Perhaps the zenith of the Gravy boom began on a Sunday night in November 2017, when Paul Kelly played to a relatively small crowd in the forecourt and up the steps of the Sydney Opera House, and to a much bigger crowd watching at home on the ABC. 

From the atmosphere in front of the stage, and the stream of tweets from the TV audience, it was clear that Australia was having a little reckoning with Kelly, that thousands around the country were remembering in unison quite how good he is, and quite how much they loved him. 

In The Guardian, Andrew Stafford aptly wrote about how, “For two hours on Sunday night, it felt like a good proportion of Australia was gathered around a gigantic campfire.” 

It was as if he was being inducted as a national treasure in real time by the acclamation of thousands of people on their lounges, one great institution performing beneath the arcing shells of another. 

Not that long into the set, maybe four or five songs in, a man who may or may not have been a dickhead, but undeniably had the voice of a dickhead, decided to assert himself above the happy ambience. 

In the moments between one song and another, he bellowed out “PLAY GRAAAAVY,” the demand cutting through the hum of the crowd and – evidently – all the way up to the stage.

Kelly heard him, and paused only long enough to make it apparent that he had heard him and to give the crowd time to wonder how, if at all, he was going to respond. And then he responded, quietly but firmly, in that wry voice that fans remember he has every time they see him live. 

“Gravy comes to those who wait.” 

With the interloper thoroughly humbled, the crowd laughed and cheered. And Gravy did indeed come, but towards the end, like everyone knew it would. 

By that stage, How To Make Gravy was more than 20 years old. It is not quite right to say that it didn’t take when it was first released – it was after all nominated for Song Of THe Year at 1998 APRA Awards (where it, Nick Cave’s Into My Arms, The Whitlams’ No Aphrodisiac, and both To The Moon And Back and Truly, Madly, Deeply by Savage Garden all lost to ‘Even When I’m Sleeping’ by Leonardo’s Bride – quite a year). 

But in the two decades between its initial release, when it charted at No. 144, and the gig in the Opera House forecourt, when it was just about to launch back into the charts again, eventually spending four years there and re-peaking at No. 34, the Gravy song had crept and crept and eventually become a cherished, mainstream cultural ornament. 

Had triple j's Hottest 100 Of Australian Songs ballot been held that week, it may have won the lot. As it was, eight years later, it came in at No. 9.

Kelly himself has seemed surprised by its slow and then epic success, but he has encouraged and enjoyed it.

In December of 2018, and then again in 2019, he led big, sprawling, festival-style shows called ‘Making Gravy’, in open air venues like The Domain and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. 

He sells tea towels with Joe’s gravy recipe printed on the front, and gave his blessing to a film adaptation which came out on Binge last year. He gratefully says he has “lost control of the song”.

“I thought it was a comedy when I wrote it,” he told the ABC a few weeks ago, “but people react in different ways.”

But now he has taken hold of the story again, by writing a sequel, which was released as a single last month, and will be on his new album, Seventy, due to be released in November. 

Rita Wrote A Letter is a dark, sad song set to a boppy, jaunty beat (perhaps stop reading here and go and listen to it before reading my much less affecting precis). 

Main character Joe tells us that two years after he got out of prison, his wife’s considerable patience with him, with his temper and his selfishness, finally snapped. She took the kids and went off with his brother, eventually having another child with Dan and moving “further up the coast”. 

Cut off from his family and cut out at his job, Joe went and bought some heroin off a friend “for old times’ sake,” used it alone, overdosed, and died. 

Whether Kelly originally meant it or not, there is an unavoidable sadness at the heart of the original. He told an interviewer in 2017, “The first time I sang it in front of some of the family I almost didn’t get through it.” And it is hard not to hear some reassertion of that sadness in the sequel, a gentle recasting of the cult of Gravy. 

It is a less grand, less rousing song in form, and a much bleaker and colder one in content. Along with the tropes of an Australian family Christmas, the flicker of redemption in How To Make Gravy, the promise to “pay em all back,” is gone. 

And darker still, Joe accepts that things are better this way, acknowledging without bitterness that his wife is better off with his brother than with him, that his kids are better off with their uncle than with their dad, that his family, to be blunt, will all ultimately be fine with him being dead. 

He has form for this. Paul Kelly has become this beloved national figure despite regularly setting out to disturb Australian comfort.

In 1987, as the nation prepared to celebrate 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet, he put out a song called Bicentennial, which framed the festivities as dancing on the graves of the First Nations people brutalised across those two centuries, from the “Hunted man out on the Barcoo” to present day deaths in custody.

In 2020 he wrote Sleep, Australia, Sleep, an acid lullaby about climate change that urges Australia to “Count down the little things, the insects and birds. Count down the bigger things, the flocks and the herds. Count down our river, our pastures and trees.” 

It is strikingly direct, and grim. After listing the coming natural hazards, it assures us “We'll lose track of counting, as the corpses keep mounting.”

And even at that concert out the front of the Opera House in 2017, live on the national broadcaster, he interrupted his own deification so that Vika Bull could sing a blasting, shattering version of Sweet Guy, a song he wrote in the late ‘80s about a woman stuck with a changeable, violent man, wondering why he “turns so mean.” 

An up-tempo rocker, another of his Trojan horses. “Listen up now,” he said, introducing it, “Vika has something to tell you. She has a question for you.”

Introducing Rita Wrote A Letter at his arena show in Sydney a few weeks ago, he reminded the audience that, in the original, Joe had been worried about Dan running off with his wife, and “it turns out, he was right to be worried.” The crowd laughed, and then he played the song he’d written. 

A song that’s much harder to come at than its predecessor, and that has nothing to do with Christmas. And one that’s going to be a fair bit harder to sing in joyful strains in a pub, or a backyard, or on primetime television.