1 week ago
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It’s a warm Sydney evening in December, and Keli Holiday ambles across the stage at Sydney CBD venue Machine Hall, asking for the strings to be turned up. Waitstaff criss-cross the floor, preparing trays of champagne and canapés for the corporate event that kicks off in a few hours, occasionally stepping around Holiday as he strides to different corners of the room, throwing instructions back to the sound tech. Strings need to go up there, more keyboards here, something weird is happening with the vocals.
Mostly, the floor staff ignore the splatters of bass and drums echoing from the stage, but they all stop to watch when those familiar stabbing chords of Holiday’s breakout hit Dancing2 kick in, the see-sawing strings howling in the cavernous space. There’s particular attention paid to the sound mix of this song, which is understandable: it’s the reason we’re all here, after all.
A short time later, Holiday (born Adam Hyde) is swerving around Christmas shoppers as we walk to a nearby hotel. He cuts an imposing figure in the crowd: tall and solidly built with a shaggy head of hair and moustache. Many people turn to look as he passes, some taking furtive photos. At one point, two tradies lean out of their truck to wave and yell, “Hey Keli!“, and Hyde shouts back a gruff “How ya going?”
Hyde is somewhat used to this. As one half of the party-starting dance duo Peking Duk (the other half is Reuben Styles), he’s headlined festivals, played armfuls of sold-out tours and knows what it’s like when a song takes off. Peking Duk’s biggest single, 2014’s High, went quadruple platinum and took home the ARIA award for best dance release. It was followed by a run of similarly successful singles: Take Me Over (featuring fellow Canberra act Safia), Stranger (with Swedish singer Elliphant), Fake Magic (with electronic music duo AlunaGeorge), and a string of other tracks that kept Hyde and Styles on Australian festival stages for a decade.
But Keli Holiday is a different beast, and Hyde feels it. “It’s definitely a different feeling,” he says, popping a coffee pod in the hotel’s machine before kicking off his black boots. “It feels familiar, yet uncharted in any way, shape or form, which to me is really invigorating. But it’s also the kind of anxiety that makes you hum, which is funny because I’ve been doing music professionally for 20 years, but not once have I ever felt like a musician. Not once have I felt like I belong in any of these rooms.
“I’m not complaining about that at all, I actually like that standpoint. But Keli feels like I’m really on the boat on my own. I’ve got a great crew … but it’s an independent journey that’s taught me more about myself than I ever could have f---ing learned anywhere else.”
Keli Holiday was started not too far from where Hyde is sitting now: in a small, “grim” flat next to the Eastern Distributor in Waterloo. Home for a few weeks following a long and tiring Peking Duk tour, he bought a cheap guitar to fiddle around on while going through a “shitty” breakup.
He wrote and recorded a couple of songs in the flat, then took them over to his close friend, producer Golden Features (Tom Stell). Stell encouraged him to keep going and pointed Hyde in the direction of The Presets’ Kim Moyes, who had done some production work for Newtown band DMA’s, and who Stell thought would be interested in a new project. Before he really knew what was going on, Hyde says, he was working with Moyes to turn the scratchy tracks into his debut solo album, 2022’s Keli.
There was no real intention of keeping the project going, Hyde says. He was living in LA at the time, playing the odd gig, “just living for the afternoon” as COVID raged around the world. But after moving back to Australia, he felt there was more work to be done. Another Keli release, the EP Jesterman, appeared in May 2024. His thoughts turned to the idea of another album, a “proper” debut album, he says. “I had a strong intention of what I wanted it to feel like,” Hyde says. “Which was Suicide [the band] meets INXS … and then Keli Holiday as the little love child pops out of that.”
‘To me, that’s just pathetic … I’m not going to throw it back because I feel bad for them. They’re sad people.’
Keli Holiday (aka Adam Hyde) on dealing with online hatersThere might not have been an intention in the beginning, but Hyde is now passionately driven. “I’m willing to die to write the greatest song I can possibly find,” he says earnestly. “That’s my constant search. That’s my north star when I wake up now. And it’s something that I’m very proud of to be my north star because I look at people like Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith … they understood that there is no beginning, middle, or end. It’s just a constant search, not to get too woo-woo or deep about it … it’s just sweat at the end of the day. You just got to sweat it out.”
He tapped songwriters and producers like Alex Cameron, Konstantin Kersting (Mallrat, Spacey Jane), Belgian-Australian singer Romanie, and his old mate Golden Features to help pull the tracks together for what would become his new album, Capital Fiction. The album has been led by one of the biggest local hits in recent years, the tense, propulsive Dancing2. A little over a month after we speak, the song landed at No. 2 in Triple J’s Hottest 100, second to Olivia Dean’s globe-conquering Man I Need.
It first came to life when Hyde was mumbling the melody in a session with Cameron. “He put his arm on me and he said, ‘This is your moment to go full Hutch’,” Hyde recalls. “And I was like, ‘What the f--- do you mean?’ And he’s like, ‘Full Michael Hutchence. You need to deliver this shit. You need to write a story that is intimate to you and you need to deliver that shit and send that motherf---er home’. And I was like, ‘All right, sick’. And I think I did it justice.”
The track, written about his partner, media personality Abbie Chatfield, rocketed up the local charts and sound-tracked hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos. Suddenly, Keli Holiday was everywhere – playing grand finals and award shows and picking up another shiny ARIA, this time for best video. He assembled a supergroup of local musicians to perform the track at the ARIAs, including G Flip, Baker Boy, Alex Lahey, Spiderbait bassist Janet English, and more. Hyde was riding the wave, hips swaying back and forth in his trademark dance move, finger pointed to the sky.
Dancing2 has enjoyed the kind of crossover success that’s rarely experienced by local artists these days, but its ubiquity has brought a backlash. In the week leading up to our interview, a wave of online trolling crashed over Hyde and Chatfield. Skits ridiculing Hyde’s appearance, dancing and “performative” progressivism went viral. Commenters skewered Dancing2 due to its tonal similarities to LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends. A Reddit post titled ‘Why does everyone hate Keli Holiday so much?’ received more than 400 comments. Does it affect him?
“It’s very different the way I digest things I see online as opposed to [the way] my partner does,” Hyde says after a pause. “Because she cops it, she f---ing cops it and for no real reason, apart from, I think the reason we all know, she’s a woman. But the way I’ve always seen it is that I don’t know you. And that’s the best way that I can make sense of it all. I opened up Instagram the other day and this lame f---ing comedian that was so wack had made some skits and he’d AI’d my face on and I was like, ‘Wow, man, this is not only corny and shit comedy, but I don’t f---ing know you’.
“I would pray to God that I could never be that wack to spend hours out of my day making skits about someone I don’t know,” he continues. “I mean, to me, that’s just pathetic … I’m not going to throw it back because I feel bad for them. They’re sad people. But words do have weight online if you’re constantly battered with them. We’re not designed as human beings to cop this kind of shit … [For] Abbie, it weighs heavy on her, understandably, because we get death threats to our address. Some of the things that are said to her are just atrocious and really vile, disgusting things.
“On one hand, I want to protect Abbie and I want to protect myself, of course. And then on the other hand, it’s like ‘Well, I don’t want to feed into this shit because it’s so mindless and all they want is attention’.”
Hyde tries not to dwell on it. He’s not one to look back or preserve moments, he says, and his attention is already turning to the upcoming tour and the next album. Hyde knows Dancing2 has given him a massive platform, and he needs to keep running. “[Sometimes people] will get a bottle of champagne after the gig and they’ll be like, ‘We’ve done it’,” Hyde says. “And to me, I’m like, ‘Nah, no one’s done shit yet, dog. We haven’t even started’.”
Keli Holiday’s Capital Fiction is out on Friday. He performs at Sydney’s Metro Theatre on March 6, Melbourne’s 170 Russell on March 13, Brisbane’s The Triffid on March 20, Perth’s Freo.Social on March 27, and Adelaide’s Uni Bar on March 28.
