This interview feature is part of a new Scene Report on Dunedin. Check out the series here.
Before Lewis Capaldi appeared with his tender ballads and impeccable comic timing at Christchurch’s Wolfbrook Arena in January, those who turned up early were transfixed by the most intimate of performances on the biggest of stages.
Jude Kelly walked out, sat alone at a keyboard, and put on a support set resplendent with majestic folk-pop songs. For anyone who came solely to see Capaldi but arrived a tad too early, they left with a lasting impression of a new artist of note.
It was a ‘pinch-me’ moment for Kelly, and she’s been collecting a lot of those moments in her young career so far. Supported one of the world’s biggest pop stars? Done it. Played in front of Coldplay’s Chris Martin? That happened casually one day last year.
More moments are on the way, too, as Kelly is one of 10 Aotearoa acts selected to play at beloved English festival The Great Escape this May, as part of a landmark partnership between the New Zealand Music Commission and Live Nation New Zealand.
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Still in her mid-20s, reaching such milestones probably seemed a distant possibility when Kelly was taking her first steps into music as a teenager in Ōtepoti Dunedin — in fact, as she tells me on a post-Laneway call from Póneke Wellington (she travelled to the capital to see Nick Cave play live), she initially “never really thought about releasing music.”
“I just enjoyed gigging,” she confesses, “and so I don’t think I ever really thought about it too consciously until I started to release music. But everyone was pretty supportive.”
Kelly was a late inclusion in our Dunedin series — certainly not through lack of talent but simply because, in my mind at least, she’s a proper Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland artist. She seemed to arrive in our country’s most commercially-oriented music city almost fully-formed: she came with the look, the charisma, and the lyrical ability to be a breakout pop star.
She tentatively agrees. “I think it’s probably the pop side of me that probably associates me more with Auckland, whereas that wasn’t the sound underneath it.”
Which is why she’s all too keen to discuss all things Dunedin.
“There is this old band from the ’80s called Look Blue Go Purple,” she starts. “I just think that they’re so cool and I think their attitude is everything that kind of ‘Dunedin Sound’ is in a way. ‘I’m just doing it and not giving a fuck’… I love their mentality.”
Born in Whanganui, Kelly and her family moved to Dunedin when she was nine. Before her big move to Auckland at the age of 22, she honed her music skills playing with Juno Is and Marlin’s Dreaming.
Older Dunedin music eras get more attention on a national scale, particularly the period when the early Flying Nun bands were emerging, but the Dunedin scene of Kelly’s time is underrated: as well as Juno Is and Marlin’s Dreaming, great bands like Mild Orange and Soaked Oats were also breaking through. (The former have become a touring staple across the globe, while the latter have found a solid fanbase across Aotearoa and Australia.)
Kelly says her time was spent attending and playing as many gigs as possible. The Crown gets a mention, unsurprisingly (“[I]t’s just like a haunted house, she says in a complimentary tone), and she also remembers a café called Dog with Two Tails, where she had her first open mic performance. “[T]hat was kind of like the first time I really started doing shows live.”
“[…] I had been around the scene for so long, I loved going to the gigs, so I think by the time I was actually releasing music everyone took to it really well,” she recalls.
“I didn’t plan to do music… [I] was just playing live shows in Dunedin and started just getting good, sort of word of mouth [coverage] around all the South Island. And it was great. And people would be like, ‘Where are these songs?’ And I was like, ‘Well, nowhere!’ It’s not my intention to do that.
“But I think when I was graduating, I kind of just thought to do music just to see what it was like and take it year by year… I did a year in Dunedin and then I moved to Auckland strictly for music and was just basically like, ‘If I’m actually going to do it, I’m just gonna go in and really try to do it.'”
While Kelly notes that it “was quite difficult” trying to find her place as a pop-leaning artist in Dunedin, it helped that “a lot of my words are more folk-based. So if you’re leaning into the singer-songwriter thing, then for sure. But I knew I kind of [had] a larger and bigger sound.”
“I really struggle with the pop side of things because of how loud and grabby it felt,” she adds. “And so I guess that’s where my Dunedin side that I love [comes out], and a lot of my people I’ve met up here are similar to that. You know, it’s [a] much more chill, calmer approach…”
There’s absolutely nothing “loud or grabby” about Kelly’s style of pop on her gorgeous debut EP, The Seven Spirits of Her.
The record, which she released last year after carefully working on it for two years, positioned her as a folk-meets-art-pop artist much closer to performers such as Lana Del Rey or Mitski rather than someone like Capaldi.
“It’s almost an audio biopic,” Kelly said upon its release, “Each song harnesses a different story that taps into an experience or part of us—whether it’s love, contentment, or growing up too quickly. These stories have been for me, but I hope when people listen to the EP, they too can see the beauty in the ugly.”
“I was really happy with it, actually,” she reflects one year later. “[I]t was a really long journey to get that out, and I was so happy with it… I really had to fight for some things to stay… I mean, naturally you could always go in and change things, but I think for the first EP and what I wanted to get across with it, I think that that was received.”
The EP clearly caught the ear of Capaldi’s talent bookers. Two months on from her support run for the Scottish singer, Kelly is still processing the experience.
“That was great,” she says at first. “That was so scary. That was amazing. Yeah, that was a huge milestone for me to have done — even more so that it was just me on stage and no band.
“[It was] so terrifying but it kind of just simplified everything you know… I did that for so many years before I started being a recording artist…”
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Did she get to chat much to Capaldi on the tour? “Well, we hung out afterwards on the after the Spark [Arena] show,” she says. “Yeah, me, Aaron Rowe and Lewis and our teams had a beer and just all just chatted and it was really, really nice. Yeah, such a lovely guy.”
Before Capaldi, though, came Chris Martin.
As he’s done in other countries, the Coldplay icon asked to meet some local artists when he touched down in Aotearoa, and Kelly was one of the lucky picks.
“[S]omeone I knew just tapped me on the shoulder and was like, ‘You should be in this room,” she reveals. “And so [I] was like, ‘Okay, cool. Coldplay, awesome.’
“It was a room full of peers and a lot of people that I do respect. We kind of all sat in a circle and chatted and it was very personable. We shared a song that we were working on and he provided some feedback…. I thought that that was really cool to be able to connect with the community and just hone in on that.”
Credit: Nicole Brannen
Befitting her considerate approach to music-making, Kelly is in no mood to rush her first full-length album. A “shorter EP,” she says, is more likely to follow The Seven Spirits of Her.
“I’ve been writing a bunch [over] the last year, I guess, and I have a pretty strong idea. But obviously being an independent artist is quite difficult, so [an] album’s probably not quite on the cards yet. But yeah, [I] think maybe another EP… I don’t think it’ll take very long. I think it will be kind of a quick turnaround on this one… I’m still developing, still growing, still figuring out the right way.”
She offers an example: getting her next record to “sound as close to possible” to her live show without it being a live record, “to get that immediacy.”
“[That’s] one of the most important things for me as an artist,” she says.
Kelly may miss Dunedin but she knows she’s in the right place, surrounded by the right people, to progress her life and career.
“[A]ccessibility to opportunity and being not necessarily surrounded by similar artists in your world, but just similar like-minded people,” she says about the benefits of being based in Auckland. “I’ve met so many people up here that make a lot of different music, like very different music to me, but they just inspire me heaps. I think, you know, [it’s] that cliché thing of like, you are who you surround yourself around.”
Jude Kelly’s The Seven Spirits of Her EP is out now.
