GREEN LEFT WEEKLY
Tribute to a great fighter
Carla Gorton
12 April 2007
Cannot Buy My Soul: The songs of Kev Carmody
Various artists
Virgin, $24.99
For 200 years we've been beaten down
Too long on the dole
My dignity I'm losing here and mentally I'm old
There's a system here that nails us, ain't we left out in the cold
They took our life and liberty friend but
they couldn't buy our soul.
Joe Hill died, Che Guevara fought and Pemulwuy lay down dead
If a person speaks out critically here you can get loaded down with lead
How long can the majority wait for their story to unfold
They took their life and liberty friend but
they could not buy their soul.
Cannot Buy My Soul is a tribute to Kev Carmody's outstanding song writing talents. Paul Kelly, who has collaborated with Carmody on many projects, gathered together the John Butler Trio, Bernard Fanning, Missy Higgins, Augie March, The Waifs, The Herd, Archie Roach and many more to record this album. Along with this is a bonus disc of the original recordings by Carmody.
I loved the tribute album, but it was the disc of originals that really brought that strong emotional response you feel when you listen to music that really moves you.
And that is what Carmody has made since he released his debut album Pillars of Society in 1989 - music that moves people and songwriting so laden with stories that few can match it. "Droving Woman", delivered on the album by Augie March, Missy Higgins and Paul Kelly, which plays for eight and a half minutes, is one example, but there are many more, including tracks not selected for this album like "Tom Shane" from the Eulogy album. Hopefully, this album will lead people to Carmody's other albums and to discover the power of music with a political heart.
Indigenous activists and their supporters have been out on the streets again recently to fight for justice around the issues of Aboriginal deaths at the hands of police. Carmody's music traces the history of these campaigns.
"River of Tears", performed by The Drones, tells the story of David Gundy, a 32-year-old Aboriginal man who died after being shot by police when he was woken from his sleep during an unlawful raid on his home in Marrickville on April 27, 1989. The police were in fact looking for another man. Gundy was an Aboriginal man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The police had no legal right to be in his home, much less to point a loaded and cocked shotgun at him. A coronial inquest found that Gundy had died accidentally and an internal police investigation found that complaints about the police involved could not be sustained.
"The Young Dancer is Dead", performed by The Last Kinection, highlights the fate of 18-year-old Daniel Yock, who in November 1993 was picked up from a street in Brisbane and taken in a paddy wagon to the Brisbane watchhouse. He was dead on arrival. In April 1994, the Criminal Justice Commission in Queensland found the six police officers who arrested Daniel Yock were not responsible for his death.
The John Butler Trio, who performed with Carmody at the Make Poverty History concert in Melbourne on November 17, present a great version of "Thou Shalt Not Steal". Bernard Fanning puts his stamp on "Elly". Troy Cassar-Daley, performing "On the Wire", and Archie Roach, singing the title song, are outstanding. Sara Storer's version of "Moonstruck" made me appreciate the beauty of this song all over again. "Darkside" somehow seemed to have been written especially for Tex Perkins to perform.
One of the highlights of the album for me is The Herd's version of "Comrade Jesus Christ". As Shannon Kennedy from The Herd explained on the February 12 episode of Message Stick on SBS, "The context that Kev's put the lyrics in, it's not about religion or about Christianity, I think it's more about being an activist."
This is an album for activists. It is also an album for musicians, and those who love a range of musical styles. And it is an album with soul. Despite the fact that Carmody's performing has been hindered by arthritis and physical pain of recent years, brought on by many years of labouring work in his youth, hand cutting cane and carrying wheat bags (that's another yarn all of its own), here's hoping that we can look forward to future releases and collaborations down the track. Some of Carmody's recent projects have included the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Wave Hill walk off at Kalkaringi and the Nganampa Music Project with musicians from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytiatiara Lands.
Courier Mail Review from Noel Mengel on Wednesday 21 February 2007
GREAT artists do not simply come from the one direction.
They draw down deep from their own experience, their insights are wide-reaching, their perspectives varied, they won't be constrained by what audiences expect of them. They grow, they mature.
Name your art form and you can cite examples. In music, famously: Bob Dylan, Neil Young. And in Australia, Paul Kelly. They have written protest songs, folk songs, country songs, rock songs, angry songs, spiritual songs, songs that are all about the words; others that are more about the sounds that run through them.
Trying to define them as "protest singers" or "folk singers" is worse than useless.
Darling Downs-raised Aboriginal songwriter Kev Carmody is an artist like that, and this new album featuring performances of his songs by Australian performers as varied as The Waifs, Bernard Fanning, The Drones, Steve Kilbey, The Herd and Missy Higgins outlines the breadth of his songwriting achievement.
There's Thou Shalt Not Steal, a powerful reaction to white hypocrisy from a black perspective, interpreted here by John Butler Trio, capturing the heart and guts of the original with undoubtedly the strongest recorded performance of Butler's career.
Inevitably, there is anger: see The Last Kinection's hip-hop version of The Young Dancer is Dead, about the death in custody of Brisbane dancer Daniel Yock. And dark despair, in Tex Perkins's Darkside, with feral kids on the loose amid drink, drugs and sex.
But there is tenderness, too, in Clare Bowditch's reading of the beautifully observed Blood Red Rose, and a sense of pride, grace and strength in the face of adversity from Archie Roach on Cannot Buy My Soul.
One of Carmody's themes across the four albums he has released since 1989 has been the healing, spiritual power of the land, not just for Aboriginal people but all Australians. That is reflected here, in songs such as Dan Kelly's I've Been Moved, Sara Storer's Moonstruck and Troy Cassar-Daley's On the Wire, in which a heroin addict hauls himself back to the care of his people and home country. Extraordinary.
Not enough people know about Carmody, or only know of him as co author of From Little Things Big Things Grow with Paul Kelly. This album, which features a second CD of Carmody's powerful performances of the same material, will help remedy that.
But I urge anyone who cares about music, who cares about who we are, where we come from and where we are going, to do one thing. Go to a record store post-haste, or ring a radio station, and ask to hear Droving Woman, all 21 verses and nine minutes of it, sung in turn by Glenn Richards of Augie March, Paul Kelly and Missy Higgins.
All of it is true, assembling stories that Carmody lived, heard or observed in his years as a drover in the Queensland bush.
If you can hear it without wonder, without a tear, without feeling a connection to this country . . . well, there's no helping you.
Is it any good? Henry Lawson couldn't have written it any better. And these performances from three of our most distinctive voices have to be heard to be believed.
Stars sing out in praise of the king of soulful protest
The AGE
Michael Dwyer
March 17, 2007
Striking a chord: old friends and mutual fans Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody strum
along in Kelly's back yard.
Photo: Simon Schluter
Kev Carmody never forgets how to treat people.
"You gotta be gentle," his Aboriginal grandmother taught him, "like moonlight comin' on your skin."
He strokes his arm and grins sideways at his mate, Paul Kelly, who registers the campfire poetry with an appreciative nod.
It was partly the two songwriters' mutual passion for the indelible visual language of storytellers that drew them together, backstage at Sydney's Homebush Stadium sometime in the late '80s.
"It was probably a Rock Against Racism concert," Kelly says, as they rummage through their memories, "or Building Bridges maybe …"
Neither slogan has the enduring resonance of the first song they wrote together, From Little Things Big Things Grow, which tells the eight-year-long story of the Gurindji land claim on the Wave Hill cattle station in a dozen vivid scenes and a singalong chorus.
That story is retold by platinum-selling folk trio the Waifs on Cannot Buy My Soul, a new Kev Carmody tribute album conceived and coordinated by Kelly in a bid to bring one of his favourite artists some overdue recognition.
Other high-profile contributors include John Butler, Missy Higgins, Tex Perkins, consecutive AMP Award winners the Drones and Augie March, and ARIA's reigning queen and king of pop, Clare Bowditch and Bernard Fanning.
"I approached popular artists 'cause I wanted a much wider audience," Kelly says.
"Bernard sells a lot of records. But he's also a Queenslander, so he knew
Kev. And I knew he'd be compatible."
Carmody's songbook is rich with the soil he grew up on. His mother was Murri;
his father a drover of Irish descent who took the family to Queensland's barren
south in 1950, when Carmody was four.
"The ground was like this," he says, stamping his foot on the timber
deck of Kelly's backyard, "but at least it was a base and there was an
old dirt-floor hut that was built before the war."
They stayed there until '56, in a slightly uneasy state of isolation.
"They were taking the children away then, so we were dodging the bloody
coppers, we were dodging the priests," Carmody recalls with humour.
"As soon as we saw a car, we were instructed to run straight into the
bush and not come out till one of your relatives come and got you."
From the age of 10, he was schooled by nuns in Toowoomba, and only there met the clash of cultures that would inform some of his darkest songs. Others - I've Been Moved, Moonstruck, This Land Is Mine, Droving Woman - are formed of more remote memories, as valuable and lyrical as any Henry Lawson enshrined.
Carmody reports with satisfaction something Missy Higgins said of her selection,
Droving Woman, a spellbinding ballad she shares with Augie March and Kelly.
"She said 'It's like this ancient world we don't know about'. That's the
beauty of this (album). The next generation is taking it on. These new bands
like the Last Kinection, the Herd, they've made these songs their own. It's
part of the oral tradition and that's what I always thought: at least if I put
it down in song, it'll be there for the next generation."
Both his Murri grandparents and his Irish-born grandmother were crucial to
his creative evolution, he says. "Granny Carmody lived till she was 96
and she could sing hundreds of Irish songs, accompanied by the rubber end of
her walking stick.
"My (Aboriginal) grandfather was born in the bush near Capetown (in the
late 1800s), and he always taught us kids to be attuned to all sound.
"He knew five Aboriginal languages plus English and he said: 'It's one
thing to know human language, but unless you know the language of crocodiles
and dingos, you're never gonna survive'."
It was from this grandfather that Carmody took his first cues as a storyteller.
"He was an old lore man and he said (Europeans had) had come to the country
with 10 of the best laws you could have, the Ten Commandments, but they broke
every one of them. 'So when you get to school, you gotta tell 'em'," he
said.
Accordingly, one of his first songs was Thou Shalt Not Steal. It was a bitter
land rights tirade on his first album of 1987, Pillars of Society, a record
that kicked hard against the entrenched oppression of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's
Queensland - too hard for mainstream ears.
"Johnny Butler called me up to get some background on it," Carmody
says, "and I said: 'You're not doin' that one, John? That's one way to
stop your career dead in its bloody tracks!' He said: 'No, it's gotta be done'."
And so it is, with every word of its 200-year-long story faithfully intact,
but with Butler's expressive slide guitar adding the sweetness requisite to
21st century radio.
"Yeah, I shoulda learned how to do it," Carmody grins.
"This mob showed me how to do it. I shoulda put a little more of this
in it," he says, shaking a packet of artificial sweetener on the table.
"After all my political and union work, you just say it as it is."
Cannot Buy My Soul is out through EMI.
Radical folk
Cannot Buy My Soul
the songs of Kev Carmody
Jen Jewel Brown
The executive producer of Cannot Buy My Soul, Paul Kelly, is to be commended. For here, in the guise of a double CD of Kev Carmody covers and original versions, we find a great collection of raw-edged Australian folk in all its ascendant glory.
Anyone who copped the Make Poverty History concert or managed, like me, to see it second hand via a free DVD that came with the Herald Sun, would have caught a rare hit of Carmody and Kelly together, doing their co-write "From Little Things Big Things Grow".
Well, the charisma, the power of Carmody just slaps you like a bucket of cold water in a drunk's face. He's our black Bob Dylan, as important as Johnny Cash. There are plenty of tough stories of dirt-in-the-mouth murder and betrayal here, along with beautiful, heart-strumming lullabies.
Born to a Murri mother and an Irish father, Carmody spent early nights listening to hillbilly songs sung round the campfires of the mustering camps of the Darling Downs, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood crackling from a dry cell radio up a tree.
The first CD features Carmody's songs well covered by Dan and Paul Kelly, The Waifs, Bernard Fanning, John Butler Trio, The Drones, Archie Roach, Sara Storer, Dan Sultan and Scott Wilson, Tex Perkins, Clare Bowditch, The Herd, Steve Kilbey, national treasures The Pigrim Brothers, plus Augie March, Missy Higgins, Troy Cassar-Daley and The Last Kinection. The second CD features the originals, and it must be said these feature some of Australia's finest musicians, and they still thunder with virility, fine arrangements and wind and string-driven things. And age hath not wearied them at all.
Cannot Buy My Soul - the Campfire Storyteller - Part 1: Pat Whyte - Click here (PDF)
Cannot Buy My Soul - the Campfire Storyteller - Part 2: Pat Whyte - Click here (PDF)