Ian Moss: ‘I was just dealing, emotionally, with the fact that Cold Chisel had folded ... it took us cold’
Ian Moss admits he wasn’t in a great place when Cold Chisel called in quits in 1983, but he turned it around with an album recalling the soul music of his childhood.
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When Cold Chisel imploded in a rock’n’roll firestorm in 1983 different members had different ways of coping. Jimmy Barnes, Chisel guitarist Ian Moss recalls over a morning coffee, did what Jimmy does best and threw himself into his work.
“Jim hit the ground running … and punching and kicking,” Moss says. “He was going hard, he was having a lot of success with his Bodyswerve album.”
Don Walker, in true Don Walker style, decided to spend a year as some kind of European vampire.
“Don kind of disappeared and went on weird train trips from, you know, Vladivostok to Moscow,” Moss says. “He said he was that cut up by the whole thing that he reckons he didn’t see sunlight for six months. He just went on this European tour and would just sleep all day and only come out at night. He’d soak in the night life and go to bed at dawn.”
Personally, Moss says he spent a good couple of years trying to get his head around the fact that his band – one of the great Australian bands, perhaps the greatest, was dead (although since resurrected).
“I was just dealing, emotionally, with the fact that Cold Chisel had folded and how big of a deal that was,” he says. “It took us cold. There was definitely a sense of loss.”
Eventually Walker returned from his nocturnal continental wanderings, rang his old mate Mossy and offered him the one thing that you might hope a writer of his standing might offer you. Songs.
“He said, ‘Look I’m starting to get back into songwriting’,” Moss says. “And he generously said, ‘If you’re stuck I’ m more than willing to throw some things your way’.”
The things he threw Moss’s way were the building blocks of Matchbook, Moss’s first solo album that would go on to reignite his musical career.
It went to No. 1 on the Australian charts and stayed in the top 10 for 14 weeks, selling more that 200,000 copies. It saw Moss win ARIA awards for Album of the Year, Best Male Artist and Breakthrough Artist in 1990, and it spawned the classic singles Tucker’s Daughter, Telephone Booth, Mr Rain and Out of the Fire. Moss says he’ll be “forever grateful” for Walker’s help on the record.
“You had Out of the Fire, which was a collaboration with a strong contribution from me,” he says. “Then there was a Moss-Prestwich-Walker co-write on I’ve Got You. Mr Rain, that was myself and some people in New York, and Tucker’s Daughter is all my music and Don Walker’s lyrics.
“Then there’s Telephone Booth, Matchbook and Such A Beautiful Thing – they’re completely Don Walker.”
At the heart of Matchbook is soul music, something Moss says entered his bloodstream as a kid growing up in the outback town of Alice Springs. Commercial radio, he says, didn’t arrive until 1970 so until then it was the ABC or nothing, and the ABC had a habit of spinning Motown, Sam Cooke and Ray Charles.
And those soul-influenced tunes that found their way onto Matchbook weren’t just great songs, they also sounded amazing. This, Moss says, was thanks to the work of US producer Chris Lord-Alge. Lord-Alge, who’s worked with everyone from James Brown to Madonna, had a reputation for using large amounts of dynamic range compression. Essentially, this makes music “pop” from the speakers, but it’s not to everyone’s taste.
“I went with Chris against most people’s advice,” Moss admits. “But I heard James Brown’s Gravity album and I was like … ‘Wow, who mixed that?!’ One of the biggest compliments I received was when I was in LA and I ran into a studio engineer. He said, ‘You’re that guy that made that album? Every studio in LA plays that album to tune their monitors!’ I think that’s all about Chris Lord-Alge’s mixing.”
Lord-Alge also convinced him to bring in renowned session drummer John Robinson to provide the beats for Tucker’s Daughter.
Chisel was a band that was famous for its DIY ethos, and Moss’s first encounter with true Californian excess was an eye opener. “I’d never seen such flashiness!” Moss laughs.
“I turned up at the studio to see this truck and a guy unloading a massive drum kit with gongs and everything. It was all to do one song. He listened to the demo and said, ‘Yeah man, I got it’ and plays one take.
“It was pretty good, but I said, ‘Think more Motown than rock’. That was it. Two takes. Then he was rubbing himself down with a towel saying he was pretty tired and that he thought we had enough.”
For Moss’s Thebarton Theatre show celebrating Matchbook’s 30th anniversary, the exact setlist is still being worked through, although every track on the record will be played.
“There’ll also be some tracks from the Ian Moss album from last year, and my take on a small handful of Chisel songs – My Baby, Bow River and Choir Girl. Obviously I never sang Choir Girl in Cold Chisel, so I’ve found a way to give it my own spin.
“There’ll be a five-piece band that I’m happy to say has two women – Zoe Hauptmann on bass and Leanne Paris on keyboards.”
And for Moss the show will be a chance to tread the boards in one of his favourite rooms, the Thebarton Theatre.
“Yeah, I’m looking forward to hitting the Thebby one more time … in case it’s not there next time,” he says. “I really hope that’s not the case though. It’s a great room, and a great sounding room. A beautiful venue.”
Ian Moss, Matchbook 30th Anniversary Tour, Nov 15, 8pm, Thebarton Theatre, ticketmaster.com.au or 136 100