We'd just chuck ideas around and he'd pick the best bits

Aboriginal singersongwriter Kev Carmody met Kelly at a Sydneyland rights concert in the late 1980s and they ended up writingFrom Little Things Big Things Grow, about the Gurindjipeople's eightyear struggle for land, around a campfire. "Hedoesn't beat you over the head with (his political views)," says Carmody, whose 2007 tribute album Cannot Buy My Soul wasproduced by Kelly. "He says, 'This is the reality I see.' He hadthat great ability and compassion and sensitivity to look overindigenous progress over 219 years and say, 'This is what Iperceive.'" A sense of social justice must run in the family: after Kelly's father died, his mother helped set up a social welfareorganisation in Brisbane's south, where she moved in the sister Anne has done aid work in East Timor and Uganda; andbrothers Tony and Martin have worked with Brisbane street kids. Although Kelly describes himself as "welloff" these days, he'sanything but flashy: he wears a black plastic Swatch and drives adented 2001 Toyota Camry; after lunch, he asks the waiter to puthis leftover pizza in a doggy bag. He didn't start making a livingfrom his music until the release of Gossip, and then the 1987 followup, Under the Sun, produced the hit singlesDumb Things and To Her Door. Since then he has solidified his reputation with a string ofalbums (22, including soundtracks) branching out into bluegrass andexperimenting with reggae and RB. He has dabbled in acting andwritten film scores, winning ARIA awards for the soundtracks of Lantana and Jindabyne, and continued to produceand compose for other Australian artists, including Renee Geyer,Archie Roach and Christine Anu. Collaboration, he says, keeps him from going stale. "I think awriter's eternal problem is not to repeat themselves becauseeveryone has their own ruts or grooves," he says. "I remembersometimes writing songs with the Messengers and one of the bandwould say, and meaning it as a compliment, 'Oh, that one's straightfrom the factory.' You could spend the rest of your life writingsongs straight from the Rosetta Stone factory but that's just too deadly. Writingwith these other people is making yourself write in new ways and,if it works, you end up coming up with something that neither of you could have done on your own ... That's religion; who needs God?" The cowriting process, says Linda Bull, begins with lunch and achat around the kitchen table: "We'd just chuck ideas around andhe'd pick the best bits. He'd take all the bluntness and crudenessout of it and make it beautiful; that's his magic ... It'sconversations that you have everyday. That's why I think his songs are so popular: everyone knows what he means." Fans sometimes approach him after shows and seriouslyask him how he knew their story. "You know a song's working," says Kelly, "when people feel that it belongs to them like that." Kelly started out as a work colleague, says Bull, but over the years has proven to be a true friend. When her daughter wasseriously ill in hospital, he was the only one in the musicindustry who called. "He just picked up the phone; it was verytelling," she says. "He called me because he was worried, and hecalled every single day to find out how she was ... That was abeautiful thing to do. He's a father. He understands." Kelly has tried to keep his children out of the spotlight, butthe proud dad can't help giving his DJ son, Declan, a plug: the 26 yearold sound designer (whose mother is Kelly's first wife,Hilary Brown) has a Triple R radio show on Sunday nights, he says,called Against the Arctic. His daughters, Madeleine, 15, and Memphis, 13, live with their mother, Kelly's second wife, Kaarin Fairfax, but he sees them on weekends. "We're all still friends,"he says of his former wives.

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