Perry Keyes is the truest chronicler of hard knocks as has ever worked in 4/4 time – a hardboiled talent with songs as diamond hard as Lou Reed, a purveyor of songs as winded by life as Woody Guthrie, a man as working class as Bruce Springsteen.

Keyes writes of the Sydney beneath the surface, a primal convict city building upon itself like the layers of Ancient Rome. His songs put listeners in mind of a time when the Harbour City was abuzz with brothels, bent cops, bookies and ‘colourful racing identities’.

But Keyes is not a Sydney Poet in the way Paul Kelly is “Melbourne’s Bard” for neither pigeonhole has any basis in reality. Kelly’s most famous songs are actually Sydney-based and while Perry’s work rings out from Matraville, Waterloo, the Matthew Talbot Hostel in the ‘Loo and Redfern’s dark heart, the city merely propels his narratives.

Keyes’ father hailed from Glebe in the days before the ‘inner west’ was gentrified. He was a part-time SP bookie and full-time streetsweeper. “I’d be walking to school and see my dad sweeping dead pigeons out of the gutter,” Keyes recalls.

His mum worked at the WD&HO Wills cigarette factory in Kensington. As an infant, he contracted polio and spent his first five years in a hospital, before going to stay with his grandparents in Redfern. “We lived in Hugo Street, Redfern in what is now ‘the Block’ until Whitlam gave the streets to the Aboriginal Housing Company. Then we moved to Eveleigh Street and finally to Waterloo. It was out of the frying pan and into the devil’s scrotum.”

Music was always a constant to Perry and his discovery of the Clash coalesced a band in 1985. Keyes knew no other musicians apart from a drummer who frequented a Redfern pinball parlour run by a Greek in clothes two sizes too small who dealt heroin under the counter. “I had no insight into how musicians got their shit together – all I knew was where to go to see bands play. One day I went to this guy’s flat and his bedroom was full of stolen musical equipment. So I started this band – the Stolen Holdens – all of us playing on stolen instruments.”

Initially dubbed Leb Zetland because three of the four guys in the band were Lebanese, the band rehearsed in an old cake factory in Alexandria where a 17-year-old heroin dealer lived with his 16-year-old prostitute girlfriend. “He sold heroin, she was a pro, but they had a great life. During the day they’d be out working, off their faces. So we’d bash away in their lounge room and they’d come home in the afternoon and then we’d give them a lift up to the Cross, where the drummer’s girlfriend worked as a stripper. We didn’t judge people, y’know? Some ended up dead or in gaol, but it’s a time always infused with humour. We just wrote about what we knew.”

Leb Zetland may not have been serious but Keyes was. “I didn’t have anything else,” he says. “When you’re singing a song about a mum holding her dead son in his bedroom after he’s done himself in, I wanted the band to play the songs well.”

When the Stolen Holdens played the Sandringham in Newtown, their gritty take on life went against the rose tinted view of King Street other songwriters eulogised. To some they were a footnote because they never toured or released an album, but to others they were legends.

For most of the 90s, Keyes did a JD Salinger. There were almost no shows and his guitar only came out of its case at home. By the turn of the 21st century, he was working three shifts a week behind the wheel of a taxi.

But in 2002, Keyes ran into Bek-Jean Stewart and Grant Shanahan of Sydney band Eva Trout who were both fans of Perry’s work. The cabbie took little convincing. Soon, Stuart Coupe of local independent label Laughing Outlaw, who wasn’t previously aware of Keyes, heard about the sessions and cut him a deal.

Keyes’ sprawling two-album set Meter was compared to Springsteen’s epic The River, and out of nowhere, record industry bigwigs began enthusing about a songwriter who seemed more myth than man. Keyes’ songs – accumulated over ten years and carrying a weight of knowledge about all that is seamy and rundown in Sydney – saw critics unstinting in their praise. The release in November of his second album The Last Ghost Train Home brought him to the attention of international media. At the time of print, Keyes was gearing up for his first ever international tour.

Lifeline

1967 At 14 months Keyes contracts polio – the last laboratory-confirmed case of a disease eradicated in Australia many years prior
1971 Discharged from the hospital, goes to live with his grandparents
1982 Perry’s father goes to sea
1985 Forms first band, Leb Zetland, soon renamed the Stolen Holdens
1993 Retires from live performance
2000 Begins driving taxis for a living
2003 Begins performing again. Forms Perry Keyes & Give My Love to Rose
2004 Signs to Sydney independent label Laughing Outlaw
2005 Releases first album Meter - 2005 Billboard Top 10 list.
2007 The song ‘In Ancient Rome’ features in US TV show Californication. The Last Ghost Train Home is voted ABC Radio National’s Album of the Year

“If he’d been born in the US then Keyes may well have been heralded as the next Springsteen. As it is, he’s something altogether more original.” 4/5 Rock ‘N’ Reel (UK)

“Songwriting as good as Bruce Springsteen at his best” – Tim Ritchie, Radio National