Ned Kelly and the inner-Melbourne suburb of St Kilda have very little in common, apart from speculation that Kelly Gang member Steve Hart visited a doctor there for treatment for syphilis. But here we are, musician Ashley Davies and I, sitting in a St Kilda cafe, sipping cafe lattes and talking about Ned. Davies, 39, lives “just down the road”, and has even brought with him copies of Ian Jones’ The Friendship That Destroyed Ned Kelly: Joe Byrne and Aaron Sherritt and Ned Kelly: Man and Myth.

Davies is proud of the 15-track instrumental album, Ned Kelly, he released late last year, but there are no airs or graces about him – in fact, he could be any half-trendy, middle-aged bloke. He is pint-sized, but has enormous enthusiasm. He often uses the term “full-on”, which is exactly how he might be described. During our chat, Davies talks about the motivations behind the album, his favourite tracks, working with Kelly expert Ian Jones, who wrote the narratives for each track, and reveals how he obtained the sound effects for the show-stopping Stringybark track. In addition to presenting a full transcript of the interview, we have also provided you with a couple of bonuses – Ian Jones’ thoughts on the CD, and our very own review.

How did you get the idea for a Ned Kelly album? A friend gave me a book called Our Sunshine by Robert Drewe, which I really enjoyed. The language is amazing. I liked it more than Peter Carey’s book (True History of the Kelly Gang). Then it was like, what’s real and what’s not? So my friend gave me another book called Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, which had a lot of essays on Ned from different experts. That just fuelled me. Then Ian Jones’ book, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, came out. I’d already written a couple of pieces of music on Ned, which I do if something moves me. Then I read Ian’s book, which inspired me to write a few other tunes. It got to the point where I had enough music to put a record together. Then it was like: if you’re going to do a record, what are you actually going to do with it? I wanted to do something that was unlike anything that had been done before.

I decided the best way to get the story out was to write stories rather than songs because people had done that before. I was going to write the stories myself, but I had Ian’s book on me one day and a friend saw it and said “I know Ian; he’s a lovely man”. Her daughter went to school with Ian’s daughter, Elizabeth. I said “Gee, do you think you could let him know what I’m doing? Could I talk to him?” I thought I’d write the short stories and use Ian as a reference. She asked him and Ian said it was okay if I rang him. So I did, and I went and met him and played some of the music I had written. I was in awe of him, but we talked about the project and, I hadn’t planned to, but I asked him if he’d be interested in writing the narratives. I’m a great admirer of Ian’s writing and his ability as a historian – he’s got no peers when it comes to Ned Kelly. So when he said “yeah” a day or two later, it was just brilliant.

What was the next step? I went away and thought about what I considered were the important events in Ned’s life: what he was born into; Harry Power; when he was 19; the Fitzpatrick incident; Stringybark. Then Ian and I got together and he brought up ‘the six demons’. He said the blacktrackers were a major part of the story. I was really glad he brought that to my attention. I knew they were the dudes that Ned was really worried about, but Ian really brought that point home. With that one, it was “oh, didgeridoo” – I wasn’t going to write for that track. I just went the hack with an Aboriginal mate who played the ‘didge’.

What were the first tracks you wrote for the album? Strangely enough, the first track, Battle Lines, then On the Run. Some days I just mucked around on the guitar, just thinking about the stories and taping everything I played to see what I could come up with. I wrote some of them from scratch just thinking about the mood I wanted to portray, but there were a couple of tunes that I’d had laying around for some time, like The Bushranger’s Apprentice – I‘d had that for a few years, but to me it totally went with the story of Ned and Harry Power riding around the countryside doing their thing. The final track, Manifesto, was written a few years ago too. I didn’t want to end the album on a downer and I find that piece very uplifting. I hadn’t been able to use it in anything else I’d done, so that naturally fitted in.

Did you ever have the temptation to turn the tracks into songs? I reckon you’d have to be a Bob Dylan or a Paul Kelly to cut it. I write lyrics for songs, but I thought ‘there is no way I’m gonna go there’. I honestly felt I wouldn’t have been able to do justice to it in songs. In a story sense, in narratives, you could. But when you’re writing lyrics, you’ve got to think about it in terms of phrasing arrangements and so forth and then you’ve got to fit it all in. You don’t want to cut it to fit; you want to use all of the words that you want to use. But more importantly, I wanted to make an instrumental record. I’d written instrumental music before but never totally instrumental. I love instrumental music because, much like a book, you can conjure an image in your head.

Tell us about how you did the special effects – ie. the footsteps, the panting, etc. – in track five, Stringybark Creek. In Ian’s book, The Friendship (That Destroyed Ned Kelly: Joe Byrne and Aaron Sherritt), there is a paragraph about how Dan Kelly was laughing almost hysterically with a nervous excitement. To me, that was a chilling passage. These guys probably wouldn’t have seen a dead body, much less three that had been shot dead, and Dan was only 17 at the time. It was like: how do you possibly get into that mind-space? The running gun battle between Ned and (Sergeant Michael) Kennedy got to me as well. I thought:: ‘imagine being chased by someone with a gun’.

With those two things in my mind, I actually went out to Stringybark Creek with a mate. I wasn’t in the exact spot, but I was in the vicinity. I took a microphone with me and wanted to capture something of that running about in the bush, and the breathing, etc. I ran through the bush and it was really full-on. You’re jumping over logs, you’re trying to get through bushes, and of course the bush would have been a lot thicker back then too. I ran until my guts really hurt. Because I knew what went down there, it added to the experience. To be quite honest, I was shitting myself. But I just felt I had to do it.

What are your favourite tracks on the album? It’s funny actually. I like the whole record, but my favourites are three with death involved – Stringybark Creek, Aaron’s death (Endplay) and The Last Stand. I can’t separate them because they each have an intensity about them.

What was Ian Jones like to work with? Magnificent. I used to love going to his house and seeing him, whether it was something about Kelly or about a specific idea I had. He’s been so supportive and right into the project. When you talk to Ian about the Kellys or Ned, it’s like he knows them. It was like going for a great history lesson. He spins a great yarn. He’s a great man and a great bloke.

You are performing at the dinner that will be held at Glenrowan on June 28, which will mark the 122nd anniversary of the last stand. What can the audience expect? It will be more of a presentation than a show. Ian will do the narratives while I play four tracks relating to the Glenrowan phase of the story, starting with the death of Aaron Sherritt in track nine, through to The Last Stand. It will be a visual presentation with part of the live show, picking up the story when it becomes really full-on.

Was the fact that no-one had put a modern musical angle on Ned one of the attractions for putting it together? Not really. I didn’t want to go down the road of what other musicians had done before; I wanted to do something different, but I did it simply because that was where my head was at.

Is the final result what you had envisioned? Totally, I’m so stoked. Everybody involved gave so much. The musicians were incredible and what they brought of themselves and expressed, there is not a tune that I would have liked done different. Even the work that Tom Sapontsis did with the artwork in the booklet. I wasn’t thinking of doing anything like what Tom came up with. I didn’t know Tom before-hand – a friend put me onto him. I thought we’d go the old history trip with the black and white tones. When I saw this colour thing that he was into, I thought ‘oh, yeah’. Bottom line is: I wouldn’t change anything to do with either the music, the narratives or the look of the book.

Have you been approached by any of the movie companies to use your music in their films? Not yet, so we’ll just have to wait and see. If it worked well, then it would be cool. People have used it. It was used for a TV show that Ian and Peter Carey were both on and there was also a radio show.

Tell us about your plans for a live show? We premiered the show at the Apollo Bay Music Festival in March. We had a great response. The Age even wrote that it was the highlight of the festival. I’m hoping to organise a tour for later this year through regional Victoria and see what happens from there. Once I start the live show, I’ll start the second press of the CD. I see it being an ongoing thing; it’s not like a normal CD that I’d release. Because it’s about Ned and because of Ian Jones’ involvement and the fact there looks like being a DVD to accompany it, I might decide to get the live show up and running and do another tour.

What can we expect to see on the DVD? The finer details are still to be nutted out, but it will basically be a doco of the live show, the music and Ian’s narratives. But I don’t want to go too far into that at the moment because it’s still up in the air.

What does the live show entail? You’ve got the 15 tracks off the CD and I’ve worked with a couple of people to put a visual together. There’s a video clip for each tune. We used a lot of original photos. It’s a bit like those ABC and SBS documentaries: the jazz doco and the Civil War doco. They used photos in such a way that they could get movement out of them. I mean, you can make a train in a photo move by using various camera techniques. In our live show, just as the train is rolling up to Glenrowan, we made it look as though it was moving and then stopped. I’ve already recorded Ian (Jones) reading all of the narratives but, in the show, he reads some of them and the audience reads others. So what you’ve got is the band playing the album live to the images, with the narratives complementing both.

The focus moves around a bit. Sometimes the focus is on the band, depending on what the story is and how much of the story needs to be told because some of the narratives are five paragraphs, while others are two. For example, On the Run is a good visual for the band. The sound man also does his thing with ‘surround sound’, not for every track, but every now and then, like for Stringybark Creek when there’s the running through the bush. So, there are a lot of things happening.

So the idea is to make it more of an experience than a show? Totally. My thing has always been about presenting a story. And what got me into Ned Kelly was that I didn’t know the story. In doing the CD, I was writing and playing music and getting into it from that aspect, but it was also important to get the story across. It’s the same with the live show. It’s really important to me that people get, not the whole story, but an idea of what happened through Ian’s narratives. So many people have remarked to me that they just didn’t know the story. They didn’t know that Ned’s mum went to jail, they didn’t know about Fitzpatrick, Stringybark Creek, Aaron Sherritt. People knew that the Gang had robbed banks, killed police and worn suits of armour, but they didn’t know the rest of it. Some people came up to me crying. They enjoyed seeing authentic pictures of the characters and they got right into it.