Paul Kelly's 'Leaps & Bounds' Was 'Just A Song About A Feeling' That Became A Footy Anthem

Paul Kelly is wearing a smart navy suit and apologises for needing to send a text before we chat. It's AFL Grand Final week and this Cremorne studio is not far from the MCG, where Kelly will perform as part of the pre-game entertainment.

Leaps And Bounds was one of the songs Kelly performed at the 2012 AFL Grand Final and we're tipping it's gotta be good vibes singing about the MCG from the MCG's hallowed turf. 

"Oh, that's fun, yes," the national treasure enthuses, a warm smile spreading across his face. "It's a very old song and I wrote it with my friend Chris Langman when I first moved to Melbourne in '77. We were in a sharehouse together and we played in a band together for a very brief while, and we had started that song. 

"For us, it was kind of a song about nothing, really. It was just a song about a feeling; it was an autumn song. And we didn't actually finish it when we first wrote it – we just had a chorus and a melody – and I finished it later on when I actually moved from Hoddle Street up to Punt Road. I was living in a first-floor flat and out my window I could see the Nylex Clock and the MCG, so that's where that lyric came from. It was never really written as a football song, but it's sorta been picked up."

During last year's Making Gravy show at Sidney Myer Music Bowl (the one that narrowly avoided cancellation after heavy rainfall caused the venue to flood), the audience clearly got a kick out of singing along with the opening lyrics ("I'm high on the hill/Looking over the bridge/To the MCG...") with these local references (almost) in eyeshot. 

"It was just a song about a feeling; it was an autumn song. And we didn't actually finish it when we first wrote it..."

While introducing From St Kilda To Kings Cross that night, Kelly mentioned that he always feels the late guitarist Steve Connolly's presence whenever he performs the song. "That happens a lot and I guess that feeling's getting stronger as I keep playing," Kelly considers. "I mean, Spencer P Jones is another one that played on How To Make Gravy – that slide part – and he left us last year so, you know, it's quite precious to be able to, in some way, carry your old friends around even though they're not here anymore. So that's something I've noticed as I've got older. And Steve Connolly, he's in so many songs that I still play: To Her Door, Leaps And Bounds and Dumb Things. Steve Connolly's always with me."

All of these classics are among the 43 songs on Songs From The South 1985-2019: Paul Kelly's Greatest Hits, which drops this month. Exactly how many songs has the great man written to date? "Oh, it'd be 350 or something like that and I probably have about 100, 150 that I could recall, pretty much."

The cover art features young Kelly holding a trumpet and looking pretty chuffed with himself. When asked what would've been happening in his life around that time, he offers, "I think I was 12 or 13. I learnt trumpet for five years in high school and I decided to play the trumpet 'cause my older sister was going out with this guy who played trumpet. I sorta looked up to this guy and then he brought around some Louis Armstrong records and I heard Dixieland – you know, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five - for the first time. And, to me, that was just incredible sort of wild music where everyone seemed to be just playing off on their own, but somehow they were all playing together - that was my first experience of jazz, with Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet. 

"So that was a big discovery for me: the power of music. And then my parents bought Herb Alpert's Greatest Hits and I fell in love with that. And I used to lie down in the dark listening to that record and imagining myself playing the trumpet. So that was probably the first time I sort of had an idea that, 'Oh, maybe I could do this, maybe I could make a living or, you know, go and play music to people.'"