Kev Carmody

He’s a man whose cultural and musical significance can’t really be understated, and I enter this interview somewhat terrified I will overlook some fundamental tier of his life and work. An ARIA Hall of Famer and Don Banks Music Award recipient, his support for indigenous communities and his impact on the Australian landscape turned Carmody into one of the most respected artists we have. Of course, my nervousness is entirely unfounded. Carmody is as direct, humble and down-to-earth as they come.

“I’m always unknowingly attuned to sound,” he says reflectively. We are discussing his latest album, Recollections… Reflections… (A Journey), Carmody’s first in 12 years. At 40 songs long, however, he is making up for lost time.

“The sound of water over rocks, wind in the trees. We recorded all that sort of stuff. It’s definitely a bloody journey, alright. There’s one song there from about 1967, when I put a few guitar chords together in what we used to call ‘hillbilly’ music style, talking about the old hometown fellas who used to sit down on the big median strips in Central and Western Queensland and be the town gossips, right through to songs written today.

“My basic objective was to a) keep it acoustic, and b) I wanted no drum kit and no bass guitar. The studio is in the huge old fruit-packing shed, with this beautiful insulation in the walls. After the Second World War you couldn’t get insulation, so the workers just got grass and bound it together with wire, made the walls around 20 centimetres thick, and then tarred over it. It has a beautiful feel inside for sound, but that shed was also just full of junk. So there we were, using bits from an old petrol station as drums, recording all of these natural sounds. Chooks and birds from when we took the bloody recorder out at five in the morning, the grandkids’ flamin’ musical toys, just to get some interesting sounds.”

There is a genuine pleasure in hearing Carmody speak. He has the gift of the gab, but his tone is so expressive as he happily plucks other voices out of the air to elaborate on the people who have wandered in and out of his life story. At 68, he has no scarcity of anecdote and encounter, and has found his career entwined with some of the most memorable characters of recent history (just last year, he and firm friend Paul Kelly performed their song, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’, at the state funeral for Gough Whitlam). As such, this album represents an overview of a wide and engrossing life.

“It’s my musical education, in some ways. On the droving camps when I was a young kid in the ’50s, all we could get was the ABC Radio. We’d run an aerial up a tree to get the signal. In the morning you’d get the old hillbillies – Tex Morton, Slim Dusty, that sort of stuff. Hank Williams. But in the night, you’d get this absolutely gorgeous bloody classical symphony music. [At university] I started hearing experimental music, this John Cage stuff. So now this album was a bit of experimentation with what was lying around, but I also wanted it all to be in one take. No rehearsal, no bloody pre-production, just walk in and improvise. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, cut it out! And keep all the bangs and cracks!”

He chuckles. “There’s a guitar that had been lying in that shed for 20 years, and in the heat the soundboard had busted off, so there was a gap of around five bloody inches on it, and if you pressed down on it you’d get this whammy bar sound. You can hear it actually crack on the recording, and if you were in a normal recording studio, you know, they’d just say, ‘Oh no no, take that out, that’s a mistake.’ I said, ‘Bloody leave it in there! That’s what I played, leave the crack where it is!’”

Over 40 tracks it is hard to isolate any one song as being particularly representative of Carmody and his work. An early example of the strengths of his writing, however, comes in the sweetly stunning dirge, ‘Black Jimmy’, which deals with indigenous issues close to Carmody’s heart.

“There are so many of our people chucked down the far end of the graveyard. They put the brass plaque around their neck and said, ‘This is Queen Daisy, this is old King Billy.’ And then this real degradation of who we are and what we were. I was visiting this little country town, and in the early morning walked up this high hill where the cemetery was, and noticed down under this gumtree there was this gravestone by itself. Normally, our mob weren’t marked. We didn’t have gravestones. But this had ‘Black Jimmy’ written there, and the dates. But to be separated even in death just hit me. There was lichen and moss growing over the tomb, and in that morning sunlight, well, it was just beautiful.”

It is a memory well said, and translates splendidly into song. Before we end, I compliment Carmody on his voice here, and how readily you are caught up in the details of his stories overall. He laughs.

“I’ve always considered myself a songwriter. I’m not a singer, strewth! I’m flat as! Get some other poor bugger to sing ’em!”