Here’s the thing about this one: it’s technically about a 19th century photographer, but it doesn’t feel like a history song. Mark Moule wrote the lyrics for a mate’s uni project about Izzy Orlof, the guy who apparently brought the camera to WA. That’s the assignment. What actually comes through on tape is something else. At the time, Moule was flying back and forth from a mine site, raising his kids solo, and getting exactly one night a month in Fremantle to decompress. Orlof happened to settle in Fremantle too. That overlap is doing a lot of work in this song, whether Moule planned it that way or not.
So you get this odd layering. The words are pointed at someone else’s life. The ache underneath them is clearly his own. I’m not sure that was the intention going in, but it’s the reason the song holds up. It also helps that it doesn’t oversing the moment. Plainspoken, narrative, a little weathered around the edges, which tracks with the Paul Kelly comparisons Moule gets. No big swings, just someone telling a story straight.
The fact that this sat finished for ten years before anyone heard it is almost beside the point. What matters is it sounds like a guy who needed one good night a month just to keep going, and wrote that feeling into a song about somebody else.
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