called. Inspired by a Lovin’ Spoonful song, Never Going Back, and Robert Johnson’s From Four Until Late, a sad goodbye-to-all-that song tumbled out on the keys. It was From St Kilda to Kings Cross.
Kelly played it to Walker when he came home. “You’ve got your own thing now,” Walker told him gruffly. For Kelly, it was a watershed. “I’d found my own little patch of ground, was hoeing a row nobody else was,” he reflected in his memoir, How to Make Gravy.
The song would open his third album, Post, released 40 years ago this month. The album didn’t chart. But it recouped its smell-of-an-oily-rag recording costs, paid off Kelly’s debts and provided the launchpad for everything that followed.
After dossing with Walker, Kelly moved in with Dragon’s keyboard player, Paul Hewson. Hewson had songwriting fingerprints on that band’s big early hits, April Sun in Cuba and the notorious Are You Old Enough?
Hewson and Kelly swapped songs and stories. Both addicts, they occasionally went out and scored. Kelly was unsteady on his feet, but his confidence was growing. Guitarist Steve Connolly and drummer Michael Barclay soon followed him to Sydney.
Barclay wouldn’t end up playing drums on Post, though. The songs were spare and haunted, supported only by Barclay’s high-harmony singing and Connolly’s beautifully understated leads. Usually, he just added minor embellishments to the vocal melody.
The trio gained a residency at the Strawberry Hills hotel in Surry Hills. The Sydney rock scene was obsessed with the ghost of Radio Birdman; all raised fists and leather jackets. Standing in front of such an audience with an acoustic guitar and no drummer took some nerve.
Many of the songs on Post dealt with addiction and its consequences. On the first side were Incident on South Dowling, White Train and Blues for Skip, a lyrical description of writer’s block featuring a shiver-inducing lead break from Connolly.
The second side further blurred the line between art and autobiography. There was Adelaide, an ironic kiss-off to Kelly’s old home town (which annoyed his family), and Standing on the Street of Early Sorrows, a song to an adolescent crush named Julie.
There was also (You Can Put Your Shoes) Under My Bed, which rhymed “spastic” and “fantastic”. A music publisher in Nashville thought the song had potential, in the hands of the right country singer, if only Kelly could change that line.
He never did. Not because he thought it sounded any better back then than it does now – it just stuck. “You get a lot of bad or boring rhymes pass through your mind while you’re writing and you do your best to weed them out, but sometimes an awkward one muscles its way in, hunkers down under the song-skin and won’t be removed for love or money,” he wrote in his memoir.
And there was the final track, Little Decisions, a homily that celebrated the virtue of putting one foot in front of the other in hard times. Kelly’s voice was simultaneously at its world-weariest and warmest:
Work a little harder
Keep your mind on death
Get your things in order
Take a deeper breath
Shortly after recording was complete, Paul Hewson left Dragon, then at the height of their success courtesy of the album Body and the Beat and its massive single, Rain. He died of an overdose on 9 January 1985.
Without a deal, Kelly began shopping Post around. Michelle Higgins, Gudinski’s trusted PR at Mushroom, locked herself in the Sebel Townhouse on Mushroom’s credit card until her boss re-signed him. Gudinski relented, releasing Post on a Mushroom subsidiary, White.
The album’s title alluded to the series of farewells embedded in the songs: to St Kilda, to Adelaide, to the Dots, to drugs (though that would take a while longer), to Kelly’s first marriage, and to Hewson, to whom the album was dedicated.
On release, Post was a stiff. Kelly’s then-manager, Stuart Coupe, wrote in his book Shake Some Action that Gudinski’s reticence seemed to have been vindicated: “To all intents and purposes, Paul Kelly had delivered his third commercial dud.”
But word spread, and better times were ahead. Connolly and Barclay would form the core of Kelly’s new band, the Coloured Girls (later renamed the Messengers). With them, he would re-record full-band versions of four Post songs for his next album: the sprawling Gossip.
That album would take Kelly from the margins to the mainstream. Post, though, was the essential backstory. It’s the album on which Kelly found his voice – the one that established him as arguably the foremost Australian singer-songwriter of his generation.
