Jimmy Barnes’ ghostly ‘visit’ from late drummer in new book as Cold Chisel gets back on the road
Jimmy Barnes isn’t sure if he believes in ghosts but he’s “seen a lot of weird things” as he shares in his new book. See the video.
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Exclusive: Jimmy Barnes isn’t entirely sure if he believes in ghosts. But his near-death experience as a life-threatening staph infection ravaged his back and heart late last year summoned spectres of his past.
“Well, I’ve seen a few weird things in my life,” he says.
He’s home a month after his latest round of surgery, this time to rid his hip of another bout of the excruciatingly painful staph infection which flared up during his Hell of a Time shows in New Zealand.
After this classic Barnes understatement, the master storyteller is off on a great yarn. Speaking of ghosts, it turns out his stepfather Reg Barnes was a spiritualist, who “saw ghosts everywhere and had a Native American Indian as his spirit guide”.
“My mother saw him, my sister saw him. Mum said he was like a guardian angel,” the rocker writer says.
“I was sceptical until I was leaving Reg’s funeral, and thinking ‘I hope he’s OK’, and suddenly everywhere I looked there were images of Native Americans, a guy with a lighter, an old cigarette ad, just everywhere, these little reminders. So it’s possible.”
The Australian rock god tells a few ghost stories in Highways and Byways, the fourth instalment of his best-selling series of memoirs.
Some are tales unlocked in that dream state as he regained consciousness through the fog of anaesthesia after myriad surgeries over the past 20 months.
Others have lingered in his haunted mind after digging deep into his harrowing childhood, and battles with alcohol and substance abuse, for his award-winning books Working Class Boy, Working Class Man and Killing Time.
His latest collection of yarns opens with the poignant recollection of him being visited in a vivid dream by his late mate, original Cold Chisel drummer Steve Prestwich. His beloved bandmate died in 2011 following surgery to remove a brain tumour. He was 56.
Prestwich was on his mind in the weeks after Barnes and his Chisel bandmates Don Walker, Ian Moss, Phil Small and Charley Drayton had decided they would reunite to celebrate their 50th anniversary with the upcoming Big Five-0 tour.
In his dream, the frontman is driving the van carrying his bandmates down the highway to the first gig of the tour and Flame Trees, written by Prestwich and Walker, comes on the radio. But it’s not the Chisel version, it’s a “slower … more melodramatic” reinvention Barnes performs with his band.
Feeling awkward that it’s not the Chisel original playing on the radio, Barnes reaches out to turn down the volume, but Prestwich’s hand appears and pulls the singer’s back away from the dial. “Leave it, Jim,” the drummer gently tells him. “It sounds great. You’re singing it beautifully.”
“I had the dream after we all spoke about doing the tour, about eight months ago. I woke up and I got out of bed and went downstairs … I didn’t want to go back to sleep because it was so real, I f--king touched him. I just wanted to enjoy being with my mate, because he felt so close,” Barnes says.
The cover of Highways and Byways gives the reader a big hint that his latest collection of stories pays several enlightening visits to his homeland of Scotland.
Whenever he and wife Jane and their family visit his birthplace of Glasgow, relatives and strangers who turn out to be relatives, fill in pieces of the puzzles of the life of his parents Jim and Dorothy Swan, before they immigrated to South Australia in 1962.
Skeletons inevitably rattle their bones from the closets there, revealing deeply held family secrets. Like the dark past of his favourite Glasgow hotel which happens to be just a few streets from the “old neighbourhood”, the alcohol-drenched, violent tenement slum where he spent the first five years of his life.
In the chapter Across The Tracks, Barnes reveals how he discovered the hotel had been a “gentleman’s club” during after-dinner drinks with his cousins and their guests, who happened to live next door to the Swan family in the ’50s and ’60s and were close to his parents.
After a few whiskeys, his dinner companions let slip his father had worked in security at the club. And his grandmother was “one of the girls”.
“Blythswood Square was this tree-lined oasis of beautiful houses and then you walk 100 yards down the hill to the left and you’re in where I came from,” Barnes says.
“Apparently it was always a red light district … and my grandmother worked there. I knew my dad did security for brothels but I didn’t know my granny worked there. I’m not judging. We were told not to go up there.
“But it was funny staying in that hotel in Blythswood Square that used to be the gentleman’s club, and now it’s my favourite place to stay in Scotland; it’s so close to where we lived.”
Barnes blurs the lines between fact and fiction in his new book, interspersing the true stories with tall tales.
He fashions characters he has crossed paths with in his life into the protagonists of compelling short stories, some which leave you desperate to know what happens next.
On occasion, Barnes cloaks facts in fiction, as in The Singer and the Superstar.
The setting is a celebrity-packed lunch in honour of an “international” star, who only acknowledges the working class singer sitting across from him with condescending stares.
The singer abruptly leaves the lunch after the superstar ignores his attempt at conversation. He briefly stops by the famous guest of honour at the table to lean down and tell his antagonist that he was pompous and pretentious and a “poncy prick of a person”.
Barnes laughs when asked how much of the encounter was real – in particular, the identity of the superstar.
“I’m not going to tell you,” he says. “I had to change a few things.”
As he has done with his previous books and stories and song tours, Barnes the writer often strips off his rock’n’roll uniform to peel back the layers of the man he is away from the stage. He likes the idea of the reader trying to figure out which character he is in his evocative and often moving short stories. He will tell you he is the boy who delights in the mysteries of the crystal set radio popular in the late ’50s and suffers a mysterious injury in one yarn.
And we may suspect him of possessing some Dr Dolittle powers courtesy of the slightly offbeat story called The Swarm. Maybe it’s unsurprising Barnes is fearless and a little reckless after surviving all of the surgeries and infections and alcohol and substance abuse.
Who else but the No Second Prize chartslayer would decide it was a good idea to personally move a swarm of bees that were a little too close to the family’s treasured home by the river in NSW’s Southern Highlands?
“I drove down my driveway one morning on the way to (his daughter) Mahalia’s and the bees were just on the tree there,” he says.
“I rang my beekeeper mate to come and help me and we put a bin down at the bottom of the tree and hit them and they all dropped into the bin,” he says, echoing the scene from his book.
“His car was full, and he said I’d have to put them in my car and drive them. So I had an open bin full of bees in my car and I’m driving three miles an hour. I’m trying to be calm, to be at one with the bees. And if they’d come out, they’d have just killed me.”
It is fitting Highways and Byways closes with the chapter Our Precious Time, a tribute to his friendship with the band’s original “timekeeper” Prestwich, as Barnes reunites with his Cold Chisel brothers for their Big Five-O tour.
With his reputation as one of the country’s most physical and committed live performers at stake, Barnes has spent six weeks rebuilding his strength since his hip surgery.
Jane’s nourishing and delicious meals created from their home garden, daily physio to get that hip moving and long walks with his grandson Dylan have been at the core of his rehabilitation.
Everyone who knows him knows he can’t sit still for longer than it takes to eat a meal. As he followed his medical team’s orders not to push too far, too fast, he exercised his mind by reacquainting himself with the lyrics of more than 100 Chisel songs, and tested his voice while pedalling on the bike.
Barnes says he’s ready for the road, to perform 23 mostly sold out shows in tents, fields and arenas in Australia from October 5 to December 4.
He’s itching to stand alongside these men who have helped shape 50 of his 68 years on the planet. He doesn’t want to waste precious time.
“Chisel (shows) start with Standing on the Outside. And it just goes vroom and you slip into gear and you just know it’s going to be great,” he says.
“That’s the thing I’m looking forward to doing on this tour because 50 years down the track, I want to put together the 50 years of experience and 50 years of joy and 50 years of learning and do the best shows we’ve ever done.
“It’s a lifetime of understanding, and the magic only happens with me and Ian playing Don’s songs with Phil and Charley in the back. Nothing else sounds like that.”
After the Chisel shows, you’d better believe there will be another record from this hallowed band. Once that rock beast gets up to speed, it would be foolish not to harness the energy for new songs.
For Barnes, there will be the realisation of an ongoing ballads record project to be helmed by Neil Finn, another member of the extended clan. One of the songs is called Precious Time.
There’s another instalment of the Where The River Bends cookbook with Jane.
And that first novel he’s been cooking for a few years now, his Scottish ghost story, is taking shape. At the book’s heart is his quest to unravel and move on from the intergenerational trauma of his family’s impoverished and violent past.
But within those pages will be stitched a Barnes family story to send a shudder through your body and the hairs on your neck skyward.
It is the story of his late sister Linda, a medium who was possessed as she played with a ouija board with her friends when she was 13.
“I was there, I was about a year and a half younger, and the glass was moving and they were asking about boys and if there were any boy ghosts and that sort of stuff and all of a sudden the glass flew across the room and smashed against the wall,” Barnes says.
“And (Linda) got up and ran straight into the wall and just kept getting up and running back into it, talking in weird voices. They had a doctor come … and then Reg’s mum came and took her and she stayed in her house for a week … and they nursed her and protected her and taught her how to protect herself. I’m still very sceptical about all of this stuff at this point. But it happened.”
For the last tickets to the Cold Chisel tour, visit coldchisel.com
Highways and Byways by Jimmy Barnes, HarperCollins, $45, out October 16, available to pre-order now.
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Originally published as Jimmy Barnes’ ghostly ‘visit’ from late drummer in new book as Cold Chisel gets back on the road
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