As Sunday sessions go, they don’t get more magical than Paul Kelly playing a pop-up gig at a Kings Cross pub.
Four decades ago after alighting on Sydney’s Oxford St after travelling on a greyhound bus from Melbourne, he wrote the iconic From St Kilda to Kings Cross on the white grand piano in the front room of the home of his friend, Cold Chisel’s Don Walker.
On Sunday’s early spring afternoon, with his nephew Dan Kelly by his side, he staged a free gig for about 250 lucky fans who won tickets in a ballot in the bar of the Potts Point Hotel.
A mural of Kelly now looms large on its outside wall above the streets where he roamed as a struggling musician all those years ago, closing the loop of the classic song which is also commemorated with a painting on the beloved Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda.
With the windows and doors opened to allow the songs to echo through the Kings Cross alleys and entertain the dozens of locals, bemused tourists and marathon runners with medals around their necks lingering outside, Kelly celebrated a reissue of last year’s Seventy album with a musical trip down memory lanes.
“Been a long time since I’ve played in Kings Cross, maybe 30 years or more,” he said after opening the show with I Will Always Love You in tribute to Dolly Parton.
“This is a Sunday session I love, playing at three o’clock in the afternoon.”
While the setlist showcased some of his newer stuff, it was also stacked with songs that arrived during the six years he lived in Sydney in the 1980s before returning to Melbourne.
Songs rusted into the soundtrack of Australia, like Sydney From A 704, Darling It Hurts and Randwick Bells.
Before Deeper Water, he rattled off a list of Sydney beaches, some where he used to swim back in those days – Coogee, Clovelly, Maroubra, Bondi, Bronte and he appeared particularly pleased with himself to remember Tamarama.
Fans sang loudly as he performed Rita Wrote A Letter and even louder when he sang its prequel How to Make Gravy, now a movie for our minds to reflect the joy of our hearts every December 21, the official Gravy Day in Australia for the past 30 years and the signal for Kelly fans that Christmas is coming.
The pub choir swelled in volume as he hit the home stretch in the setlist with Dumb Things, To Her Door and From Little Things, Big Things Grow.
Kelly will reprise his pub celebration of the Seventy record at Lefty’s Musical Hall in Brisbane on Monday.