Words And Music

Last November a small contingent of members from the Australian media were gathered together at the Sydney Opera House for a special tour announcement. All in attendance had been briefed beforehand on the information about to be conveyed, but it was still a great surprise and delight when the great Paul Kelly strode into the room, picked up an acoustic guitar and delivered a stunning rendition of the Crowded House classic Into Temptation. Before anyone even had a chance to ruminate on what had just happened, the equally legendary Neil Finn entered the fray, picked up his own acoustic, and delivered a faultless version of the gorgeous Kelly album track You Can Put Your Shoes Under My Bed (from 1985's Post). The songs sounded incredible in each other's hands – somehow transformed by this new mode of delivery without either being dramatically altered – but those marvels paled into virtual insignificance when the pair then joined forces and burst into a shared take on Kelly's evergreen Leaps And Bounds, giving a whole new lease of life to the Australian staple.

This brief but bountiful musical component of the media call done and dusted, the two Antipodean music legends took a seat and were joined by host John Doyle – of course in his irreverent guise as “Rampaging” Roy Slaven – and proceeded to explain the logistics of their impending Australasian joint tour. A family affair – the band for the run also containing Paul's nephew Dan on guitar and Neil's son Elroy on drums – the sets will find them visiting the depths and breadths of each other's catalogues in a united manner. They were at pains to point out that for the bulk of the concerts they will be accompanying each other on their own songs – not visiting each other's songs as they'd done this morning – although anything was possible once the actual tour got underway.

There was an easy rapport between the two songwriters as they discussed what lay ahead of them, a connection built from years of friendship and mutual admiration. They first toured together way back in 1987 when Paul Kelly & The Coloured Girls supported Crowded House through America, and they'd appeared briefly at each other's gigs on occasion over the intervening decades, but this tour was to mark the first official shared tour between the two icons. When Street Press Australia was granted a private audience with the pair following the conference, they were quick to point out that they'd forged an enduring long-term bond despite not having spent that much time in each other's company.

“At stages we've seen a bit of each other, but long stages go by when we're not moving around or not in the same cities as each other,” Finn offers warmly. “But there's a good friendship there, and that's the thing about friendships – you don't have to see each other all the time, you can just pick up where you left off. There's no obligations.”

“Yeah, and there was a time you lived in Melbourne when I saw you a lot more, when was that, late-'80s?” Kelly quizzes.

“Up until 1993 we lived in Melbourne, and we used to play a bit of tennis together and hang out fairly regularly,” Finn smiles. “Plus you'd just run into each other out and about, all cities are fairly small in their own way. Our paths would cross at airports and hotel lobbies and music awards and things like that.”

There's readily available online footage of Kelly and Finn playing tracks together onstage in Western Australia on ANZAC Day 2011 – perfectly in keeping with the Trans-Tasman nature of the collaboration, Finn of course being of New Zealand heritage – but they don't believe that this was a major precursor to the tour that we're discussing today.

“That was just a one-off show really – even before that show we'd been talking for years about doing a tour together,” Kelly reflects. “So it's been batted back and forth a bit, we just haven't had the chance to make our schedules align until now.”

“Yeah, suddenly windows in both of our schedules opened up in both of our lives, and it seemed to be good timing for it,” Finn interjects.

“The times that we have done shows together, we've got up and sung with each other, so I guess coming out of that Perth show where we sang about three or four songs together – and Dan Kelly was with me and he got up too, and Liam [Finn] was there with Neil – that was really starting to sow the seed for a blended show, where it wasn't just 'I sing my songs and you sing your songs' – really knitting the two together,” Kelly admits. “We've been discussing it on email for a while how to really knit the show together, and we got together yesterday and pushed that a bit further along.” 

Do the pair know of any precedents for such a blended collaboration as the one they're about to undertake?

“There was Billy Joel and Elton John, I didn't know about that until today,” Kelly laughs.

“I remember that coming through,” Finn says, also suppressing mirth. “There are various things that aren't dissimilar, there was The Highwaymen that went through with Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson [and Johnny Cash], and I believe that was really good. It doesn't happen a lot, but there's a few things that go around on that basis – in New Zealand my brother [Tim Finn] did a tour with Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn and they were all onstage together, so it's not entirely without precedent. But I think the one thing that we want to make sure we do is give it its due and take it beyond any feeling of it being a novelty or a gimmick, and make sure that it's something that's a substantial musical collaboration and people are going to walk out having heard versions of the songs that they've never heard sounding like that before. We want to give it a sense of specialness.”

All such large-scale tours must be fairly special undertakings for the artists involved, but Kelly concedes that this joint run is even more nerve-wracking than normal.

“I generally look forward to tours anyway, because I try to make each tour different than the last one, and there's always new things to play – you go out and you've usually got new songs to play – so for me it's usually a mixture of excitement and nerves,” he tells. “We have an idea how it will work, but you never know until you actually do it so there's that little element of 'toeiness' to it, but yeah, we're really looking forward to it.”

It must be daunting even contemplating a setlist given the incredible catalogues of songs at their disposal – as well as Kelly's exceptional 30-plus year career Finn has celebrated songwriting credits with Split Enz and Crowded House as well as his accomplished solo work to bring to the table – but the pair maintain that they're not fazed by the forthcoming decisions, and may even throw a few of each other's lesser-known tracks into the mix.

“We got it down quickly to about 50 songs, but we think it will be more tricky to get it down to about 30 songs which we figure is what we'll need as a pool to draw from,” Finn states nonchalantly. “It'll mean leaving out some good ones, but when we get together next time we'll probably whiz through the songs and play them all a little bit, and it will be a lot easier to identify what works when we're playing them in real time together in a room, otherwise we're just talking about theories and looking at names on a piece of paper.”

“And apart from just the two of us,” Kelly joins in, “once we get together with the band I think certain songs will suit the band better than others, and that will help in culling them down a bit.”

“We want to do familiar songs for people, I enjoy doing them anyway,” Finn rejoins, “but there's going to be enough room in the set to do both well-known songs and also a few delightful obscurities that just seem suited to this environment. We've already got a couple of those still on the list.

“I pulled out Paul's A-Z list [2010's The A-Z Recordings] and listened to them all, and it was great because I could listen to them without their recorded parts – they were just sitting there as songs – and I just kind of responded to a few that I actually didn't know, but I thought when I went by, 'Oh, there's something about that which I could imagine suiting this environment'. But it's all just a hunch at the moment.”

And even though Kelly is yet to substantially tour his excellent 2012 Spring And Fall album, he's not planning on integrating much of that into this shared venture.

“No, I see that as a separate thing,” he reveals. “I'll probably do a few songs from Spring And Fall, but because we have so many songs to sing between the two of us – and as Neil said, we want to have some well-known songs and some songs that suit the two of us – that'll do. We might do an Everly Brothers type thing, where we just break down the show to a duo or a trio and just do some really good ol' harmonies. Some of those Spring And Fall songs are super, it's just a matter of making them fit. I'd like to do, down the track, a tour where I play the full record – it is something that is meant to be played in order. But that's down the track.”

Neil Finn & Paul Kelly will be playing the following dates: