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Perry Keyes

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As the 70’s slogan goes – ‘the personal is political’ – and to my mind, music is the perfect way to bring us back to this essential truth.

Protest songs are a rich and wonderful seam, but I’d like to discuss music that opens us to the other politics at play on a deeper level, the politics of the personal that underly the party political. What is an individual’s place in the world and what is the relationship each of us has with the power structures in which we live?

We reel in shock when personal politics – in particular those of the alienated, brutalised and marginalised – spill or coalesce into tragic action such as murder, violence, crime, suicide, addiction or more widely – terrorism and extremism. We hashtag and repost and march to ‘get on board’ with various movements . … we are quick to blame. None of us can help our parentage and the circumstances into which we are born, so the oft thrown around instruction to ‘check your privilege’, while the intent is in the right place, is essentially a fairly empty trope. Moreover, everyone is privileged to some extent, when the question is asked ‘compared to whom?’ To put it simply, there’s always someone worse off. Once we’ve acknowledged our own privilege – then what? Are we not entitled, indeed obliged, to stand up and be counted on issues that affect others born into different circumstances?

It’s a wider topic for another post, I only raise the subject here to contextualise what I’d really like to explore – the concept of understanding the broader political issues and landscape through the prism and perspective of an individual.

Story telling has always been the best way to engage a listener, reader or observer. If we can get a glimpse into a life led by someone outside our realm of experience, surely that will serve to give any political engagement a context and a meaning far greater than policy statements and slogans. From the great bluesmen of the early 20^th Century in the US, through to songwriters such as Woody Guthrie, Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg – the songs that speak the loudest to me are not the polemic, but the small stories of individuals.

I’ve been a Billy Bragg fan since my early adulthood – we are the same age, so I’ll begin with the Bard of Barking. For all the wonderful call to the barricades songs he has written, Bragg is, I feel, at his best addressing politics obliquely from the point of view of the working class, suburban individual… you can picture his characters, where they live, what they wear. In ‘Greetings to the New Brunette’, his bloke … celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo, wallows, confused by his pregnant lover’s sexual politics. out of his depth & out of her social class, eventually leaving her alone with the new baby. The lonely woman in her mobile home listening to the 4 Tops in ‘Levi Stubbs Tears’… who ran away from home in her mother’s best coat and married before she was even entitled to vote, a victim of domestic violence – he put a hole in her body where no hole should be.

To bring it home to Australia, let’s start with the iconic. No, not Midnight Oil or Briggs whose wonderful anthems are indeed a powerful call to arms, but let’s instead begin with the master songwriter, Don Walker.

Walker’s lyrics are grounded in the Australian working-class view of the world. Set these lyrics to music that is anthemic in its simplicity and you have the reason why Chisel are still revered (and sung along to) in every pub in every suburb and country town in Australia. Like all good lyricists, he puts the listener in the place of his protagonist… gives us a fleeting moment of shared experience. Four walls, washbasin, prison bed, Standing on the outside, looking in, the escapee from the stultifying small town in ‘Flame Trees’, the truck driver in ‘Shipping Steel’, the powerless suburban blokes in ‘Star Hotel’ here lies a local culture, Most nights were good, some were bad. Between school and a shifting future. It was most of all we had.

Go back to 1992, 30 years after Nixon started the unwinnable War on Drugs & 10 years before the Uniting Church finally opened its safe injecting room in Kings Cross over continuing howls of protest. Listen again to Paul Kelly put us in the shoes of  the addict who got married early, never had no money, and after a broken marriage and  a year in The Buttery rehab returns nervously, in a Silvertop, to her door, a second chance, a redemption, the power of believing in a flawed individual and extending a hand brought to life in song.

Draw a line to Sydney’s own Perry Keyes, who lays his own life and those of his lifelong neighbours and community in Waterloo/Redfern unflinchingly at our feet, asking for our understanding, our empathy, challenging us to not look away and avoid the discomfort. Keyes lulls us with his voice and beautiful melodies, then shocks us by demanding that we meet each character face to face as a person, not just another ‘houso’ or a player in a morality message.  His latest album ‘Jim Salmon’s Lament’, released in 2018, is the latest in a deep body of work and a masterclass in storytelling that is almost filmic in its depiction of humanity.

Every song on the album brings a new character and story to life – all of them from the same small community, most from the same family, some funny, some sad and all vividly real – The opening song of the album, ‘Lets have a smoke outside’ takes the listener into the room as we see Big Jim and Jenny getting hitched at the registry office before catching the bus to a caravan park for the long weekend, celebrating with a slap up meal at the RSL under the plasma screen … get your surf and turf, 21 dollars’ worth, for a special girl on a special day.

‘Iris’ the first single – brings us their adult daughter as a woman surviving, there’s no judgement given or asked for, no pity extended, just a deep compassion for the everyday experiences of so many – Iris sells her mouth, it’s no honeysuckle kiss, she says you can put it where you want officer, just don’t treat me like this. In ‘Hyde Park Hotel’ Iris’s brother tells the story of the teenager as cool as Evonne Goolagong while he is as straight as the Milky Bar kid. Years later, he stands by helplessly as she sells herself on the street and she wobbles in her own corroboree. Yet he won’t desert or judge his sister – all I can do is wish her well, when I see her standing outside the Hyde Park Hotel … if she spends all her money on block speed and wine, I could never let her down, what’s hers is mine.

As Keye’s sings.. these are just details that don’t mean a thing … if you want to know what’s real, let’s have a smoke outside. And maybe they are just details of everyday lives, but are those lives not as important as the lives of anyone else?

Listen carefully to Perry Keyes’ lyrics, and think long and hard about the forthcoming destruction by the rampant development policies of the NSW Government of the Social Housing in Waterloo. The forced breakup of a community and the fracturing of people’s lives, people far removed from privilege, but surely with as much claim to their own dignity history and community as anyone else? Think about our punitive criminal laws and our over policing and incarceration of the marginalised and of our indigenous youth. Think about the concept of marginalisation itself – who does it serve? What powers and interests does it prop up and enforce?

For anyone with a shred of empathy its songs like these that drive home just where we should be focussing ourselves politically and what the real goal of politics should be: empowering the individual, building communities & networks, ensuring education and equality of opportunity, offering safe havens to people at risk. In this moment in the world and in this city here and now. class warfare is happening around us, and we are losing our soul. Without people like Perry Keyes, Don Walker, Billy Bragg and many others to paint pictures for us and make us confront the darkness embedded in our first world ‘lucky’ country, our rhetoric and polemic are meaningless. Perhaps a listen to ‘Jim Salmon’s Lament’ on polling day might help to focus our vote, or perhaps it will make no difference, but maybe, for a moment, we can all think of Iris and her family and what politics should really be about.