If you've been tuning in here for any length of time, you'll know that Whisperin' & Hollerin' were hugely impressed by Australian singer/songwriter and sometime taxi driver PERRY KEYES' debut album 'Meter': a killer double album chock full of sharply-observed vignettes often concerning the seamier side of Sydney life but propelled along with marvellously rough-edged grace and danger by Perry's inventive band, Give My Love To Rose.
'Meter' proved a captivating listen and it's a record which this writer continues to hold in extremely high regard. However, what he didn't expect was that its' erstwhile follow-up, the emotionally-charged 'The Last Ghost Train Home' would arguably surpass it.
Just out on the influential Laughing Outlaw label, 'The Last Ghost Train Home"s patch is again Keyes' home turf, the working class Sydney boroughs of Redfern and Waterloo. Well, formerly working class, before the developers came in and changed all that in more recent times. Unlike the more narrative-based 'Meter', though, 'Ghost Train...' sounds a whole lot more personal - at least on the surface. Is that a fair appraisal Perry?
"Yeah, well 'Meter' was my collection of love songs, written from the point of view of people trying to have relationships where their environment undermines," their author explains over the phone.
"A lot of the time, their situations are pretty fucked-up, like in the song 'Wide Streets' where there's a lot of self-interest involved and the people involved would only do things if there's something to their advantage in the deal. On the second CD, I progessed through to darker songs like 'When things Wear Out' (where the drunken male lead actually kicks and beats his long-suffering girlfriend to death) which is of course just about the ultimate awful situation. By comparison, 'The Last Ghost Train' relates to a community - specifically Redfern, where I grew up - breaking down and development dismantling the established cultural touchstones."
On songs such as 'Double On The Main Game' and - perhaps the record's key track - the superb 'The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw', 'The Last Ghost Train Home' paints some resonantly moving pictures, but has the Redfern Perry knew growing up completely disappeared in the competitive, upwardly-mobile 21st Century?
"Yeah, it's mostly gone," Perry replies.
"It's that whole gentrification thing that seems to affect most cities, y'know...the factories are shut down and gradually studio apartments crop up with the professional classes in mind. There are some physical elements left if you wander around, but most of the cultural touchstones are gone, theatres and dancehalls and so on. In the late 1960s they were just ripped out and in came in the 20-storey tower blocks. It wreaked havoc with the established, working class neighbourhoods and all the people were kicked out and relocated in the outer suburbs. It was like something out of a Ken Loach movie."
From here, our talk turns specifically to the song 'The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw'. Without question one of Keyes' greatest achievements to date, it's a tale of sporting triumph over adversity, involving the legendary John Sattler, 1970s rugby league icon and one-time captain of the Souths in Sydney, though it has much wider implications as it makes copious references to Sydney in - as Perry puts it - the "post-Menzies land of plenty" in the early 1970s. There again, I guess it would appeal to a confirmed Wigan RL fan like myself...
"Oh wow - that's amazing," replies Perry. "I mean, obviously the Rugby League's huge here, but I used to love watching the English rugby league in the 1970s and 80s...places like Warrington seemed from another galaxy. And the commentary...Eddie Waring...I could never understand a word he said!"
Don't worry mate. English RL fans had their work cut out as well....
"Yeah, well I'm a bit of a rugby league trainspotter, I must admit. I love the fact it's a working class game, aimed at the working class. It's wonderful it's survived, really. It's true that football was predominantly working class, but it doesn't have the community spirit that League has."
Absolutely. But tell me more about the game when John Sattler broke his jaw. Did he finish the game?
"Oh yeah, " enthuses Perry. "He broke his jaw in 3 pieces in the 7th minute of the game (bear in mind, RL is 80 minutes in all - ed) and the Souths went on to win the match. As you can imagine it's since gone down in folklore. The idea of the song is to document local changes, starting in the 70s in Sattler's heyday and ending up in the modern day. It sorta typified the guts and determination of the whole area and thet toughness of the people so it's still referred to even now as a kind of an example to us all."
I can quite understand why - it's real man of the people stuff, isn't it?
"Absolutely," says Perry.
"Of course, the Souths are just giants anyway because they've won 20 championships, so they're held in really high regard. Off the field, John Sattler is the ultimate gentleman, really softly spoken, but on the field he was a really dirty bugger, up to all the tricks, hur hur!"
Of such things are heroes made, of course, but talking of heroes, another of 'The Last Ghost Train Home"s many highlights is the self-explanatory 'Joe Strummer'. I wasn't too surprised Perry would write a song in tribute to the late Clash frontman (the sleeve of 'Meter' even depicts the back cover of the Clash's debut album in the front cover montage) but what I didn't know about was the content of the song's chorus: a proud, but less-than-radio friendly rant which goes "well, fuck that shit, eyes front and face it/ fuck that shit, eyes front and take control."
"That relates to a story about The Clash playing live and the audience had got wind of the fact it was Joe's birthday," reveals Perry.
"And so the crowd started chanting 'Happy Birthday' to him...and of course, Joe being Joe he pretty much replied with the words making up the chorus.telling them to think about their futures...though I can't definitely say I've repeated them verbatim!" he finishes, chuckling.
Well, I must say even this long-term Clash head didn't know that one. I was also intrigued by the reference to Arthur Scargill in the lyric. Not an obvious figure to include in a song about Joe Strummer. Is that a reference to the Miners' strike or something?
"Yeah, that's right," Perry affirms. "I remember as a teenager in the 1980s seeing lots of footage of the miners' strike in England on the news...the images of the lines of bodies and the buses carrying the scabs across the picket lines really vividly. In my naive way, I remember thinking "wow! - if ever we needed The Clash to get back together the way they were."
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean there. It was never going to happen, of course, but The Clash made you feel that maybe things could change for the better....
"Right," agrees Perry. "I mean, in the cold light of day it's naive to think rock'n'roll can really change anything, but the great thing about The Clash was they gave you a jolt, they got you to wake up and think 'hang on', should I really be accepting this or whatever."
Warming to the theme, he continues:
"In the song, it was more of a question of highlighting the things Joe stood for, and also in many ways it's about loss as much as anything. People The Clash wrote about, like Montgomery Clift were actually hugely tragic people as well as heroic."
Talking of tragedy, a subject several of Keyes' most resonant songs relate to the horrific subject of homelessness. Arguably his most poignant song of all, 'Matraville Trees' closed 'Meter' and touched on this issue with incredible compassion and two of 'Ghost Train"s best songs, 'Peter Cottonball' and 'Matthew Talbot's Blanket' deal directly with the tragic end results of this predicament. Is it a problem that's getting worse in Sydney, Perry?
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"Yes, sadly it's worsening," says Perry quietly.
"Y'see, basically the government closed down a load of institutes about 20 years ago and put a lot of these people into government housing schemes. In itself it was a nice idea, because it was trying to encourage independence, but a lot of the people involved were never capable of caring for themselves, so many of them ended up back on the street. Because there's no-one to give 'em their medicine, basically."
I assume a lot of these folk are actually talented people who've fallen on hard times too?
"Oh yeah, they are, that's just it," says Perry.
"Sometimes I get stopped in the railway station or whatever and they're often really bright, incredibly interesting people, it's just that they can't cope with their problems, schizophrenia and so on."
He pauses and then continues quietly.
"It's one of the things I can't fail to see driving my cab, Tim," he says.
"You know, you see kids from 13 up doing what they have to do to survive. I mean, if you drive up and down the same place 30 times in one shift, you just can't miss seeing people involved in drugs, male prostitution, you name it...you can't miss it. They're like ghosts drifting through the streets. The one thing as a songwriter I feel I CAN do is at least try to give voice to these things through song, but you really feel helpless sometimes."
On a more musical slant, the song 'Peter Cottonball' - which deals graphically with both drugs and homelessness - really intrigues me. It's initially really dramy and opiated-sounding and then there's this sudden explosion of a chorus when the band kick in. It's pretty disorientating when you hear it for the first time.
"Hey, that's great, it worked!" enthuses Perry. "That's the effect I hoped it would have. I came up with that one by trying to merge the feeling of Neil Young's 'Tonight's The Night' with some of Lou Reed's stuff like 'Heroin'...and then with a sudden fast bit, kinda like Drive By Truckers. I wanted that to jolt the listener out of the song's dream-like first part because it represents the kind of mad surges of anger that overtake people."
Ed Kairouz plays a really powerful, Neil Young-style solo on that song too. It's a real feature of the track.
"It probably sounds a bit trite, but I really wanted to have more guitar solos this time round," reveals Perry.
"With this album, we wanted to rough it up a bit and also Ed and I both play electric guitar live, so we wanted to get it sounding more like the live band. We play the songs fairly faithfully to the way they are on the albums, but in some cases we like to leave it a little more open-ended...like with 'Some Aches' from the first album, when we do that live we often go into a Velvets-style section at the end where it builds and builds."
I always think Give My Love To Rose provide great, sympathetic support to your songs. How close to completion are your songs before you present them to the band?
"They're invariably pretty much done," replies Perry.
"The arrangements are organised in my head and I have 'em pretty much sorted, but that's not to say the band don't add a lot because they do. They all have a track record, for example."
Yes, of course you appeared on (drummer) Bek-Jean Stewart's fine 'Junior Years' album released earlier this year by Laughing Outlaw, didn't you?
"Yeah, absolutely...that's very much her own achievement, but she's written great songs for years. Before working on my stuff, she did Eva Trout (also featuring Keyes' producer Grant Shanahan on bass and co-songwriting) and they had Top 10 hits over here and did the whole major label thing, touring the States and so on. It still amazes me that she approached me to be my drummer."
Really?
"Oh yeah, 'Meter' was recorded only six months after she'd started playing drums, would you believe it! But y'know, she's great, she has a real great instinct for music and the whole band bring their own sound with them - for example, I've been working with Ed (Kairouz - lead guitar) for years and he always knows exactly where he's heading, so it's a very organic thing."
Sadly, by this stage, time constraints mean our chat has to wind down, but finally answer us this one: on the album's understated title track, yourself and Bek-Jean duet on the record's kiss-off line "if it was the way it used to be, would you be happy?" Somehow, it brings the record full circle, but overall is Sydney a better place to live these days than the landscape the album often refers back to?
"That's an interesting one," Perry considers.
"Sometimes I think that comes down to how much money you've got. For example, everyone's always telling me how beautiful Sydney harbour is, but I don't own a boat, so I never use it and wouldn't know really. I mean, I'm sure that's fine for lawyers, doctors, professional people who can afford all the trappings."
"The more interesting stuff has pretty much disappeared, though, in the sense of the city's organic culture - I mean, it's hard to find good second hand book stores or record stores these days and a lot of its' character has drained away in that sense."
"What I do want to stress though, is that this album isn't about nostalgia, even though I miss a lot of this stuff. I mean, living in Redfern back in the day was tough, often a struggle, so I'm certainly not glorifying that. 'The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw', for example, is totally anti-nostalgia, but it makes the point that the very real, tangible sense of community has been removed with the changing of the times. I'm not sure we're the richer for that."
Me neither, but I am sure that we're a lot richer for the presence of Perry Keyes. In a music scene often incapable of recalling further back than the previous week's NME cover, he's the sort of artist built to last and the wonderfully emotive 'The Last Ghost Train Home' is a rock'n'roll ride par excellence you'll be signing up for with regularity once you've heard it.
('The Last Ghost Train Home' is out now on Laughing Outlaw)
(www.laughingoutlaw.com.au )
(www.perrykeyes.com )
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