There’ll be a big absence at the Kelly family Christmas: the singer’s older brother, who inspired an album he didn’t live to hear
To understand why Paul Kelly would make aalbum nearly 30 records deep into his career, it helps to know how he spends his own festive season.
Martin’s spirit is all over Kelly’s new album, Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train: a collection of seasonal songs performed by Kelly and collaborators including Emma Donovan, Marlon Williams, Lior and Waleed Aly. “I think of Martin as the heart and soul of this project, he was the older brother who was a big influence on us younger ones,” he says.
But that, he says, proves a point: Christmas songs are a tradition as rich as the festival they accompany. There are also songs that represent Christmas in the austral summer, including Swing Around the Sun by Casey Bennetto, author of the musical, Keating!. It speaks of “miles of scrunched-up paper, yards of burning skin / an alcoholic vapour ’round the yellow-lidded bin”. Kelly couldn’t believe the song hadn’t already been recorded: “We had to put a lot of work into that one, not the least because there’s 19 chords in it.
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