Paul Kelly’s Live Apples DVD is out now through EMI.
This week sees the release of Paul Kelly’s new in concert DVD, Live Apples. Filmed at Toowoomba’s Empire Theatre, in September 2007, the show captures Kelly performing his last studio album Stolen Apples in its’ entirety as well as a further sixteen songs from one of this country’s more impressive catalogues.
Helmed by director Paul Drane, the event was shot by the Renegade film crew.
They were fantastic,” enthuses Kelly, “They’re the company that film the Rock Wiz show and Paul Drane goes way back. He filmed the ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock n’ Roll)’ clip for AC/DC on the back of the truck driving through Melbourne in the early 1970’s. It was great to work with him.”
Kelly admits that capturing a ‘moment’ can be quite a task, and the set up for this type of shoot can be exhausting. “The day of filming is a long day,” he laments. “You set up early and perform a lot of the show during sound check so the crew can work out their camera angles.
[Then] it’s a matter of getting used to being filmed, and then you don’t worry about it.”
hot entirely on one night, there was little room for error. “It’d be great to have the luxury of The Rolling Stones who can film a series of concerts and just use the best bits. After a while you wouldn’t even know there was a film crew there.
We tried to get all the conditions right for a good concert. We decided to film the show about three or four weeks in when the band was humming along. It was a nice theatre that looked good and sounded good.”
chameleon, Kelly has continually surprised his audience over the last two decades. As The Coloured Girls became The Messengers, Kelly surprised us all by breaking the band up. After the funk driven Professor Ratbaggy came The Stormwater Boys and The Stardust Five. Thankfully, he’s getting in the habit of filming his endeavours for DVD.
I’ve done three DVD’s in the past four years,” he continues, “we did one for Ways And Means, which was fairly grainy footage filmed in America, and we filmed The Stormwater Boys’ bluegrass show at the Enmore in Sydney. A natural collaborator, Kelly is continually altering the structure of his touring bands.
[The tour] was the first time I’d put a six piece band together for quite a while. We had two guitarists besides me, and a dedicated keyboard player, which we haven’t had for quite a while.” Highlights from the DVD are tunes from Kelly’s earlier days like ‘Before Too Long’, ‘Sweet Guy’ and ‘To Her Door’.
We went back and deliberately paid attention to the old recordings,” he explains. “The plan was always to do Stolen Apples first and then do older songs for the second half. Some of the older songs we played are probably closer to the originals than what’s been happening over the years.
Like most artists you don’t listen to your own records so, over the years, songs morph into something else. What struck me about the early songs was how much keyboards were on them – I’d forgotten. They were very specific parts, beautiful parts, originally played by Peter Bull. We didn’t go painstakingly note-for-note, but it was good to remind ourselves of the good parts on them.”
Paul Kelly’s Live Apples DVD is out now through EMI.
