Kev Carmody

Kev Carmody is Australia's pre-eminent Aboriginal recording artist, a storytelling wordsmith whose often politically charged and socially aware lyrics early in his career found him described as 'Australia's black Bob Dylan'.

Born in 1946 Carmody grew up on a cattle station near Goranba, 70km west of Dalby in the Darling Downs area of south eastern Queensland. Apart from a younger brother he saw few children until the age of seven, mixing mostly with stockmen. The family was poor and lived largely off the land growing vegetables near the house and hunting and catching everything from kangaroos to fish. His parents' union - Kev's father was Irish, his mother a Murrie aboriginal - was frowned on by the local white community. Around the stockmen's fire he learned his love for storytelling music.

When Kev was ten (1956) he and his brother were taken from their parents and sent to a 'Christian' school which Kevin has described as little more than an orphanage. Without completing his senior school years he returned rural work, for seventeen years working at bag lumping to wool pressing, welding and anything else life could throw at him. But he'd learned to read and write and promised himself not to let those skills go to waste either, and at the age of 33 Kev enrolled in the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education to study colonial history, progressing through to PhD studies at Queensland University, his thesis topic being Darling Downs between 1830-1860. His lecturers allowed him to bring his guitar as a means of implementing oral history, ultimately sparking his interest in songwriting and a music career.

While at university Kev Carmody also took the opportunity to acquaint himself with experimental music pioneers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Although his own music would reflect his own Murri culture, and the song as social history traditions of Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter, Kev was never going to be an ordinary or traditional singer-songwriter. There's been musical imagination as well as lyrical passion.

Already in his 40s, he released his first album 'Pillars Of Society' in December 1988. Songs like 'Black Deaths In Custody' and 'Though Shalt Not Steal' were powerful statements, highlighting the plight of the aboriginal people in modern Australia. Rolling Stone magazine described the album as '…. The best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia'. Backing up the anger and pain was the truth of history, his PhD.

Carmody's second album. 'Eulogy (for a black Person}' was produced by Paul Kelly associate Steve Connolly, with musical support from the rest of Kelly's Messengers and members of pioneering aboriginal rock band Mixed Relations. 1993's third album 'Bloodlines' included a song co-written with Paul Kelly. 'From Little Things Big Things Grow', an historical account of the Gurinji tribe drovers' walkout at Windy Hill station in the Northern Territory during the 1960s, the incident which sparked off the Australian land rights movement.

While Kev Carmody's songs speak of the Australian experience, he's taken them around the world.

After one more album, 'Images And Illusions', produced by Steve Kilbey of The Church, Kev Carmody took stock of his life and career, not completely comfortably with the demands placed on him by the mainstream recording industry. He continued performing, as a musician and public speaker, to audiences as diverse as the National Press Club and aboriginals in prison. He's taken seriously his position as an aboriginal elder to encourage others to take change of their lives.

Based back in south-western Queensland, after a break of nearly ten years Kev Carmody finally released a new album in 2004. Completely self-financed and distributed, 'Mirrors', was recorded at a friend's property "down the road", his first album recorded with computer technology. Although he says he had enough unused songs for ten albums, the songs on 'Mirrors' were purpose-written over a period of six weeks. Songs covering contemporary issues like the treatment of refugees and his thoughts on George W. Bush were accompanied by the captured real life sounds of the Australian bush.

For several years Paul Kelly harboured ambitions for a tribute album to Kev Carmody, a dream finally realized in July 2006 when Paul invited a wide assortment of artists to choose their favourite Carmody song to record. The results were released in February 2007, a double album 'Cannot Buy My Soul', featuring performances from pop, rock, country and rap performers on one disc, and Kev's own renditions of the same songs on the second disc.

In the aftermath of the incoming Labor Government's 2008 apology to indigenous Australians Kev and Paul Kelly reprised their 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' incorporating portion of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Sorry speech. Released as The GetUp Mob the new version also featured Missy Higgins and Urthboy.

In recent years Kev Carmody's activities have been hampered by the onset of crippling arthritis, legacy of the years of hard labour from his pre-music career days.