Rock legends Cold Chisel keep the danger on stage for the One Night Stand tour

COLD Chisel remain the rock band to beat on Australia’s biggest stages. Jimmy Barnes and Don Walker reveal how they keep their edge.

Cold Chisel announce national tour of big gigs for 2015 to launch new album. Picture: Supplied.

WHEN Cold Chisel played their final shows on the Last Stand in 1983, Don Walker remembers feeling elated.

The band were breaking up, with longstanding tensions between the volatile rockers — Jimmy Barnes, Ian Moss, Phil Small, Steve Prestwich and Walker — at such a volatile level that even being in the same room could result in a brawl.

Walker said some of the friction was fuelled by the disappointment the band could not translate their phenomenal success at home into an international career.

He recalls walking into the afterparty following the closing gig at the Sydney Entertainment centre on December 15, 1983 and feeling a heavy weight fall off his shoulders.

“There was a sense of enormous relief. But also we all knew we were in the best band in the world, and it wasn’t going to happen so it felt like an enormous sense of waste,” Walker says.

“It was also a hard reckoning of the realities of our chemistry and how we were getting on.

“But all of that falls away once the band gets on stage and there’s an esprit de corps between the five of us and what we do together.”

Fast forward three decades, and the Chisel reunion that began cautiously in 1998 with the Last Wave Of Summer record remains intact.

Their resolve to continue was tragically tested with the death of Prestwich in 2011, but knowing the drummer would have wanted to keep going, they enlisted former Divinyls musician Charley Drayton and recorded their first new music in 14 years for the 2012 album No Plans.

As they put the finishing touches to their next record, Chisel have announced one of the most ambitious tours of their career with a series of marquee concerts and special events.

The green light for the One Night Stand tour came when tickets went on sale for the band’s concert to help close the Qantas Credit Union Arena in Sydney, which will be demolished in December.

The first show sold out instantly and they quickly added another one. Then the NRL came calling, asking if Chisel would be the only act to perform at this year’s Grand Final in October.

Then Michael Gudinski wanted them to be the first Australian act to headline at Hanging Rock and the band decided to do another big lap around the country to promote their album.

Just because they wanted to.

“We are not doing the gigs to make money — if we wanted to spend a million dollars on production to make it special, we would. We are doing the gigs because we want to,” insists Barnes.

They will make some coin and they will sell some records, which makes less coin for bands these days.

But the guiding principle at the heart of the fractious, delicate democracy that is Team Chisel is the potent desire to get on stage and perform.

It’s really all they want to do. And for Barnes, the tension which gets them onto that stage and performing like the last rock band standing remains as potent as it was when they broke up back in 1983. But with less punches thrown.

“We started this band because we wanted to play music together and then you start chasing your tail, making records for record companies and going through all that s---,” Barnes says.

“When Steve died, we had that back, just loving playing and then it got snatched away.

“We decided to keep going because any of us could drop dead at any minute no matter how old we are.

“And since day one of the breakup to now, every time I walk into a room with these guys, there’s that same tension. I remember why we broke up but I also remember how to make that tension work for us.”

Barnes won’t claim to be the chief stirrer of the Chisel pot but he will admit to challenging his band mates to play harder, faster.

He knows it gets up their nose and creates a “f--- you!” response from them, which then becomes channelled into the incendiary energy the band has built a lifelong reputation on.

He teases his guitarist mate Moss about his obsession with testing different guitar amps to find the perfect sound.

“They all f---in’ sound like Ian Moss! So just play it!” he says.

He shuts down any attempt to reinvent their rock songs with a different arrangement or feel.

“We are not f---in’ jazz band or blues band. My job in this band is to keep them a rock’n’roll band. If I let some people have their way, they would sit there doing jazz and no way we are doing that. We are playing hard and fast.

“That is what sparks the volatility of the whole band, that recklessness and edge which feels like it could all fall apart. That’s the danger of rock’n’roll.”

The band are understandably excited about the as-yet-untitled new record and having new songs to play later this year.

Walker, the acknowledged chief songwriter of Chisel, said he challenged everyone to bring their own compositions to the studio this time.

“That was a personal goal of mine and in the end, that is the way it has finished up,” he says.

“Personally speaking, I wanted this album to be unlike the last album and to be much more diverse.”

With the hard task of whittling down the songs they have recorded into a final cut, Barnes said inevitably Walker’s tracks will shine through.

He said with Drayton now a full-time member, Chisel has morphed yet again from the band that made Last Wave Of Summer and No Plans.

“This album has a lot of sparseness, a lot of piano and it’s become this tough, hard rock,” Barnes says.

“As good as the songs I wrote or Phil or Ian wrote, when you play Don’s songs with this combination of people, something special happens. So I think a lot of the record will end up being Don’s songs because we play them so well and sound like Cold Chisel when we do.”

Cold Chisel perform at the Deni Ute Muster, October 2.

NRL Grand Final, ANZ Stadium, October 4

The V8 Supercars Castrol Gold Coast 600 on October 24

Decades Festival, Strathpine, Queensland, October 31

Cairns convention Centre, November 5

1300 Smiles Stadium, Townsville, November 7

Darwin Amphitheatre, November 10

Perth Arena, November 14

Hanging Rock, Victoria, November 21

Hope Estate, Hunter Valley, December 12

Wollongong Entertainment Centre, December 13

Qantas Credit Union Arena, December 17 and 18 (sold out).

Cold Chisel mailing list members pre-sale from 10am on June 1. general tickets available from June 3.

Originally published as Rock legends Cold Chisel keep the danger on stage for the One Night Stand tour