Rock legend Jimmy Barnes says his first novel is inspired by a spooky event with his late sister

Ahead of his new album and tour, Cold Chisel rocker Jimmy Barnes opens up on a terrifying event with his sister when he was a child that has inspired his first novel.

With a childhood scarred by abuse and violence, years of battling addictions and recent life-threatening health issues, the extraordinary life of rocker Jimmy Barnes has had more than its share of horrors.

After two memoirs, a couple of collections of nonfiction short stories, a kids book and a cookbook (with another coming this year), the Cold Chisel front man and solo singer has now turned his hand to writing a novel. And, you guessed it, it’s a horror story inspired by an otherworldly incident he says happened when he was a child growing up in South Australia.

“It’s a horror story but it is based on my life,” Barnes says animatedly, sitting in a board room in his record label’s Melbourne office. “My sister Linda, who passed away a few years ago, when she was 13 years old, she was possessed and I was in the room.”

The way Barnes tells it, his sister was larking around with some friends using a Ouija board while he sat terrified in the next room.

“She ran at the wall and smashed her head and face, blood and everything,” he recalls. “She picked herself up and was running in to the other wall and mum, who’s pretty tough, came running in and held her down and Linda was pretty well frothing at the mouth. And she was talking weird stuff that didn’t even sound like her voice.”

Doctors were called, spiritualists were involved and all manner of spooky events ensued and Barnes says his sister was “troubled till the day she died” in 2022 but it gave him the germ of idea for a story that mirrors his own life by starting out in his Scotland and then moving to Port Adelaide.

Jimmy Barnes says he likes the ‘defiant bastard’ he is today. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Barnes says that if someone had told his younger, wilder self that he’d write six books in his 60s, “he would have thought you were crazy”.

“I couldn’t sit still long enough to write anything in those days,” he says. “I was hyperactive, from day one. But 10-year-old Jimmy would probably say ‘Yeah, I can see that’. Because I was a very good student.”

But the fact that he has done it is a tribute to a defiant streak that he says goes right back to his earliest days performing in Adelaide. He still remembers an early hometown newspaper review of Cold Chisel, praising the band but predicting that its powerhouse singer would blow his voice out within six months.

“I was like ‘f--- you’,” he says. “That’s when my defiance kicked in. What (the reviewer) didn’t know was that from around that time onwards I was doing eight gigs a week and it’s like a muscle – the more you use it the better it gets. I’m stronger and I’m singing higher now than I was in 1974.”

It’s been a thread that has run through his entire career of more than 20 solo albums and nine Chisel albums and has led him to name his most recent release Defiant in recognition of never taking a backward step or taking no for an answer.

“People say ‘you can’t do it’ and I go ‘yeah? Watch this’,” he says with a laugh. “You can’t write a book – yes I can. You can’t write a song – give me a f---ing go. You’re not going to win an audience over here – you watch.

“I’m a defiant bastard. I’ve been defiant for as long as I can remember. You can be defiant in bad ways and believe me I know because I have been stubborn or pig-headed and all that sort of stuff. But you can be defiant where you don’t let anything get you down. They can throw the book at me and I’ll pick myself up and learn from it and move forward again.”

Jimmy Barnes late sister Linda, who died in 2022.

Even the making of the album spoke to his stubborn steak – he was laid up in hospital recovering from emergency surgery after a life-threatening staph infection from a temporary hip damaged his heart and when he wasn’t “drugged out on painkillers” he was singing songs into his phone to send to his producer in Nashville.

“I don’t sing quiet so the nurses kept running in thinking something had happened to me, like ‘he’s having an attack’,” he chuckles. “It was my escape and my bit of freedom to get away from being on machines and being in pain.”

Despite its many references to conflict and fighting – his father was a prize-fighter in Scotland as a young man – Barnes says that the album is more about redemption and forgiveness. It continues a process that started in earnest nearly a decade ago with his first memoir, Working Class Boy, in which he finally stared down the trauma he had been running from all his life. In a way, he says, he’s even thankful for his shocking experiences of deprivation and hardship on the mean streets of Glasgow he experienced as a child because “if I didn’t go through it, I wouldn’t be who I am – and I like who I am now”.

“Lots of lyrics on this record are about that,” he says. “It’s about how it did hurt me, but I picked myself up and now I’ve grown from it. If you don’t learn something from it, then you keep falling back into the same stuff and that’s when it becomes a worry. So this record is a more about forgiveness – and you’d be surprised what you can be forgiven for and the first thing you’ve got to do is forgive yourself.”

Defiant is Barnes’ first solo album since last year’s hugely successful 50th anniversary tour with Cold Chisel. Although it was mostly written and recorded before and during the 23-date sellout tour, Barnes says that every song he writes and every gig he does is influenced by his bandmates.

Jimmy Barnes and Ian Moss performing with Cold Chisel last year.

“After 50 years of going on stage, I still learn shit from them every night,” he says.

Barnes, who performed the high-energy shows heavily strapped by a physio due to his temporary hip, says the key to the success of the recent tour was not making an album beforehand.

“We’re very volatile,” Barnes says of his ongoing partnership with pianist Don Walker, guitarist Ian Moss, bass player Phil Smalls and drummer Charley Drayton, who joined the band after the 2011 death of Steve Prestwich.

“We have five different really strong personalities and we fight a lot. So we get in the studio and make a record and by the end of making a record, we want to kill each other. Then we have to go on tour and it’s a bit of a battle.

“This last tour, we didn’t make a record. We just we just went out on tour and it was so much fun. It was so loose and everybody had such a great time and I learned to just go with the flow a bit and I don’t have to be so uptight.”

And in good news for Chisel fans, Barnes says he doesn’t want to wait another ten years for a milestone tour.

“I’m going to wait for the 52nd I reckon,” he says. “Because we’re getting older now we should do it every two years instead of every five.”

Barnes is also celebrating the third generation of musicians in the family, with his 15-year-old granddaughter Ruby Rodgers releasing her debut EP the same day he released the title track from Defiant as a single. Singer-songwriter Rodgers is the daughter of Mahalia, who has long performed in Barnes’ band and is currently wowing audiences around the country as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Jane Barnes, Jimmy Barnes and Mahalia Barnes at the 2023 APRA Music Awards. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

“It’s so beautiful because me and Mahalia, we are soul singers,” Barnes says with a mix of pride and awe. “She’s learned from us but she’s learnt her own thing.

“It’s really soft and just melts my heart. She’s really good writer, she’s pushing herself – she’s one of those people around the house every day she’s got the guitar and she’s singing. She’s singing while eating dinner and I’m saying ‘stop – you’ve got to eat, you’re driving your grandmother mad singing everywhere and that’s my job’. But she’s an incredible girl. I’m really proud of her and I think she’s really going to blossom.”

Defiant is released on June 6. Jimmy Barnes plays AEC Adelaide, June 7 (sold out); Palais Theatre, Melbourne, June 13 and 14 (sold out); Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, June 20 and 21 (sold out); State Theatre, Sydney, June 27; Canberra Theatre, June 28 (sold out). Tickets frontiertouing.com

Originally published as Rock legend Jimmy Barnes says his first novel is inspired by a spooky event with his late sister