RHYTHMS MAGAZINE March 2010

FEATURE STORY: PERRY KEYES

BETWEEN THE DARKNESS AND THE DAWN

RHYTHMS GOES DOWNTOWN WITH THE SYDNEY SPRINGSTEEN

BY JEFF JENKINS

“Perry is the real deal. Songs from the heart, from the Aussie street. He is a rare talent” – Peter Garrett

It’s a mean rip, so easy to slip – Down On The Street With You

“This is the part of Sydney they don’t show you on the postcards,” Perry Keyes tells Rhythms as he takes us on a tour of “The Block” in Sydney’s Redfern. “People around here are just hanging on.”

Pointing to a drab terrace house at 23 Louis Street, Keyes states: “That’s where I lived.” The house was later purchased by the Whitlam Government and given to the Aboriginal Housing Company. “We were one of the few displaced white people,” Keyes jokes.

More than three decades later, Keyes met Gough Whitlam at a Whitlams gig. “G’day Gough,” he said, “I want my house back.”

Bobby, lay your head down next to mine/ Sleep, but don’t dare dream - 1982

Perry Keyes spent most of his first five years in hospital. At 14 months, he contracted polio. It was the last laboratory-confirmed case of the disease in Australia. “I don’t really remember those years,” Keyes claims, “but maybe a psychologist would tell you a different story.”

While Keyes’ childhood friends went surfing and played rugby league, he retreated to his bedroom and taught himself to play guitar, inspired by The Clash and Lou Reed. “Having a dodgy leg meant I was on the outside looking in. Music was this great little secret that I stumbled upon.”

He started writing songs. “It was the only thing I’ve ever done that made me feel like it was something I could do.” Time Out magazine called them “love songs to the city’s mean streets”.

Some stuff just won’t wash off – Bobby The Burning Dog

Keyes’ new album, his third, Johnny Ray’s Downtown, is a rock ‘n’ roll epic: 16 tracks, 74 minutes. “Some people might think the concept of the album is a bit passé, but it’s the bigger idea that I go for. I just want to make my albums like musical movies or musical novels. I want to write lyrics so that when you hear the first couple of lines you can see it.”

Ray’s dashboard light shines on the street/ The trucks wash the dirt from the white concrete/ I climb through the hole that I made in my arm – Ray’s Dashboard Light

After making his second album, 2007’s The Last Ghost Train Home – a finalist in that year’s Australian Music Prize – Keyes ventured that his next album would be “about surfing and heroin”.

“Well, I guess it kind of is,” he says. “It’s really about the boys that I grew up with and what happened to them.

“When you’re young, you’re not going to die, nothing can hurt you, you’re bullet-proof. I wanted to write about that period just before you realise there are consequences to what you do. If you’re gonna take lots of drugs or surf on the bonnet of your car going 80k down Anzac Parade, one night you might fall off.”

Keyes started writing the album after a childhood friend paid him a visit. “He told me about another guy we’d known all our life who’d just died. Then we started talking about other guys we knew, and it was like, he’s gone, he’s in jail, he’s fucked up because he was on drugs for 15 years. And I thought, wow, what a thing. Is it just peculiar to where we grew up or was it happening everywhere?”

In the shiny, shiny town they just keep fallin’ down – Boxing Day

Rhythms meets Keyes for a beer at the Warren View Hotel in Enmore. It was here that Keyes made his “comeback” in 2002, playing on Saturday afternoons, armed with just an acoustic guitar.

After five years fronting a band called the Stolen Holdens (“We had a cultish cult following,” he jokes), Keyes stopped playing live in 1993. “I’ve never been a guy who wanted to be in the music business. And at that time, I was getting older and there just didn’t seem to be a place for the music I was doing. I looked at the songs I was writing and the music I liked and it didn’t seem to have anywhere to go, so I just sort of stopped.”

Keyes got the Warren View gig after a phone call from his good friend Bernie Hayes (whose 1999 album, Every Tuesday, Sometimes Sunday, referred to his residency at Newtown’s Sandringham Hotel, also the home ground of the Stolen Holdens).

One Saturday afternoon, after his first set, former Eva Trout singer Bek-Jean Stewart approached Keyes and declared: “I want to be your drummer.”

“Can you play the drums?” Keyes asked.

“No, but I’m getting a kit.”

Stewart later organised a recording session with her former bandmate Grant Shanahan. “Bek-Jean was the only one who really thought we were making an album,” Keyes recalls. “I thought we were just making demos or something like that.”

Shanahan shares a chiropractor with Sydney music writer Stuart Coupe, who also runs the Laughing Outlaw label. He bumped into Coupe and asked: “Have you heard of Perry Keyes?”

“No,” replied Coupe, “should I have?”

Shanahan: “He's the Bruce Springsteen of Redfern.”

Coupe: “You have my attention.”

Shanahan gave Coupe rough versions of 12 songs that eventually turned up on Keyes’ double-disc debut, 2005’s Meter. “I became, to put it mildly, obsessed by the songs,” says Coupe, who immediately played one of the tracks on his FBi radio show (mistakenly introducing Sandra’s On The Way as Santa’s On The Way).

Tim Freedman called Meter “the greatest Australian album of the past five years”. The Whitlams singer tells Rhythms: “Perry is one of the greatest lyricists Australia has produced. He is the Ruth Park of the end of last century’s Redfern. His characters live, and they have all the more impact for not having been spoken for before.”

“I think Perry really is one of the great songwriters,” Coupe states. “I like his precision with words. It’s the way he sings about a character getting out of jail and ‘learning how to steal a car properly’. There are dozens of lines like those.”

Laughing Outlaw has released all three Keyes albums. “I cannot begin to explain how much Stuart has done for me,” Keyes says.

Another heavy-hitting Keyes fan is Sydney music lawyer Brett Oaten. “I will never get sick of telling people how great Perry Keyes is,” Oaten says. “He chronicles working class Australian life in a way that Paul Kelly once did, that no one else really tries to and which is beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. I listen to him every week of my life.”

Keyes’ fans even started a Facebook group – “Help Perry Keyes Go To The Top Of The Charts”, explaining, “Perry Keyes is a battler. He’s 42. He drives a cab. He’s not supposed to be on the charts. He writes and sings the most amazing songs. About real life. His life. He doesn’t make videos. He’s not pretty, but, more importantly, he’s not plastic.”

Former EMI boss John O’Donnell was one of the first to join the group.

“I first heard of Perry through Stuart Coupe,” O’Donnell explains. “I’ve known Stuart for years and he knows I’m a big fan of Springsteen, Dylan, The Band, Paul Kelly,

Chuck Berry, The Clash … He sent over Perry’s recordings, I put it on my stereo and it totally blew my mind. It was probably the most profound reaction I’ve ever had to something new and unknown. Song like Some Aches and NYE from Meter just floored me. This is not geography, it’s soul music from the streets.”

Everybody’s movin’ on the street – Lou Reed & Robert Quine

Explaining the title of the new album, Keyes says: “I love the idea of Johnny being a real rock ‘n’ roll name, and Ray being a real rock ‘n’ roll name, and downtown is a real rock ‘n’ roll term.

“Where I grew up, it’s all units, so we never had backyards. So everything that happened happened outside, out on the street, downtown, in the city, in the park, at the bus stop. We had all our fun and misadventure outside – in full view of everything and everyone.”

“We’ve gotta get out of here before the city destroys us both” – Hank Moody, Californication, Episode 8, Series 1, “California Son”

Keyes’ brush with fame came when In Ancient Rome, one of the songs from his second album, was featured in the eighth episode of the first series of Californication. “The day the episode went to air, I did about 20 radio interviews with FM stations,” Keyes recalls. “They all went for about 30 seconds: ‘What’s it like being a singing taxi driver?’”

After the interviews, Keyes clocked on for his taxi shift, picking up some Gold Coast women at Sydney Airport. “We were chatting as I drove them into the city. They said, ‘Wow, what about that taxi driver who’s got the song on Californication, do you know him?”

Keyes smiled and said: “I don’t know him, but I’ve heard of him.” He says it’s the closest he’s come to being recognised.

Keyes still drives taxis to supplement his music earnings. “I’ve never had a proper consistent income. After school, I went on the dole for a long time. I worked in a glass factory. My brother’s a builder, so I did different things for him.

“Living in a housing commission, it makes it possible for you to not have to make heaps of money – they link your rent to your income. And I was never a guy who tried to make a lot of money. I knew I wanted to play music, so I decided I wasn’t going to get a wife and kids and have to pay off a mortgage. A lot of my musician friends are married with kids, paying off houses, so they have to work. For me, it’s always been easy – I don’t have any excess stuff that I have to worry about.”

Some people barely pay attention/ Others barely pay the rent … falling backwards is easy – $35.40

The Perry Keyes Tour finishes at Keyes’ flat in Waterloo, which is in the shadows of enormous high-rise flats. “One day they’ll rename this ‘Perry Keyes Street’,” he jokes, before adding: “I feel like a bit of a wanker taking you on the ‘Perry Keyes Tour’. It’s not half as interesting as I make it sound on the albums.”

Waterloo has been Keyes’ home since 1980. “People say to me, ‘If you won the lottery, where would you live?’ And I point across the road and say, ‘I’d probably buy that warehouse just over there.’”

Death or glory, it’s the same old story/ Which one ya gonna choose? – Things That A Boy Would Do

Johnny Ray’s Downtown is available through Laughing Outlaw Records.