Dan Kelly & His Dream Band
NGV, Sunday 28 February, 2016
Writer: Fiona Hile
Photo credit: Kathryn Liddiard
Photo credit: Kathryn Liddiard
Just over a thousand hand-folded pink and yellow plastic orchids provide a
radiant canopy for Dan Kelly and his preternaturally gifted Dream Band on a
bright Sunday afternoon in the gardens of the National Gallery of Victoria. The
structure, by Melbourne architect John Wardle, echoes that of the Myer Music
Bowl nestled snugly in Kings Domain just across the road and casts a flickering
underwater light across the faces of the assembled crowd.
Kelly’s songs wear their influences on their sleeves and there’s probably not a
person alive who could not find within their labyrinthine forms some point of
connection. The ‘mutant gospel folk’ of “Baby Bonus” features Dan as a young
Nimbin woman who’s just had her first kid. We’re urged to imagine Madeleine
and Memphis—Kelly’s sonically-gifted backing vocal cousins—as his
dope-dealing, tarot-card reading boyfriend. Next up is “Catholic Leader”, a song
about a janitor who scales a jasmine vine to spirit away the nun of his dreams.
This kind of elaborate and detailed story-telling is a feature of Kelly’s songs, one
that binds him and his audiences to an intricate web of literary and musical
references. Its multifarious threads lead just about everywhere, from the more
obvious Bob Dylan, Jonathan Richman, Hendrix, Morrissey allegiances to the 19th
century German composer, Robert Schumann, whose Fantasiestücke enacts the
fusion of literary and musical ideas known as program music, with an emphasis
on rhythmic ambiguity and the confusing dream lives of lovers.
“Crème de la Crème” details a guitar-tech’s passion for the singer from The Super
Jesus, ushering in Racine and New Order with the inclusion of an interminable
love triangle in which the manager is ‘an emotional strip-mine’. It’s empathetic
and jaunty, acting as a kind of pre-med for the pain of “Never Stop the Rot” in
which a couple ‘always found a way to fail’, bickering their way through a series
of exotic destinations and impossibly clever end rhymes.
The elongated magical-realist narrative of “Dan Kelly’s Dream” is, Dan tells us, a
5/4 mind-crank ripped straight from “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”. If you listen to
his occasional DJ stints on Double J, you’ll hear that Beck’s “Satan Gave Me A
Taco” sits somewhere between the two and that “Gold Coast Man” wears the
colours of Tex Don and Charlie’s “Harry Was A Bad Bugger” and relies in part on
the load-bearing rhythms of Taj Mahal’s “Corinna”.
If the proliferation of lyrical and musical overdubs can at times start to feel like a
conspiracy theory or love or both, this is also Kelly’s great achievement. It’s
worth listening to his AMP-nominated Leisure Panic—a kind of musical livre
composé—along with his numerous solo and group recordings, to get an idea of
the extent to which Kelly’s work constitutes an ongoing project in which the
structure of music and the structure of love are shown to be at once disjunctive
and intertwined.
“Everything’s Amazing” is the afternoon’s antidote to the not entirely unpleasant
moments of existential agony. If its lyrics are ever so-slightly cynical, they don’t
stand a chance against the Morrissey-drenched opening, the bountiful backing
vocals and Kelly’s own mind-reiki tones. Looking around at the relaxed crowd
(and that guy at the back singing the words of every song), it seems possible that
music might provide some kind of temporary refuge from the droughts, fires,
wars, starvation and incarcerations that persist outside the communal warmth of
the NGV’s architect-designed, beer-on-tap love-nest.
