Dan Kelly
Dan Kelly is quickly becoming our
generation’s Steve Miller. Our own Space
Cowboy/Gangster Of Love is back with his
second album, Drowning In The Fountain Of
Youth, bubbling with the kind of intelligently
agile, irreverently mischievous, psychedelic
blue-eyed soul that the Steve Miller Band,
Todd Rundgren and 10CC took to the charts in
the ‘70s. Ah, the glorious ‘70s! When strange,
beautiful pop songs shimmered over AM
radio. When four-part harmonies and lavishly
imaginative production swept us off on threeto-
five minute tropical holidays.
Those days are back my friends. Just listen
to the swelling harmonies of I Will Release
Myself (Unto You) (and try not to weep a tear
of nostalgic delight) if you don’t believe it
possible. If Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males’
startlingly brilliant debut Dan Kelly And The
Alpha Males Sing The Tabloid Blues presented
a charismatic distillation of the greatest
elements of modern indie rock, Drowning In
The Fountain Of Youth takes a step back to
make a giant pirouette forward.
Behold those angelic harmonies!
Those enthralling melodies!
That extravagant (self) production!
Those extraordinary lyrics!
How did Dan and his Alpha Males arrive
at this new future classic direction?
They’ve experienced much since the release
of their impossibly auspicious debut two
years ago. Beloved bassist Gareth Liddiard
finally departed to concentrate on his own
world-conquering outfit The Drones. He was
replaced by bass player Lewis Boyes whilst
guitarist Aaron Cupples and keyboardist
Dan ‘The Black Shadow’ Luscombe were
also initiated as full-time members alongside
drummer Christian Strybosch.
Whilst busily touring the country’s finest
venues and festivals (where he and his
handsome Males attracted rows of doe-eyed
female admirers to the foot of the stage), Dan
put on a brave public face.
But he could be found in dark corners after
all the girls had left, wringing his hands in
nervous terror. Maybe he’d written his only
good album. How could he possibly better
The Tabloid Blues?
But the combined spirit of the Alpha
Males gathering around Dan proved to be
irrepressible. Somehow that spirit manifested
itself in a tropical guise. Falsettos, four-part
harmonies, ukuleles and Theremins became
standard operating apparatus, and the first
born of this new fertility emerged in the
form of the most mellifluously expressed but
savage indictment of our current political
clime yet Drunk On Election Night. The
song had thousands of us joining arms and
crooning “Ooh cocksucker, ooh motherfucker”
in blissful vituperation. Dan realised that he
had tapped into the pulse of the youth of our
nation, just the inspiration he needed.
“Why scream and shout, when you can
massage your indignation into people?”
posited Dan. And The Males cheered because,
indeed, they were as sick as the rest of us of
all those screamy-shouty bands. So they put
on their Hawaiian shirts, gathered in a luau
of writing/recording bacchanalia and founded
their own political party on palm-trees-in-theafternoon-
breeze cadences and dropping-outis-
the-only-solution sing-alongs.
We’re talking escape. Would it be so
terrible to abandon our responsibilities and
desperate ambition? What’s wrong with
momentarily disregarding the indelibility of a
miserable marriage with a night of dancing?
Dan proposes in Baby Sitters Of The World
Unite! What’s wrong with having no greater
ambition than to be a toy boy/kept man? he
furthers in I Will Release Myself (Unto You).
Nowhere is the idea of being aimlessly adrift,
lethargically resigned and tropically beached
more eloquently articulated than in the simile
of The Lonely Coconut: “Like a lonely coconut I
roll around your town”.
But escape, it seems, is only a temporary
solution. When Dan sells up and sails off
to “play the coconuts in a Polynesian band”
in Safeway Holiday (Get Wise), he finds a
“stinking Safeway carpark laid out on the
sand”. When the dancing couple in Baby
Sitters… return home, they must again face
the question “have I wasted my life with a fool
for a lover?”.
Danger signs begin to appear everywhere.
As Dan surmises in Mail Order Bride, “The
cost of doing nothing is to slowly die”. He hits
the heart of the matter in Drunk On Election
Night: “The bad stuff’s coming when the good
do nothing, it’s true, so what am I gonna do?”
There need be no fear of impotence on Dan’s
behalf. With these 12 new songs, Dan Kelly
And The Alpha Males have made one of the
most constructive contributions to society so
far this century. Proving that pop can be both
cerebrally and melodiously gratifying (tropical
and topical!), Drowning In The Fountain Of
Youth will thoroughly rehabilitate your soul;
well, at least enough for you to make it to the
next Dan Kelly and The Alpha Males record,
anyway.
