Gravy Days: How Paul Kelly Crafted A Christmas Classic

Australia doesn’t really have a grand tradition of fine festive songs, though there have been some Christmas crackers over the years, including Bill & Boyd’s Santa Never Made It Into Darwin, Mental As Anything’s Apocalypso (Wiping The Smile Off Santa’s Face), John Williamson’s Christmas Photo, Tim Minchin’s White Wine In The Sun, AC/DC’s Mistress For Christmas, Kate Miller-Heidke’s I’m Growing A Beard Downstairs For Christmas, Darren Hanlon’s Spend Christmas Day With Me, TISM’s Damien Cowell’s I Hope You Get Laid For Christmas and Kevin Bloody Wilson’s Hey Santa Claus.

And then there’s How To Make Gravy.

Believe it or not, when it was first released, Gravy wasn’t a hit – stalling at number 144 on the Australian charts.

But it has become our most-loved Christmas song.

As we prepare to celebrate Gravy Day, it’s time to take a trip back to 1996 and discover the making of How To Make Gravy.

Paul Kelly started writing the song on the road, at soundchecks, on his trusty Maton guitar, with the band jamming on Thunderclap Newman’s Something In The Air. At that stage, it was just a melodic idea; he had no idea what it would become.

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In 1996, the songwriter was contacted by singer Lindsay Field, who was compiling a Christmas album, The Spirit Of Christmas, to raise money for the Starlight Foundation. Kelly wanted to cover The Band’s Christmas Must Be Tonight, but James Blundell had already done the song. So, Kelly decided to have a crack at writing a new festive tune.

It was one of his biggest songwriting challenges: How do you write an original Christmas song, one that’s not cheesy?

Subconsciously, Kelly believes he was inspired by the biggest-selling Christmas song of all time, White Christmas. His favourite version is the opening track on Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You, sung by Darlene Love. This cover features Irving Berlin’s original opening verse, which was not included in the Bing Crosby version. The singer is stuck in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, longing to be “up north”, celebrating a white Christmas.

It’s a similar story of separation in How To Make Gravy, though Kelly places his protagonist in prison.

Gravy is the heartbreaking tale of a guy who’s remembering past Christmas Days: the fights, the fun and the food.

All of the action takes place in a letter Joe pens to his brother Dan from jail. “Hello Dan, it’s Joe here …”

He’s filled with regret and jealousy, worried that Dan is going to steal his wife, Rita. “And you’ll dance with Rita; I know you really like her. Just don’t hold her too close. Oh brother, please don’t stab me in the back.”

The letter also includes a recipe, as Joe wonders, “Who’s gonna make the gravy now?” He instructs Dan to “add flour, salt, a little red wine, and don’t forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang”.

It’s a real recipe, which Kelly inherited from his first father-in-law. “Tomato sauce was his suggestion. I tried it, and I’m quite fond of it.”

The song doesn’t reveal Joe’s crime. The new Foxtel movie, How To Make Gravy, by Meg Washington and her husband Nick Waterman, fleshes out the details and features Kelly in a surprise cameo (with a subtle link to Kelly’s To Her Door).

Chuck Berry was a major influence on Kelly’s work. “His songwriting had a real strong visual quality. I think Chuck Berry’s amazing. He invented a whole new guitar style, he was writing the dance music of the day, and he had incredible narratives as well. You can see all his songs – you can see the fried chicken wrapper on the front seat, or the coffee-coloured Cadillac. His counterpart Buddy Holly was the complete opposite – you don’t see Buddy Holly songs, you hear them.

“I see Lou Reed in a similar tradition to Chuck Berry – mapping out a particular place and time. And that’s my bent as well. I start with the little details, things that you can see. You might have a couple of unrelated details, and after a while, you manage to link them somehow, and then you’ve got a song.”

Gravy has a remarkable cast of characters, from Baby Jesus to Joe, Dan, Rita, Stella, Angus, Frank, Dolly, Mary and Roger – “I’m even gonna miss Roger”.

Gravy also namechecks one of Kelly’s favourite singers, Jamaican reggae star Junior Murvin, whose best-known song ties in with the Gravy theme – Police And Thieves.

As Andrew Denton noted, “For a generation or two of Australians, Paul Kelly is the closest thing we have to a poet laureate. His songs are like postcards – little snapshots of the countryside with our experiences, dreams, hopes and problems scrawled in the lyrics.”

Kelly is often asked if his songs are autobiographical. “Some songs are more autobiographical than others,” he explains, “but I don’t feel that they’re autobiographical when they’re songs.

“Just the act of writing the song changes it. I’m not trying to confess; all I’m trying to do is write a song, just putting words to a melody, and sometimes you end up grabbing little details from your life. But even in the most autobiographical song, if you change one thing, you change the whole thing. However, people think if one thing’s true, the whole thing must be true. For example, in How To Make Gravy, the recipe is my recipe; that’s how I make my gravy. But the rest of the song is not true – I’m not in prison.”

Kelly elaborated in his memoir, which he also called How To Make Gravy. “I made most of it up as usual, though the general atmosphere is a lot like our Kelly Christmas gatherings, where there’s generally a large and diverse cast, the odd stray, new and old flames, gossip, singing, and much discussion and planning of food before, during and after the celebrations.”

How To Make Gravy was the favourite song of Kelly’s football idol, Robbie Flower, who played 272 games for Melbourne in the ’70s and ’80s. A highlight of Kelly’s life was having a kick of the footy with Flower. Kelly is old-school when it comes to Aussie Rules – he still practises the long-forgotten art of the drop kick. Flower was impressed, telling the singer, “I like your drop kicks.”

As a mate later remarked, “That’s like Don Bradman saying he liked your late cut.”

Ten years ago, Kelly sang How To Make Gravy at Robbie Flower’s memorial service. The experience changed how the songwriter saw the song. “I didn’t think it was a funeral song, but then I realised it’s a song that celebrates family.”

Paul Kelly once said that songwriting was about “sex and death and cricket. I mean, what else is there?” He later amended that to “sex, death, love, family, friends and cricket”.

Art historian Chris McAuliffe believes that Kelly writes about “the heroism of everyday life”.

Is that what he’s doing? “No, I’m just trying to get music to fit rhymes. Having said that, as I get older, I think my friends and people I’ve known for a long time get more heroic to me, and you become more admiring of them, just for making it through, living their lives and doing the best that they can.”

Lindsay Field teared up when Kelly played Gravy for him. The songwriter was surprised, saying: “It’s supposed to be a comedy.”

Gravy was Track 5 on The Spirit of Christmas album, sandwiched between Deni Hines’ cover of Donny Hathaway’s This Christmas and James Reyne’s version of Silent Night.

Kelly believes that Joe, the incarcerated gravy-maker, is the same character who appeared (unnamed) in previous songs, To Her Door and Love Never Runs On Time.

To Her Door, the first single from 1987’s Under The Sun, documents a young married couple’s crumbling relationship, while 1994’s Love Never Runs On Time is the tale of a truck driver wondering what might have been.

“He’s a bit hopeless,” Kelly says of Joe, “but he’s loving, and he’s loved.”

Who knows when or if Joe will reappear? “He’s probably lurking, ready to come around the corner. Though, who knows, he might be dead.”

How To Make Gravy was recorded by Kelly’s band at the time – Peter Luscombe (drums), Shane O’Mara (guitar), Steve Hadley (bass), Bruce Haymes (keyboards) and Spencer P. Jones (slide guitar).

The band shot a low-budget clip on the roof of Hadley’s place in Elwood on a stinking hot day.

Hadley remains rightly proud of his role in the recording, recently telling The Music it was his favourite Christmas song.

“When I got my head around the story and the way Paul had put it together, I thought, ‘Oh, there you go, another fucking Paul Kelly classic’,” Hadley told Kelly’s biographer Stuart Coupe. “It’s become a thing. It’s almost like Keith Richards’ shepherd’s pie recipe. People are making their gravy from Paul’s fucking lyrics.”

How To Make Gravy was nominated for Song of the Year at the APRA Awards, losing to Leonardo’s Bride’s Even When I’m Sleeping. It was also nominated for Song of the Year at the ARIA Awards, but Savage Garden’s To The Moon And Back took the trophy.

Though it didn’t initially crack the Top 40, How To Make Gravy quickly became one of Kelly’s most popular songs, which surprised him because it doesn’t have a chorus. “But it does have a lifting-off point; there’s a shift in the song, which always works.”

So, what makes a great song?

“Something surprising, I think,” Kelly believes. “That’s why songwriting seems like a fluky business. If you could go to songwriting school and take Step A to get to Step B and then Step C, like a Meccano set, you could write songs all day long. But it’s more desperate, scraping, chancy, fluky.

“There’s always part of a song you can’t plan. It might be the way the words fall, or a melody, or the way a chord comes in unexpectedly. That’s what makes a great song – something surprising.”

Kelly did a new version of Gravy for his first Christmas album, 2021’s Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train, which coincided with the song’s 25th anniversary. Kelly and Peter Luscombe are the only two people to play on both Gravy versions.

Gravy trainspotters will notice a subtle tweak to the lyrics. Kelly updated the line about Mary’s old boyfriend. In the original, he wore “just a little too much cologne”. In the new version, “he never did get Nina Simone”.

The producers of the Paul Kelly documentary, Stories Of Me, also put together a compilation of Gravy live clips, which they called “Christmas Gravy and Mash”.

Paul Kelly is happiest when he’s making music, piecing together a new song. Though on Christmas Day, you’ll find him in the kitchen – it’s his job to make the gravy … always remembering to add that extra dollop of tomato sauce.

With How To Make Gravy, Kelly gave the entire nation a gift. It also eventually made the Top 40 – 23 years after it was released – peaking at #34.

And in the end, the artist got what he wanted, too – he finally got to cover Christmas Must Be Tonight.

“That’s the great thing about Christmas,” Paul Kelly smiles. “It comes around every year, so you always get another shot.”

ON THE GRAVY TRAIN

Here are seven covers of How To Make Gravy, as well as two songs inspired by the Christmas classic.

All Our Exes Live In Texas

Hannah Crofts, Georgia Mooney, Elana Stone and Katie Wighton contributed their version of Gravy to the Bloodshot Records’ 13 Days of Xmas compilation in 2017.

Alyce Platt

For her Covid covers album, Bain Douche, Alyce Platt took her guitar into the bathroom and made Gravy.

Christine Anu

When Paul Kelly released Gravy, he shared a manager with Christine Anu. She covered the song on her 2014 Christmas album, Island Christmas, switching the gender. Anu’s version starts: “Hello Diane, it’s Joy here.” And Rita became Peter.

James Reyne

Paul Kelly covered James Reyne’s Reckless; Reyne has done two versions of Gravy – on the 2003 tribute album Stories Of Me: A Songwriter’s Tribute To Paul Kelly, and on his 2005 Liberation Blue album …And The Horse You Rode In On.

John Butler

John Butler says Gravy is “the perfect example of what we as artists try to do – to explain and convey the very emotion and feeling of a situation and setting in just a few words”. Butler’s live version was on the 2010 album Before Too Long.

Luca Brasi

Tasmania’s biggest rock band did Gravy for Like A Version in 2016.

Pub Choir

Ever wondered what Gravy would sound like sung by 2800 voices? Wonder no more …

Benny Davis

Sydney musician and comedian Benny Davis, a former member of The Axis Of Awesome, teamed up with Mark Sutton to do a comic response to the song called How Not To Make Gravy, revealing that Joe was guilty of poisoning his family.