Cold Chisel frontman Jimmy Barnes on how growing up in Adelaide shaped the early days of the band
Manchester, Glasgow and Port Lincoln all played a part in the biggest band to come out of Adelaide, writes Nathan Davies.
THEY may well be Australia’s most cherished band. From Byron Bay to Bunbury, Canberra to Cairns, our love affair with Cold Chisel runs deep.
It’s nice, then, to hear frontman Jimmy Barnes say that Chisel is, and always has been, an Adelaide band.
Barnes says growing up in Adelaide shaped not only him as an individual but the band as a whole.
“You have to remember that Adelaide was, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, pretty isolated from the eastern states,” the 61-year-old says.
“Adelaide was this little melting pot. A pressure cooker. It was a centre for immigration and industry where we were listening to American radio and being influenced by the British immigrants, so there was this mash of music styles that people were listening to.
“That came out through the bands that came out of there.”
But while Barnes may always be an Adelaide boy, his relationship with the place hasn’t always been positive.
His best-selling memoir Working Class Boy tells of his tough upbringing in Elizabeth with a father who drank too much and a mother who was often absent. There were times when the Swan kids (as they were called) would be left to fend for themselves.
Later the teenage Barnes would fall into a cycle of booze, drugs and street fighting that he admits left him and brother John “Swanee” Swan “a bit damaged”.
Putting pen to paper for the memoir – the sequel to which, Working Class Man, has just been released – helped Barnes bury some of his Adelaide ghosts.
“Adelaide, that’s our home town, and that’s good and bad,” Barnes says. “There’s stuff that I wrote about in my book that had been bugging me for years, but then I realised that it wasn’t really the town; that was my upbringing.
“I really felt like it was a weight off my shoulders after I wrote that.”
For keyboardist and songwriter Don Walker, the move to Adelaide in the 1970s was an exciting one.
Walker grew up in Ayr, North Queensland and Grafton, Northern NSW, and moving south to work at the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury, was the big smoke.
“I moved down there quite late in life, in my early 20s, and for me Adelaide was the first big city I’d lived in,” recalls the writer of Australian classics, including Khe Sanh and
Flame Trees. “It was wonderful to land there.”
Walker says he found Adelaide culturally quite different from the north of Australia and much of that difference had to do with the music.
“A big part of that was the British thing that Jim mentioned,” he says.
“A lot of people at that time had come out from England and Scotland, particularly the North of England, and that gave Adelaide its own unique music culture. “A lot of what people were listening to in Adelaide was different to what people were listening to in the rest of Australia.”
Despite working a stone’s throw from the northern suburbs Barnes called home, it was guitarist Ian Moss who Walker met first. The pair clicked, and the foundations for Cold Chisel were laid.
“I met Ian at this sort of jam in the Norwood Town Hall,” Walker recalls.
“The hall was full of people jamming in corners and stuff, and in a little side room there was a stand-up piano and Ian was in there with his guitar and a little amp.
“There was this kid with no shoes on from Alice Springs playing this extraordinary, beautiful, slow bluesy guitar.”
Barnes was roped in to sing (Swanee was the first choice, but he couldn’t get time off work) and the rest is history.
“I turned up to the Women’s Lib Hall in the city and there was Mossy, Les – the original bass player – and Don, and another drummer whose name I can’t remember now, and they sounded so good,” Barnes says.
“They didn’t sound like any band I’d played with before. Don’s approach to the piano was different to anything I’d heard, and Mossy, from the minute I saw him, I knew there was something special going on there.”
The newly formed Chisel quickly became heroes of the pub circuit, grinding out famously sweaty gigs at the Largs Pier Hotel, the Mansfield Park and the Mediterranean Hotel in the city, but there’s a pub in Port Lincoln that also has a special spot in the Chisel story.
The Pier Hotel, immortalised in the Chisel song Drinkin’ in Port Lincoln, was just the kind of working man’s pub that Chisel loved to play.
“I didn’t actually walk down to the beach with Connie,” Walker laughs, referring to the song’s female protagonist who gets a thrill out of seducing the local fishermen.
“All I remember is waking up in the Pier Hotel, upstairs. This was one of our first trips out of Adelaide.
I remember walking out onto the balcony of the Pier and, you know what Port Lincoln’s like – it’s the freshest air on the planet. You walk out and there’s these huge tuna boats and jetty and the Southern Ocean and you’re thinking ‘how good is this?’.”
Barnes recalls a drunken residency there with his brother John when they both played in Fraternity.
“It was the kind of pub where you’d get these big poling fishermen built like brick shithouses with a thousand bucks in their pocket looking for a big night out,” he says.
“One night Swanny got so pissed that he joined the crew of one of the tuna boats. We’d been playing at the Pier for three nights and we were so pissed and Swanny quit the band at five in the morning and said he was joining the tuna boats.
“The band was freaking out, and I was going: ‘He’s never done a proper day’s work in his life, he’s never joining a tuna boat.’ Sure enough, by 10 o’clock that morning when the boat was leaving he’d sobered up enough to realise what he’d done. It was a wild place.”
Barnes says he plans to bring some of this legendary wildness to the Adelaide 500 show.
“To do this show with the other Adelaide guys, it’s just f---king awesome,” he says.
SEE: Cold Chisel, 2018 Adelaide 500, March 2.
TICKETS: Ticketmaster.com.au