The man loves a chat and he takes you along with him and
before you know it you’ve gone from the mechanics of writing a song to what was
on the shelves of the local milk bar in the early 1970s, to the great South
Sydney forward packs, to holidaying at The Entrance in the early 1980s and
discovering they still had 5-cent pinball machines.
Keyes, who has lived in Redfern or Waterloo all his 41 years and talks wistfully
about family members moving “up the line” to such exotic outposts as
Marrickville, knows there isn’t a musical gene in his family and doesn’t think
there was a storytelling one either.
“I think what happened with me was I contracted polio
when I was about 14 months old and I guess, in a way, because I had a dodgy leg
I couldn’t play footy, I couldn’t ride bikes or skateboards and hang out with
all my mates, I had to sit down and be inside my own head,” he says.
“And I think that gives you more time to think about things, look at
things and wonder what makes them work. And of course once music creeps in
under the door it’s incredible.
“We used to live in a street where my auntie was on one
side, my uncle was on the other and there were cousins who were older than me.
Imagine a 16-year old explaining to a nine-year-old what Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars is about, I was just going ‘Wow, wow!’ It just seemed like an
alternative world.”
The kind of details that pepper his conversation make their
way into his songs. His second album, The Last Ghost Train Home (with a photo
of wrestler Brute Bernard on the cover), is packed with the kind of vignettes
and characters you’d normally find only in a Cliff Hardy novel or in a Paul
Kelly song about Melbourne.
Mind you, as Keyes points out when discussing that Souths
team of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “I never saw the team playing: I
was too young. But I know as much about it as anyone because you can’t get away
from it here.” And he has the carefully preserved footy cards to confirm
it.
“I remember being a little kid, we lived where the
Block is now, and my grandfather used to take me to a shop next to Redfern railway
station to get ice-cream on a Saturday night. One summer there was a pub there
on the corner called the Railway View and [Souths’ great running backrower] Bob
McCarthy was sitting on the step having a beer. We walked past him, and I would
have had a caliper on my leg so would have had eyes drawn immediately to me, he
gave me a wink and said, ‘G’day mate’. And I remember getting home and it was
like, ‘Guess who said hello to me, guess who said hello to me?’ It was such a
big deal. We were immersed in that stuff.”
That’s why he can write a song with such authenticity of
texture as The Day John Sattler
Broke His Jaw, despite the fact that he was four at that time of the famous
grand final incident.
There is one downside, though, to be in the repository of
such history, Keyes ruefully explains. “People come to a gig expecting to
see a 64-year-old guy who looks like [beefy cabaret legend of the 1950s and
1960s] Norm Erskine smoking Peter Stuyvesants and reminiscing about Ricky
May.” There may appear to be a thick seam of nostalgia for a Sydney now past, yet
Keyes’s attitude to his city is more complex than that.
“The John
Sattler song, for example, is actually about the good old days not being as
good as people said they were,” he says. “When I look at my family
and I would hear my grandparents talk about raising a family here, it didn’t
sound like a lot of fun. The thing that I think was stronger then was the sense
of community that people felt and what I tried to do with the songs was talk
about the old working-class culture and how every community needs things like
that to bind them. To give them that sense of a shared experience of
living.”
Perry Keyes’s The Last Ghost Train Home is out now through Laughing
Outlaw.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/songs-in-the-keyes-of-life/2007/10/19/1192301018270.html