Dan Kelly supports Augie March at The Tivoli on Friday 28 November 2008.
Two years after the release of his sophomore album Drowning in the Fountain of Youth, Dan Kelly has resurfaced with a new single just in time to coincide with the much coveted support slot opening for perennial critic favourites, Augie March.
Not content to simply warm up the crowd, Kelly has been accompanying Augie March onstage.
“They’ve got me on as a guitar player, which is great fun and exciting but it’s a bit of a head fuck at the start because they’re quite sophisticated songs,” an upbeat and friendly Kelly explains the morning after the second show of the tour.
“I’m just balancing with acoustic and electric guitar and adding a different voice to the harmony. It’s one of my favourite bands, so I get to play in a band I really like which is exciting.”
Taking a break from working on his third album, Kelly teamed up with Melbourne-duo The Ukeladies to release “The SUV Song”, available only as a free download from the Dan Kelly website.
Built around a Hawaiian-style ukulele and sweet backing vocals courtesy of The Ukeladies, the song’s lighthearted tropical beauty is at odds with the biting political message Kelly softly delivers.
“The Ukeladies do these really beautiful Hawaiian beach songs so I wanted to combine my cynicism with their natural innocence and muck stuff up,” says Kelly.
Told from the perspective of two Samoan women, the track is an environmentally minded political spray in which no one is spared from Kelly’s sharp wit (sample lyric: “I must admit we blame the whiteys/ think they’re worse than hepatitis and TB”).
“It’s kind of absurd in a way as a white guy pretending to be two Samoan women taking pot shots at white people, but the whole thing with environmental issues is it’s so difficult to pinpoint one or another thing, I wanted to write a song with everything in it where everyone’s to blame,” says Kelly.
Not surprisingly from the man who brought the world ‘Drunk On Election Night’, the inspiration for “The SUV Song” can be traced back to Australian Liberal Party.
“I heard a speech by (ex-Defence Minister) Robert Hill a few years ago and he was talking about how it was probably cheaper for Australia to relocate the Tuvaluans and Samoans rather than cut emissions.
“Economically it makes more sense just to drown their country and relocate them then it would be to try and save these paradise islands and I thought that was evil and cynical to the extreme so I really wanted to write a song from the view point of some pacific women saying ‘what the hell?’” explains Kelly.
Kelly’s current collaboration with The Ukeladies is hardly surprising from a man who has made a career out of fluid lineups, drifting between working solo and with his backing band The Alpha Males. It also never hurts when you share a house with members from some of Australia’s best bands.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have met and lived with people who are great musicians. I write the songs and I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what they sound like but then I kind of let loose these really individual and interesting people on it and they always bring something better than I could of done.
“I was really happy with the first record, I could have been a bit more cautious if I didn’t have people like Gareth (Liddiard) from the Drones playing bass.
“But the downside of that is if I choose to work with people like Gareth and Tom (Carlyon) from the Devastations, they’re too creative to be sitting around and being sessions musicians for Dan Kelly,” says Kelly.
Dan Kelly supports Augie March at The Tivoli on Friday 28 November 2008.
