Welcome to the Christian O'Connell Show podcast.

Say hello to our special guest who's coming today.

He's not plugging anything.

He just responded to an invitation a couple of weeks ago when I was saying how much I love Paul Kelly and how to make gravy.

And he's going to be singing for us.

But first of all, Paul Kelly, thank you very much for coming in on the show today.

My pleasure, Christian. Good to be here.

So, Paul, for many years before I moved here to Australia on the 21st December,

I used to love playing How to Make Gravy.

And not many people knew about the song, but I would always get a very big reaction in the UK,

want to know who the song was by, because it's a beautiful and a rare contemporary good new Christmas song.

I'm dying to know, was a song like that hard to write because there's been so many

Christmas songs? How do you come up with an original angle? I guess the thinking about it for a little

while, that was probably more the hard part. I remember thinking, oh, how the hell am I going to write a Christmas

song? There's so many out there. And I thought, what's the best way to write about the feeling of

Christmas? And my next thought was, well, maybe the best way to write about the feeling of Christmas

is to write from the point of view of someone who can't be there for Christmas. And as soon as I

had that thought, you know, the next one was, well, why can't they be there?

And I thought, ah, they're in prison.

Once that was, that was like the key.

And then the rest of the song sort of wrote itself from there.

And I realized, I realized afterwards, you know, that was sort of the most popular.

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