Hully Gully

Even removing Don Walker’s latest solo album from the context of Cold Chisel and other career accomplishments, it’s a brave and witty source of fascination, writes DAVID NICHOLS.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Don Walker’s Cutting Back, from six-plus years ago, remains one of my favourite albums of the 21st century, and a show he played last year at the East Brunswick Club – featuring a batch of songs he claimed had been written only in recent weeks – was also a consumer highlight. So, high expectations for Hully Gully, with the caveat that I’m still mining the depths to Cutting Back.

A good stratagem to cut to the chase (albeit one which ignores the value of the context of a body of work: by some measures this is Walker’s 22nd album) might be to imagine what we’d make of this record if it was Don Walker’s first ever; if he never did anything musical ever before. Would it be so haunting or as compelling if it wasn’t by THE Don Walker but by some 62-year-old guy with a somewhat curious name combining elements of The Godfather and The Phantom?

“It is atypical, the voice of a songwriter and not a singer.”

Firstly, his voice, one of the things I like best about Don Walker’s work. It is atypical, the voice of a songwriter and not a singer; like Burt Bacharach’s singing voice, in that regard. It’s not wrong or strange, except it’s slightly higher and a little more nasal than most of the artists who’ve generally sung Walker’s songs. But at the same time, Walker can now inject not only some drama – by which I mean not histrionics, but acting – and also some humour into what he does, and he does it ridiculously well. What the songs lose in conventional delivery, they gain in Walker’s inhabiting of them.

Secondly, his narrator’s stance. Jumping back into real reality for a second: 32 years ago Walker told Ed St John at Australian Rolling Stone, “I can put a supreme effort into writing a song about living with very little money or being in gaol, but those people who are involved in it, the people who are in gaol can still say that I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m talking about, and they’d be right.” The newly minted songwriter Don Walker, on his debut Hully Gully, would face a bit of criticism for this focus on the downtrodden, the outcast and the rural; he’s not really downtrodden, or outcast himself, and it has to be said that try as he might – and clearly he knows it’s a problem – the idea that the economically disadvantaged are the most interesting and ‘real’ people to write about has probably run its course. Sure, drifters and the laconic disappointed are good for stories, but Don Walker is a well-off, well-respected man; if he ever knew such people, he was never of them.

Now that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t write about them. He often does it well; his narrator in ‘Young Girls’, for instance, who has a split-second fantasy lifetime with a woman he glimpses while stepping off a kerb in the Cross, provides a genius short story in a scant few verses, twists and scandals as it goes. But Walker is better, I think, when he’s just writing more generally about being a man of late middle age, with his minor concerns about bullshit. (The exception is ‘Everybody’, which is a bit of cranky doggerel that doesn’t really break out of its reactionary stance even when it tries to resolve itself as a love song.) Which is to say: writing about the underdog was once a good political statement, but now, as you drift further than ever from those realities, what you know seems more true. ‘On the Beach’ – another declaration of love, albeit almost vicious – is when he’s at his best, with an approach that doesn’t sound so rote.

“About half of Walker’s songs could be sung to the theme music from ‘At the Movies’”

Thirdly, his music. Walker’s contemporaries are men like Paul Hewson or Rob Hirst, craftsmen who could tell a story in a catchy tune. Walker’s songs are more nuanced, like parables, less artisanal than Hewson’s and less didactic than Hirst’s. But Walker, while eminently capable of coming up with a pop song full of surprises, seems happier when the music doesn’t get in the way of the words. Cold Chisel were the perfect band for Walker because they were willing and able to add the extra melodies and weirdness to the mix; Walker’s Suave Fucks create beautiful and/or appropriately magical moods, but appear unwilling to quarrel with the boss. Probably about half of solo Don Walker songs could be sung to the theme music from At the Movies.

None of which really explains why Hully Gully works so well. It’s a record with an intense, assured feel and a clean, inviting sound; it’s brave and witty, and it blends fiction with reportage in ways reminiscent of, say, Helen Garner at her best. I look forward very much to spending a long time in its company.

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‘Hully Gully’ is out now independently through MGM. Walker and band are launching it on tour in November.