On camera (link here) and here in one of his favoured forms, words, Paul Kelly looks ahead to his first shows on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. He’s got a new album, Life Is Fine, and when you’re done here you can read a review of that HERE. This joint is not a bad spot to play the new songs. The venue for the interview doesn’t suck either. Suits you sir, we reckon. FORECOURT FOREPLAY Dapper as usual in a brown suit and open necked shirt, slightly stooped but hawkey

PAUL KELLY Life Is Fine (EMI) The Paul Kelly has made an upbeat, band-focused, rock’n’roll album is the newsy bit around Life Is Fine. After two collections which were essentially songs for a funeral and a “co-write” with noted sonnet writer William Shakespeare, plus a song cycle/epistolary concept album and a soul record which featured multiple vocalists, Life Is Fine seems simpler, straighter, more likely to get compared with Gossip, more obviously fun. Those are all true a

KASEY CHAMBERS Dragonfly (Essence/Warner) If I tell you that Dragonfly is a solid Kasey Chambers album does that make you feel good or concerned? Whether you fall for or fall away from this album may depend on that answer. Other words to apply here are thorough, respectable, attractive, rocking (in parts), touched with bluegrass, wordy, momentarily pop-ish, relatively impersonal, briefly weirdly personal (though only partly true), and not short of songs thank you very much.