More People Should Really Know About: Perry Keyes

Australia has long presented as a prevailing outpost of Americana. From 13,000 miles away the community of artists, facilitators, commentators and audience seems firmly established, mightily enthusiastic and inherently creative. At AUK we have given our fair share of critical love to this ‘scene’ (if indeed that is what it is) and in particular to the sublime Paul Kelly. Cracking as a lot of this music is, it does often come with a whiff of mid-western cowboy exudate, campfire beans and Kentucky bourbon whiskey. Whilst acknowledging the difficulties of working within the confines of an inherently American art form (especially right now) and communicating a very different set of experiences, it has to be said that the ‘Australian-ness’ (so sorry!) of some of this music is barely detectable.

When it comes to representing the Australian experience, few songwriters can match the already fêted Paul Kelly. Maybe in recent times Courtney Barnett and her more intimately personal and semi-abstract stories of arty Melbourne life comes close. But Sydney’s Perry Keyes is the real deal. He is the county’s finest relator of the vicissitudes of the Aussie journey.  He fits the classic trope of the ‘songwriters’ songwriter’– an artist who for some reason lacks even a modicum of commercial success but who is awash with both critical approval and the approbation of their artistic peers and contemporaries.

To offer a trio of examples of this; Tim Freedman, head honcho of The Whitlams has described Keyes as “an authentic voice from the heart of a disappearing world”, an idea that Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett advanced to note that “Perry’s songs are so real, they ache with humanity. He chronicles life in the rough lane with a poet’s eye…”. Whilst SMH critic Bernard Zuel goes further, suggesting Keyes is “The best chronicler of Sydney we’ve ever had… there’s nothing quite like it being told anywhere in Australia.” All this moves us somewhere close but doesn’t really get to the essence of what makes Keyes great. Neither does the SMH’s somewhat lazy, though not entirely inaccurate reference to Keyes as “Redfern’s answer to Bruce Springsteen”.

OK so he does write 3-4 minute story songs located in blue-collar communities, putting them in classic heartland rock and alt-country flavoured settings and peppering them with characters we sort of recognise and neighbourhoods we know but are sort of glad we no longer live in. But these settings are no affectation, they are no cloak that Keyes has thrown over his work to provide a patina of grassroots authenticity. They are the marrow of Keyes’ life and the experiences of those he has lived it with. They are authentic and faithful sentiments for what he observes and feels, and perhaps more pointedly, what he observes to be vanishing in front of his eyes.

These songs are wrenched directly from his own life story then. A story that reads like the embodiment of so many ‘working class seeks escape through rock n roll’ tropes. Raised in Redfern, a real hard yakka inner city area of Sydney, with lanes of densely packed terraced houses wedged between textile factories and storerooms. His own home was populous with various generations of family at any one time and rang with the music of Ray Charles and Roy Orbison. A teenage move to the high-rise council buildings of Waterloo saw Keyes, in thrall to the sounds of The Clash, Costello and Lou Reed, make his first tentative foray into music-making, forming The Stolen Holdens in 1989. After their demise in the early 90s he returned to a wage-earning carry-on, only resuming music 10 years later, playing solo shows with a whole bunch of songs reflecting his time in the shadows. These songs made up the bulk of his debut record “Meter” in 2005.

Since then he has offered up a further 5 studio albums, live offerings and in recent times a string of what we used to call ‘singles’. He has released records that have won prizes – his second LP “The Last Ghost Train Home” (with a cover painted by Jon Langford) was ABC Radio National album of the year and a finalist for the 2007 Australian Music Prize and 2010 LP “Johnny Ray’s Downtown” got an ARIA Award nomination.  Throughout this he’s never veered from his chosen path; telling vivid stories of his marginalised, often disregarded and crumbling inner city areas of Sydney, offering a hyper-local reflection of his home environment and community.

There isn’t a songwriter working today with a greater sense of place, who is any better at bringing places to life in such an affecting and engaging way. He is a documentarian, social historian, activist and entertainer in one.

Keyes elucidates his mien perfectly when talking about his 2018 LP “Jim Salmon’s Lament” (2018): “I started thinking about the families I grew up with and a particular family that lived in the James Cook flats, a brother and sister. I thought I would write about the dad, because I was pissed off with narcissistic blokes where everything they do is fuelled by self-interest (ring any bells?!) but every time it got to mentioning the kids I would start writing a song about them, so I realised that the centre of the album was the brother and sister. That is the grace in the record.”

This record, as with much of his later work, is centred on Waterloo, a suburb of Sydney that is currently undergoing tremendous change, or gentrification as we might pejoratively refer to it. In a piece by Tim Freedman Keyes rendered the dichotomy sensitively and perceptively: “The cafe at Redfern Oval is a great place to watch the two worlds collide – Old and New Waterloo. You’ll have the owner Harry telling Adam Reynolds [NRL side South Sydney Rabbitohs star halfback] to take the coffee over to old George because he’s been waiting 10 minutes, the housos wandering past to the shops, and at the next table a couple in suits are talking real estate.”

In life as in art he’s at one with the winners and the losers, not judgemental about one but advocating powerfully for the other – a “welfare driven underclass” as he has observed. All of this was recognised when he received a grant from Creative Australia to make a record documenting the changes taking place in Waterloo and returned with 6^th and most recent album “Black and White Town”. As Waterloo’s public housing, where Keyes lived for many years, is razed in favour of high value apartments and artisan coffee shops his songs exist as meticulously observed photo-realist anecdotes depicting the richest cast of characters this side of a Damon Runyan story. There are workers leaving the factory gates, kids recklessly partying on NYE, cons – current and ex trying to manage life, gamblers, drunk parents and struggling cab drivers. Keyes brings them all vividly to life as they go about their everyday – supping in the pub, riding the bus or the backseat, attending the rugby, selling speed and heroin, punting away their hard earned in the TAB, riding the roller coaster at the Easter Show or simply, sheepishly falling in love.

Keyes’ work is achingly personal, yet intensely universal. Chronicling life in one very particular community yet speaking to people the world over. For people who recognise or share these experiences it can be evocative of whatever they want it to be, yet there’s a precise ‘matter of factness’ to the storytelling that is at once immediately relatable and poetically figurative. As he has it these are “stories of displacement, anarchy, homelessness and of people trying to hang onto each other in the face of what’s happening in the inner-city right now”. The songs are hugely empathic, capturing both the listeners’ emotions and intellect as he opens up his world and lays it out in front of us piece by piece. They manage to remain completely non-judgemental yet utterly focussed and clear in the position they take on the world and by extension that they think we should take. It’s a fool’s errand to try and illustrate this with one small extract but let’s try with a snatch of ‘Hyde Park Hotel’ from “Jim Salmon’s Lament”:

“now dad worked at city tax, my mum was a concessionaire,
then we moved to the Walker St Flats, by Ludwig’s Unisex Hair,
and all I can do is wish her well, when I see her standing outside the Hyde Park Hotel,
it’s love by the back gate, get stoned in the dunny lane,
to Big Jim’s FM rock, to Bob Seger’s ‘Still the Same’,
I hated those songs, but I kept my feelings hid,
she was as cool as Yvonne Goolagong, and I was as straight as the milky bar kid”.

The primary purpose of these songs is to tell us about the communities that Keyes is signifying. His musical influences that inform the way he delivers these stories are clear. As noted the comparisons to Springsteen abound, in turn he makes constant reference to Dylan and The Clash (Strummer had “the biggest rock n roll heart ever” in his judgement). Then there are more oblique references in the songs to such as Graham Parker – ‘Double on the Main Game’ quoting “down by Luna Park, it’s never ever dark”, Bob Seger and Deep Purple amongst others. If this signals a singular classic heartland rock atmosphere then you’d be exactly right.

The musical setting Keyes provides is supremely melodic, alternately raucous or sentimental and tinged with country – probably the alternative kind and punk – definitely the UK kind. It’s created and presented to be as accessible as possible and this ‘everyman’ roots rock approach works perfectly in this regard. The songs are catchy as hell with just enough interest in the arrangements to keep our attention going. His voice is clear and powerful with the grit necessary to connect as authentic. It can be a little featureless at times but this only adds to his ability to focus us on his characters and stories in a compelling and universal way.

Perry Keyes is one of the great undiscovered artists of rock n roll, period. That he remains so, entering his 58^th year is both a travesty and suggests that this is probably going to be his lot. Given his artistic commitment to the places of his birth and upbringing this is unlikely to be a major concern to Keyes and is certainly manna for those of us who dote on his every word. His work has at its heart the theme of community. He understands, more than that, he feels the cultural capital that binds people together – sport, work, food & drink, music, the neighbourhood. And in song he stands up for and celebrates this culture as it is ignored, ridiculed or threatened by the hegemony of power and the search for economic capital. In this sense his art is as vital as it is beautiful. As long as we have artists like Keyes then there will always be worth in our experiences and hope for our future.