Paul Kelly AO (b. 1955), singer/songwriter and producer, grew up in Adelaide and made his performing debut in Hobart in 1974. In Melbourne, he and his pub band The Dots made two albums before breaking up in 1982. He recorded Post in Sydney in 1985, but his major break came the following year, by which time his band was known as The Coloured Girls. Their double album Gossip was one of the biggest Australian records of 1986. The band made Under the Sun (1987) before touring the US as Paul Kelly and the Messengers. They disbanded in 1991, and from that point Kelly branched into producing and acting as well as writing and performing. Kelly sings with a marked Australian accent and many of his songs refer to specific Australian people, places and experiences.
Though he has written most of his long and poetic songlist alone, over the course of his 27 studio albums has also collaborated brilliantly, particularly with First Nations performers such as Kev Carmody, Christine Anu and Yothu Yindi. His self-described 'mongrel memoir', How to Make Gravy, was released in 2010 and Ian Darling's film Paul Kelly: Stories of Me appeared in 2012. In 2013 Kelly was the subject of a biographical exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The winner of seventeen ARIA awards, he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1997. His 2019 greatest hits album Songs from the South debuted at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart, his third number one album in three years (the others were Life is Fine and Nature).
Purchased 2022
© William Kelly
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Dr Anne Sanders previews the works in the new focus exhibition Paul Kelly and The Portraits.
The story behind the creation of the portrait of singer-songwriter Paul Kelly by the artist Jon Campbell.
