Kirin J Callinan might be cursed. It’s a Friday afternoon in January and the 38-year-old musician and longtime pop provocateur is lounging on a craggy outpost just off Bondi beach when a wave lurches upwards and arcs towards him with terrifying speed. He waits for the inevitable impact. Thud! We are drenched with salt and sand.
“I have a superstition,” he confesses a second later. “Whenever I go into the water or near the water, it seems to rise up. It feels like Poseidon is enraged, or salutes me – or it’s a warning.”
The water continues thundering. Sometimes it is a welcome respite, as the mercury creeps to the high heavens – we’ve met on a contentious public holiday, meaning all the arcane forces of the universe have conspired to bring a diabolical cross-section to the beach. Screeching babies, backpackers and herds of off-duty lads chanting the national slogan all pierce the breeze. Twice, our conversation is punctured by a rescue boat hoisting a hapless swimmer from an unforgiving sea.
It’s an appropriate backdrop for Callinan’s new record If I Could Sing, his first full-length release since 2019’s cover album Return to Center and his first collection of original tracks since 2017’s Bravado.
If I Could Sing is a record of duplexity, bulging with rhapsodic highs that soar towards the firmament, only to be struck down into the pits of despair mere moments later. It buzzes with cosmic glitches and ascends with sudden gusts of strings. It is esoteric, operatic, oracular; figuring into its universe are references to super yachts, vehicular accidents and medieval torture devices. In its superlative melodrama, it is like everything else Callinan has ever released.
But there is a creeping world-weariness here too. A singular heartbreak shudders through the album, alongside the ripples of a drug-induced fantasia – a ketamine overdose before a London gig in 2018 that Callinan describes as an endless hallucination, which featured an elevator to the pearly gates and “eight-foot-tall turtles … controlling the nature of existence”.
“It’s not like my world was rocked,” he says. “But in retrospect, I recognise I desire other things in life now.”
Callinan calls the resulting album his most truthful – a left turn for an artist who has spent the better part of his two-decade career as a madcap showman for whom good taste has always seemed anathema; who has accrued adoration and infamy alike for his performative stunts on and off stage.
“I was interested in ugly sounds, ugly aesthetics,” Callinan says of his previous music – including his 2017 surprise hit Big Enough, an Ibiza-meets-country showdown which went viral for a yowling Jimmy Barnes cameo. “I so badly wanted to be a genuine outsider artist and to be operating from this place of unhinged, completely irreverent inspiration. But the problem is when you’re knowingly trying to do that, then you’re acting cerebrally and second-guessing yourself. And I’m doing my best to eliminate that critical self, that calculating self.”
Several times he refers to his pursuit of honesty as his “personal mission”: a lofty claim borne out through the album’s not-quite-ballads – more like guttural howls of heartache. “The song that hurts feels good somehow,” he intones breathlessly on the title track, a self-effacing break-up anthem set over buoyant synths, Enya-style. On an early single titled … in Absolutes, he wails into the void – “You broke my heart!” – each word an incision.
Love – and its entailing violence – wounded Callinan. It forced him inwards to assess the damage. So too did his brush with the courts in 2017, when he lifted his kilt at the Arias red carpet to flash nearby photographers – a spark of his trademark exhibitionism which resulted in a 12-month good behaviour bond and multiple career setbacks which still loom large today.
“I was very confused at the time,” he says. “I’d done this spontaneous, one-second thing that garnered a handful of laughs … and it was only people that weren’t there that were up in arms about it.”
He has not appeared on a major festival lineup in Australia since; the resulting media circus forced him to recalibrate his public image. “I’d been annoying people from before the Arias happened. It felt like that was just a catalyst. I’d been pissing people off with my bravado and with my shameless self-promotion and outlandishness … the nudity had become kind of like a chore for me, and I was not interested in it.”
He pauses. A helicopter drones overhead; nearby, the sea is as inscrutable as ever. “I’m a far more introspective person than the shameless extrovert I might have once been. But,” he says, “it might just be getting older.”
Kirin J Callinan’s songs to live by
Each month, we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust, and death.
The last song I sang in the shower
So Sorry, I Said by Liza Minnelli.
My go-to karaoke song
White Wedding by Billy Idol or Never Tear Us Apart by INXS. [My friend and collaborator] Tex Crick sung the CatDog theme song at karaoke once. I wish I could claim that.
The best song to have sex to
Something mediocre, faceless, with just the right amount of atmosphere and sensuality, but not too much. Otherwise I’m getting too distracted.
The song I clean the house to
Given I’ve been living out of hotels the last while, I don’t. But when I do, house-proud as I am, it would be something with drive, momentum, purpose, hyper-focus and a cruel, ruthless streak. I’m thinking Gatekeeper’s Giza. Or maybe I need something more shapely, with balletic form, some motion, some drama, such as Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor. Or maybe I need to be transported, through a portal, into another world. Something lucid, meditative, timeless, like Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas Soundtrack. Instrumental always.
The best year for music
This is high stakes. 1984 comes to mind. Pretty sure it was the Smiths, Ocean Rain, A Walk Across the Rooftops. But I don’t like these games. And I’m just as inclined to Google when Mozart’s Requiem in D minor first dropped. The best is yet to come.
The opening credits to my biopic
Amore Mio Aiutami by Piero Piccioni.
The song I want played at my funeral
With God on Our Side by the Neville Brothers is playing right now, and would make a beautiful funeral song. Though really I want people to be weeping. Really weeping. No song makes me weep more effortlessly than the Magnetic Fields’ The Book Of Love. Gets me going near every time. Honestly though, I’d like it to be a song I write. Really make it all about me. I don’t think I’ve written that song yet, though I have an unreleased song called People I Love that’s a contender. We’ll see.
Kirin J Callinan’s album If I Could Sing is out on Friday 2 February through Worse Records
