Northern Dreaming

Dan Kelly

It's been a couple of years now since Dan Kelly dropped his acclaimed third album, Dan Kelly's Dream, and he's still frantically writing for its follow-up. Not that you could call the acclaimed musician slack though – he's been flat out since the album dropped, touring and recording with his uncle Paul, who of late has become increasingly reliant on his nephew as his offsider both live and in the studio.

Now, finally, there's been a bit of downtime from their hectic schedules and Dan is making his way up north to the land of his youth, reminding folk in Queensland of his solo skills and working up new songs for his forthcoming record in the process. He's excited about the material, but also a tad uncertain about the direction that it's ultimately going to take.

“I sort of worked for a while in a little studio just making up stuff with the band, going for a loose kind of feel,” Kelly tells of his recent output. “We came up with a lot of good stuff there, but I'm not sure if any of it will end up on the record – from there I took those songs and have been playing them solo, finding out a way of playing them like that. They were pretty jammy, but really fun.

“Apart from that I've been honing my theme down – I've been making it even more succinctly about girls and geography. There's a lot of romance on this record – I don't want to give away how much is real, but probably not a lot of it. It's like an imaginary romance travelogue and it's half-finished – it's like I'm halfway through backpacking around the world. An old man backpacking and writing songs as I go – there's songs about Antarctica and South America, and a lot of songs about the north coast. I seem to have gone back to my youth – there's one set in Beenleigh and one down in Casino, and then another one set in the hills behind Byron. I've just been writing about that area a lot, just because I grew up there.

“Because it's so shitty down here [in Melbourne] a lot of the time, I'm constantly craving beach and warmth and family, so if I'm getting into a sort of escapist songwriting mode – which is the music I fell in love with, a lot of my songs have that Ray Davies 'escape from reality' theme – then it's really easy for me to conjure up the north coast, because that's one of the key spots that I go to in my brain, even if I'm sitting in a really chilly and dusty sharehouse room in Melbourne. Generally a lot of the themes in my songs have me jetting off to somewhere magnificent, and then finding that I can't escape myself. Or fucking up a relationship. It's not like I'm Xavier Rudd and I just go there and fucking get on my spirit bird or I'm riding a giant dildo across the night sky – things always get a bit odd. Happy sad.”

Kelly not only grew up in Queensland, but he cut his musical teeth in the Brisbane scene of the early-'90s playing in hard rock band Nord. “There was a band called Liquid Meat from the Gold Coast, and they were a real Butthole Surfers-type band – they were smart guys, but their themes were meat and psychedelic drugs and weird suburban creepiness,” he recalls. “They had a vibe, and then I joined and added a bit of a wide-eyed 'I don't know what's going on' teenage vibe. We were all into The Celibate Rifles and Mudhoney and we played a lot in Brisbane, but it was always like first on the bill at Rock Against Work – we were never very big. It was a bit of a shitfight, but it was fun. There was a lot of wah-wah – it wasn't like The xx is the best way to describe it. It was the opposite of The xx.

“Once I finished doing that I got into four-tracking a lot but I couldn't work out how to write my own songs – they were pretty wet. I was really into The Jesus Lizard and all of those really, intense bands that were around then – or even fuzzy ones like Mudhoney – but the songs I was writing were so far away from that. It was really hard for me to merge the two together, and I ended up moving to Melbourne and playing in a country band. Which was odd because I don't even like country that much. Eventually, I ended up combining my love of punk rock music with more simple, happy-sounding songs. It's not punk rock, but it's informed by that vibe – I find normal singer-songwriter stuff really dreary.

“I strive for that human vibe that Jonathan Richman has, and that you probably get from Robert Forster or Dave McCormack or Stephen Malkmus – the projection of their personality is really powerful. My songs are hanging around in that territory – I like the feeling that you get from their songs and how it's not a pose. I aspire to the effect that those guys have.”

Of course he has a fairly brilliant familial role model close at hand, but being in the presence of brilliance can sometimes have an adverse effect on the songwriting process.

“I do need to debrief – it's almost like I need to go to some Cambodian brainwashing bush camp to get all of the Paul Kelly songs out of my head,” Dan laughs. “Because they're strong songs, and when you're working on them or playing them live they stick in your head. The lyrics and stories stick in your head, or the phrasing. I've certainly learned a lot off him, and I'm sure I've stolen a lot off him, but I've really gone out of my way to make sure that I don't sound like a junior Paul Kelly – that would be pretty depressing – we've already got one.”

And, while he still has plenty of Kelly family duties on the horizon, we might be seeing a bit more of Kelly Jr in the not-too-distant future.

“After this show I'm going to spend the rest of the summer working on the record, doing a lot of the songs in the more simple style that these shows are using, and then I have the big Paul Kelly and Neil Finn tour – it's like a family band almost,” he ponders. “And then I'll put the record out and see what happens. If I can afford it I'd like to spend next winter up in Queensland, just hang out with my folks and play with some people up there. It's long overdue; it's been ten years. If you compare the two winters it's a dream to go up north, and weather's fun to write about – I know it's supposed to be the most boring thing in the world, but I find it fun. Which makes me the most boring guy in the world. Fuck it.”

Dan Kelly will be playing the following shows:

Friday 23 November - Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane QLD