Paul Kelly's Gossip Turns 40 With Special Anniversary Vinyl Edition

Four decades after it first landed, Paul Kelly's landmark double album Gossip has returned in a special 40th anniversary vinyl edition — out now on two coloured LPs, blue for the first record and yellow for the second, with each copy including one of several randomly inserted replica handwritten Kelly lyric sheets.

Originally released in September 1986, Gossip marked a defining moment in Kelly's career and remains one of the landmark albums in Australian music. Produced by Alan Thorne and Paul Kelly, the album peaked at #15 on the national charts, went Gold, and gave the world two of his most enduring singles, "Before Too Long" and "Darling It Hurts."

Kelly himself remembers the ambition behind the record clearly. "By the time the band and I came to record Gossip we had a whole lot of songs ready to go, written over the previous couple of years," he recalls. "I thought, 'Let's make it a double album!' To my knowledge no one had done that here for a long time. Michael Gudinski, head of Mushroom Records, rolled his eyes, not for the first or last time, when I suggested the idea but let us do our thing. We recorded the songs quickly at Trafalgar Studio in Sydney. All kinds of songs. We felt we were making a statement, a big colourful canvas after the bare bones of the previous record Post. Radio started playing some of the songs and we were off to the races!"

The anniversary pressing arrives alongside Seventy (Deluxe Edition), also out now, and follows a pair of intimate one-off shows for Kelly — including a stop at Lefty's in Brisbane, alongside a sold-out ballot-only show at The Potts Point Hotel in Kings Cross that drew overwhelming demand.

Forty years on, Gossip remains a defining chapter in a catalogue that keeps finding new listeners. Order the 40th anniversary vinyl edition here.