Paul Kelly, Rod Laver Arena, Wednesday, April 20
Paul Kelly is at his best in a minimalist environment.
Completely dwarfed by the looming Rod Laver Arena stands, and pressed in by the huge amount of people sitting impatiently in them, the stage and its two spotlights were made increasingly sparse.
It was just Paul Kelly, his guitar, his harmonica, his nephew, Dan Kelly (a great musician in his own right), and the communal ukulele and electric guitar.
He wasn’t overly chatty, just polite, and liked to preface his more politically-minded songs with short, children-story-esque introductions like, ‘Once, there was a stretch of land in Australia. People lived there. But the government didn’t care and used their home to drop bombs.’
My intelligence would probably be insulted if it wasn’t so eerily fantastic.
He knowingly threw in plenty of crowd favourites, people almost crying upon the opening notes of How to Make Gravy and attempting to steal the lead singer responsibilities.
The more rowdy ones around us (there were plenty) tried to copy his quite unorthodox dance moves during ‘Dumb Things’, but found that their knees weren’t quite as flexible despite being of the same age and had to sit the next song out.
Perhaps it was because I was so far back from the stage that I had almost retreated into expensive territory again in the form of the private restaurant booths, but before he starts to sing, Paul Kelly isn’t the most impressive of figures.
He was small and wearing all black and just so pleasant and agreeable that he threatened to sink into the depths of the stage in between songs.
But then everything was taken away. We clapped Dan Kelly off, backstage men took all the instruments, and all that remained was a microphone stand.
He sang ‘Meet Me in the Middle of the Air’ and such was the effect that no one danced, no one moved and, though everyone knew the lyrics, no one dared even whisper them.
When it was done, he just turned and left, and after a brief reverie, we all realised and proceeded to attempt to raucously swing an encore.
It didn’t work, which in hindsight, is good I think.
In that gaudy atmosphere, anything from Paul Kelly just wouldn’t have been right.
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