Live Review: Paul Kelly & His Band - 'Time & Tide: Four Decades Of Song'

Vivid feels different this year. Yes, the crowds are flocking back, the sails of the Opera House are lit, and the Harbour Bridge is covered in lights and projections. But there’s something about the normalcy of it that’s different: a return to what we knew before COVID-19. There is a gap in our time.

“We haven’t played in Sydney for two and a half years,” Paul Kelly tells an intimate crowd, early on in his set. For a prolific songwriter and tireless tourer with a repertoire of literally hundreds of songs, this seems wrong. But, time makes fools of us all, and the ebb and flow of the tide is something we cannot fully rely on.

Let’s backtrack a little - picture hundreds skirting the famous Opera House at Bennelong Point, greeted by the always stunning sight of the Harbour Bridge in all its iron glory, and party boats all lit up for the occasion drifting by. Instantly warmed by the crowd, you move close to the stage where Gamilaraay singer-songwriter, Thelma Plum is plying her trade. And what a trade! She works you over with songs that blend national history and personal memory.

Her treacly voice and the nostalgic tones of a simple fingerpicking blues belie the profundity of her words in opening track, Homecoming Queen. She sips at a hot toddy to keep the pipes warm; a nod to the fast-approaching winter. She also gives a nod to the place where she was raised (Meanjin/Brisbane) in her song The Brown Snake. Her closing song, Better In Blak is a triumphal anthem set to an upbeat rhythm that coaxes a dance from the crowd and calls on them to join in on the chorus.

Pic by Jordan Munns

After what seems like no time at all, given how much time it's been between drinks, Australian icon Paul Kelly and his band take to the stage. Kelly is spritely, clearly excited to be back on a Sydney stage. This excitement is matched by a crowd of mixed ages who are unified instantly in an ebullient rendition of Dylan’s classic, The Times They Are A-Changin’. Then comes, Finally Something Good, a sign of the times: buoyant with a different pace and a poppy pull that melds perfectly with the optimism of the opening cover. “Speaking of something good, give it up for Thelma Plum,” Kelly quips at the song’s conclusion.

He is humble to a fault, thanking many friends here and gone throughout his set, and early on acknowledging the first storytellers of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. In keeping with the night’s theme, he decrees, “Let the time keep rolling on; we hope it’s on our side,” before diving into Before Too Long, which again sees the crowd singing along in unison.

That’s the thing about Kelly - no matter where or when you come to him, he has a song for all occasions to make you feel. Whether forged around a Broome campfire with Alan Pigram, like the titular, Time And Tide, or a dulcet duet shared with Linda Bull, like The Pretty Place, there is something for everyone in the idiosyncratic storytelling of lines like “laughed so hard I thought I’d pee”. 

Pic by Jordan Munns

Knowing cackles rise from the audience in When I First Met Your Ma while Kelly intimates intimate memories to crowd members while the universality of the simile “love like a bird flies away” ties the piece together. It’s a blueprint for the hybridity of Kelly’s music, and a performance that sees a musical rendition of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 and a verbatim recitation of Shelley’s Ozymandias. 

Again, Kelly thanks backup singers Vika and Linda Bull, drummer Pete and bassist Bill in introducing the first song they recorded together which has “a little Spanish beat”: Love Never Runs On Time. He thanks his nephew, Dan Kelly, on mandolin and guitar, and the other members of this band, while also remembering Paul Hewson, Dragon’s keyboardist who “had melodies pouring out of him”, and who Kelly lived with in the '80s when he wrote songs like, Going About My Father’s Business.

Of course, the always iconic, always tear-jerking, How To Make Gravy came out to play with the introduction that this was “a story with a lot of people” with “no room for piracy or heresy, just gravy”. Everyone joined in here before Thelma Plum returned to the stage with Indigenous rapper, Ziggy Ramo, and the crowd’s choral collaboration continued with the retelling of Vincent Lingiari’s story, Little Things. 

The audience’s yelps and hounds prompted Leaps And Bounds as Kelly returned to the stage for an encore which took us to a chilly day at the MCG in a nod to Shane Warne, before another cover closed the night: John Cale’s Buffalo Ballet - a soulful song warning against living too fast through the retelling of the rise and fall of a small cattle town in Kansas.

Pic by Prudence Upton