The Cairns Review

Frontier Touring are thrilled to announce that revered Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly will be joined by his band to embark on their On The Road Again tour this July and August. The tour will see Kelly and his band tour regional towns and cities across the Australian East Coast, performing to 24 audiences over two months. Kelly’s band will be joining him on all tour dates, including Vika and Linda Bull, Bill McDonald, Peter Luscombe, Ash Naylor and Cameron Bruce.

Kelly says “The band and crew and I have really missed each other over the last eighteen months as shows after shows were first postponed then cancelled. We put our toe in the water with a one off New Year’s Eve performance for TV but now we’re really looking forward to stretching out and playing music night after night. We want to see the whites of your eyes, you lovers of sound, joy and fury; we want to charge the air around us and change each other and send you home singing into the night!”

Kelly will take to the stage in, Cairns at The Centre of Performing Arts on Thursday 15 JULY 2021 and Port Douglas Yacht Club on Saturday 17 JULY 2021.

Inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1997, Paul Kelly is distinguished as one of Australia’s greatest performers and songwriters, with a prolific 25 studio albums, multiple film soundtracks, and two live albums to his name. 2017’s Life Is Fine saw Kelly finally achieve his first ARIA #1 album, also earning him ARIA Awards for Best Male, Best Adult Contemporary Album, Best Cover Art and Engineer Of The Year.
 
In the height of the 2020 lockdown, the renowned performer got to work performing on Channel Nine’s Music From The Home Front, ABC’s The Sound TV series and the Victorian Government’s The State of Music livestream as part of the Victoria Together Initiative.
 
Last year also saw the release of Kelly’s album Forty Days. Performed, recorded and posted via his socials from home in lockdown, this 15-track album comprises of songs and poems, some of which were written by other artists and explore themes related to lockdown like cooking, dry pubs, hope, insomnia and separation, whilst other songs commemorate singers and poets like Bill Withers, John Prine and Bruce Dawe who have left us recently.
 
Never stopping, in 2020 Paul Kelly also released the album Please Leave Your Light On with Australian pianist and composer Paul Grabowsky. The studio album features twelve adaptions of Kelly’s originals, with Grabowsky describing the collaboration as primarily driven by a mutual and ongoing “fascination with music in its many forms”.