Photo: Joseph Mayers
Kev Carmody Cannot Buy My Soul 2020
“I’ve been moved by the wind upon the waters/And the shadows as the leaves are blown,” Kev Carmody sings in the opening lines of I’ve Been Moved, one of the first songs he wrote.
In its five crisp verses, the song revealed something of the artist he would become. The connection to the natural world, the crying of a newborn, the patterns of the seasons, the farewell to a friend. All the stark beauty and harshness of this ancient land was there, the honey sweetness of the air in spring, “the sadness in her requiem”.
A new audience was alerted to Carmody through the 2007 album Cannot Buy My Soul, produced by Paul Kelly, with versions of his songs by artists including Bernard Fanning, Missy Higgins, Troy Cassar-Daley and Archie Roach plus Carmody’s own performances. The album has been refreshed for this 2020 edition, produced by Sian Darling, with the original 32 tracks and six new versions of his songs.
Carmody was 22 when he wrote the words to I’ve Been Moved. Aboriginal people had only won the right to be counted in the national census through a referendum the year before, in 1967. He carried the poem around with him for years before setting it to music but in I’ve Been Moved he already had shown the strong foundation for his music: the clarity, the imagery, the truth.
His 1988 debut album, Pillars of Society, remains one of the most powerful protest albums you will hear, from Australia or anywhere else, fuelled by anger at injustice and hypocrisy. One of the key tracks is Thou Shalt Not Steal, with its searing description of dispossession (“In 1788 down Sydney Cove the first white people land/Said sorry boys our gain’s your loss/We’re gonna steal your land”) and environmental destruction (“In 200 years your materialism has plucked the forests clean”).
Another important point in the Carmody story was writing From Little Things Big Things Grow with Kelly, about the fight for land rights by the Gurindji people in the Northern Territory led by Vincent Lingiari. Kelly recorded it for his Comedy album in 1991 but few foresaw at the time how the song eventually would be received.
These songs became central to Cannot Buy My Soul and the six new recordings for the 2020 release show more of the depth of Carmody’s achievement.
Kasey Chambers and Jimmy Barnes deliver an extraordinary version of Black Bess, one of Carmody’s early songs with characters fighting their own personal battles. In this case they are Black Bess, loser in love and strung out on cocaine, Frankie the soldier blown away in Vietnam, and a drifter searching through rubbish bins “consoled by the role that his bottle will bring”. When Kasey and Jimmy sing the final line, “Do you have an idea what lonely can be?” there is no escaping the reality of those we sometimes walk past without a glance.
In its original form Rider in the Rain was a folk-rock song with some of Carmody’s most striking poetic imagery. Mo’ju, Birdz and Trials bring it to a new century with their mix of soul, hip-hop and electronica. The force of the lyrics (“This road called progress that runs from oblivion to nowhere”) is just as potent as the day it was written.
Carmody writes with equal force about personal matters as he does the struggles of Indigenous Australians: Courtney Barnett makes Just For You her own, accompanied by one acoustic guitar.
When she sings these heartfelt lyrics (“I love you beyond reason/This song states nothing new/It’s just for you”), it sounds exactly like a song she might have written.
Alice Skye finds the emotional core of Blue You, delivered as a tune that shimmers like a heat-haze in the inland country that Carmody knows so well.
Kate Miller-Heidke brings Blood Red Rose into the present day, and the future, without losing the essence of its story about the swift passage of a life, while Electric Fields revisit From Little Big Things Grow with added resonance from a sample of the voice of Vincent Lingiari.
Carmody was born in Cairns in 1946 to an Irish-Australian father and Aboriginal mother. His maternal heritage is the Bundjalung country in New South Wales which is the Ballina/Byron Bay/Cabbage Tree Island. His indigenous grandfather was a Lama Lama man from Cape York. Carmody’s father did rural work and the family lived on a block they rented from the Government on the Western Darling Downs.
“In the early years of my life, from 1950 to 1956, we were droving and everything we possessed was on horses,” Carmody says. “You had to feel connected with the country, and the old people told us so much history and law. The night sky was like a huge blackboard. Every star constellation had a story.”
Carmody did not learn to read and write until he was sent to school in Toowoomba at 10 but a world of the imagination was already alive to him, in the land and the sky, or listening to the wireless with an aerial run up a gum tree out on the stock route.
“In those early years us kids often went to stay with relatives,” Carmody says. “We would treat it as a bit of a joke when a car came, we would go and hide. When you look back at it now it was the older ones trying to keep us from being taken.” A compromise on education was reached, with Carmody sent to a Catholic boarding school in Toowoomba that ran its own farm. It was a harsh environment.
“When they put me in school learning arithmetic and English I thought, ‘What am I doing this for? I was on a horse at four, holding cattle, I can earn a living now.’ ” At high school he excelled at rugby union but not in the classroom. It would be some years before he realised the value of formal education.
After leaving school in 1963, Carmody headed west, teaching himself guitar chords from a book he found. He wrote I’ve Been Moved out on the stock route, looking up from his swag at the enormity of the universe. The droving life was coming to an end so he re-skilled as a welder and returned to Toowoomba, where he started performing at a weekly folk club.
Music was the door to a life-changing experience. Carmody studied classical guitar and worked through the Australian Music Board exams in theory and composition. His teacher suggested he apply as a mature-age student at what was then the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education. He began an arts degree in 1978, studying music and subjects including history and philosophy.
“I treated it just like a job. I got there when the place opened and left when it closed. At my first tutorial I said to the lecturer, ‘I’m not too good at the written word yet, can I bring my guitar?’ I used folk songs to illustrate what I was saying.”
He loved the challenge, the debate, the chance to study experimental music. He still treasures the tutorials with poet Bruce Dawe, diving deep into the written and spoken word. All that he had experienced, the bush life, the oral tradition from his Aboriginal family, the Irish love of language, his studies, prepared him for what he became, one of the greatest Australian songwriters.
“Granny Carmody would sing the old songs from Ireland accompanied by her walking stick on the floor. On my mother’s side, my grandfather from Cape York could speak four or five Aboriginal languages and English. As a kid he taught you so much, all the habits of the animals. He said it’s all right to know human languages but unless you know the language of the bush, you’ll never survive.
“One of the things he said was, you have to learn to listen to the wind. He was saying use your imagination, widen it out, be aware of things around you. You learn to listen in another way. That’s the key to my music.”
Carmody’s lack of schooling in his early years played its part in his lyrics too. “Because I couldn’t read when I was young, the things that stuck in my head were word images. When you don’t have a written language, you have to have that strong image that sticks in people’s heads so that the story is retained.” That lesson is at the heart of great songwriting too, grabbing the listener with unforgettable images.
Carmody went on to release the albums Eulogy (For a Black Person) (1990), Bloodlines (1993) and Images and Illusions (1995), the work of a songwriter whose broad interests escaped easy definition.
Not long after the release of Pillars of Society, Carmody went on a camping trip with Kelly to Wivenhoe Dam in south-east Queensland.
“We had a fire going. I picked up the mandolin and started playing a simple chord progression. Paul said, ‘What are you going to do with this?’.” Carmody suggested a topic, the strike by the Gurindji stockmen in the Northern Territory and the long battle for land rights that followed.
“I told Paul what an impact it had on us as blackfellas in Queensland when we heard about the strike. Mum was putting out the tucker on a camp when she told us the news of the walk-off. It was 1966. We weren’t even citizens.”
The song was not a hit at the time of release -- it was seven-and-half-minutes long -- but it was received well on stage. Today the impact of the song, the way people respond to it, its reach to teach an important story to new generations, is beyond measure.
Kelly says: “The thing that struck me right from the start with Kev’s music was the multitude of characters in his songs, brothel madams, warriors, drovers, drug addicts.
“When I ring Kev now I say ‘It’s Paul from Melbourne.’ When he rings me he says ‘It’s Kev from Queensland.’ The very next thing we talk about is the weather. It’s not small talk, it’s important to him. How the creek is running, how the vege patch is going, the phases of the moon, the struggles of the farmers
“There are the direct, fiercely polemic songs, which are maybe even more relevant today than when they were written. Then there are the hymns to the natural world. The great strength of his songwriting is the way he balances the fire and rage with love and hope. It’s all there.”
Carmody released Mirrors in 2003 and in 2015 a four-CD set featuring songs from 40 years of his life not previously recorded, Recollections …. Reflections … (a Journey).
At the 2005 Deadlys, he received the Jimmy Little Award for his lifetime contribution to music. In 2007 Cannot Buy My Soul won the Deadly for best album. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Southern Queensland, the former Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education where he studied. In 2009 he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
In that year he joined many of the performers from the Cannot Buy My Soul album at a live concert at the Brisbane Riverstage to perform those songs, a life’s work.
Carmody’s openness to new challenges has been central to his life and his music, which is why he is so thrilled to hear his songs taken in fresh directions. “It’s great to hear the younger ones take it into their own genre, add their own words to them. That’s part of the oral tradition, pass it on.
And sometimes it’s good to be proven right. Forty years ago he tried his luck at the Tamworth country music festival. It didn’t go well. “I got told to clear off, I didn’t have a permit and they didn’t like what I was singing about.” This year he returned. At an outdoor concert he joined Kelly and his band to perform From Little Things Big Things Grow. He was surprised as Kasey Chambers, Jimmy Barnes and Troy Cassar-Daley took to the stage to join them in rousing chorus.
Out front, 10,000 people cheered them on.
Cannot Buy My Soul is reissued on August 14 through EMI. It will be available on vinyl for the first time in a release containing the cover versions.
KEV HAS RECEIVED A NUMBER OF AWARDS, BEING RECOGNISED FOR BOTH HIS MUSIC AND HIS WORK IN THE COMMUNITY.
2023 Conferred Honorary Doctorate of Literature University of Queensland
2023 Conferred Honorary Doctorate of Letters (Hon LittsD) Australian National University
2022 Shining Star Award Byron Bay Bluesfest
2021 National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMA) Hall of Fame Inductee
2019 J.C.Williamson Award (part of the Helpmann Awards) outstanding contribution to the live entertainment and performing Arts Industry.
2017 Alumnus of the Year Awards - Outstanding Alumnus of the Year - University of Southern Queensland
2017 Indigenous Service Alumnus of the Year - University of Southern Queensland
Australia Council Don Banks Award 2013
2010 Senior Australian of the Year State Finalist, Qld.
2009 Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame inductee.
2009 Queensland Great. Awarded by the state government, the Queensland Greats Awards honour individuals and institutions whose long term or lifetime achievements have played a significant role in the history and development of Queensland.
2008 Honorary Doctorate – University of Southern Queensland
2005 Deadly Awards, recipient of the Jimmy Little Award for Lifetime Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music
2002 Film Critics Circle of Australia & Screen Music (Australia) Awards for the score for One Night The Moon.
2001 Australian Film Industry’s Open Craft Award in a Non-Feature Film for an Original Score for One Night The Moon.
1994 Australian Entertainment 19th Annual “MO” Awards - Folk Performer of the Year
1993 Country Music Association of Australia Heritage Award for From Little Things, Big Things Grow