Paul Kelly

"I want to write songs that don't get used up in the first couple of listens, that keep revealing things. As with every songwriter, I think, my staple song is the love song. Happy love songs are much harder to write than the sad ones. More and more as I've gone on, they're the songs I want to write. To me as a songwriter, that's a challenge: to write happy love songs without being banal, sentimental or smug."

From very early on in his career, Paul Kelly was recognised as one of the most significant singer/songwriters in the country. Inspired initially by the likes of Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Lou Reed and Robert Johnson, Kelly's narrative songwriting style was infused with wry observations, bittersweet emotions and enormous appeal.
The sixth of nine children, Paul Kelly was born in Adelaide in 1955 and attended a Christian Brothers School, where he played trumpet and captained the cricket team. After school he wandered around Australia for a few years, working odd-jobs and picking up a guitar along the way. He made his public debut singing the Australian folk song 'Streets Of Forbes' to a Hobart audience in 1974, and two years later moved to Melbourne, where the thriving pub-rock scene was being transformed by a surge of punk adrenaline.