‘I was heartbroken’: Don Walker on moving on after Cold Chisel

It’s no surprise that among the eight tracks on Don Walker’s latest album is a song called You’ve Got to Move. Movement and travelling are familiar themes for the celebrated songwriter, who early in his career wrote about a trucker on the open road, caught between heaven and the highway in Cold Chisel’s Shipping Steel. It’s this need to be somewhere else, on a Northbound train, or in a taxi caught in great anticipation, where Walker’s usually nameless, sometimes dodgy characters are frequently on the move.

During recent rehearsals for his upcoming tour to promote the new album, Walker half-sings, half-speaks the song’s incantation “You’ve got to move, got to move”, backed by three female vocalists who lift the chorus to glorious new heights. With a neat flick of the wrist, Hamish Stuart whisks his drumstick across a cymbal, just firmly enough to sizzle and slice into the groove. It’s only rehearsal, but the whole band can feel it, this tune is really cookin’.

“Hamish and [double bass player] Michael Vidale are a great rhythm section ... they can drive a band through a brick wall,” Walker tells me during a break. Later on, he is again keen to spruik his bandmates, including new guitarist Shannon Bourne.

Walker, who founded Cold Chisel in 1973 with Ian Moss and Steve Prestwich, is unhurried, considers his comments carefully and has a habit of putting the spotlight on others. Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is the fourth album released under his name. He’s also released albums under the name Catfish, and three studio albums with Tex Perkins and Charlie Owen, as Tex, Don and Charlie.

Don Walker’s new album Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is out May 5.Credit: Justin McManus

“The person I’ve worked with the longest is Garrett Costigan, the pedal steel player. He’s the finest musician I’ve ever worked with,” Walker says. “A close second would be Ian Moss. Or it could be [the late Cold Chisel drummer] Steve [Prestwich], or [guitarists] Charlie Owen, Roy Payne, or Red Rivers. There would be a cast of people for close second.”

Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky, which is released on May 5, features guitarist Roy Payne, who died soon after the album was made in 2022.

“Roy was an extraordinary guitar player,” Walker says. “Later in life, he became a Cajun accordion player, and he was teaching himself fiddle. Roy is the only person I can remember, when I sat down to transcribe one of his songs, I started crying while I was doing it. He was an extraordinary songwriter and singer.”

By that stage we were exhausted, and we didn’t have the stamina or the strength any more.

Don Walker, on Cold Chisel’s 1983 break up.

Velocity, as the former physics student refers to motion, has been “a recurring thing for me”. In between his piano lessons as a boy in Grafton and the early days of Cold Chisel in Adelaide, Walker embarked on his plan to become a scientist, specialising in quantum mechanics.

“I announced to my class at Carrs Creek Primary School that I was going to be a scientist,” he says. “Everybody else was going to be a farmer, and the laughter took 20 minutes to die down.”

Even now, at 72, it’s often in motion, particularly when he’s driving, that Walker finds his songs taking shape. He doesn’t consider himself to be a storyteller, but says “the people you’re talking about in the songs,” like the bloke who drove a worn-out Morris down to Adelaide in Home and Broken Hearted, are about “the landscape in regional Australia”.

“I had storytellers all around me, particularly my father, he was the storyteller in the family,” he says. “My mother and sister are both authors, but unlike me, they’re award-winning authors. My father led a fascinating life, and at some points a horrific life ... expansive beyond the comprehension of what most people live now. He was a farmer, and a soldier, like my grandfather.”

Walker’s father, Les, was also a harmonica player who listened to the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and the Dorsey Brothers.

“His teenage years were in the 1930s, so his great passion was the popular music of the ’30s ... and that’s the foundation of my listening, of falling in love with the music that he loved.”

Take 7: the answers according to Don Walker

1. Worst habit?  Nicotine.
2. Greatest fear?  Despair.
3. The line that stayed with you?  “A fool utters all his mind, but a wise man keeps it in till afterwards.” From the King James Bible.
4. Biggest regret?  Anger.
5. Favourite room?  The departure lounge.
6. The artwork/song you wish was yours?  Billy Strayhorn’s song Lotus Blossom.
7. If you could solve one thing? Fusion.

Around the time Walker turned 25, Cold Chisel’s line-up was well and truly settled with the arrival of bass player Phil Small, and by 1976 there was no stopping the group. It was time to move.

“We decided to chuck in our jobs and go and live in cars.”

For six months the group lived in Melbourne, before another move to Sydney. In the years before their break-up in 1983, they developed a reputation for legendary musicianship and powerful live shows. But Walker was content to leave the business of music behind him four decades ago.

“I’ve never really been in the music industry since Cold Chisel broke up. As far as the mainstream music industry, where people are playing hits and big crowds ... I haven’t been in that since 1983.”

It’s 45 years since Cold Chisel’s debut album was released. All the songs on the album were written by Walker, except opening track Juliet, which he co-wrote with singer Jimmy Barnes.

“I can’t remember the last time I listened to it,” Walker says about the 1978 album, which includes one of the band’s most well-known songs, Khe Sanh. “I know how it was put together, but like most albums, I spend a long time listening in such detail during the making that I seldom go back and listen again, certainly not for a long time.”

Cold Chisel in 1978 with Ian Moss (left), Don Walker, Jimmy Barnes, Steve Prestwich and Phil Small.Credit:

Cold Chisel’s first decade together also produced 1978 album Breakfast At Sweethearts, breakthrough album East in 1980, and 1982’s critically acclaimed Circus Animals. The band recorded Twentieth Century in their final months together, including the song Flame Trees, which was released six months after they disbanded. Jimmy Barnes immediately launched a solo career, but Walker needed time to reflect, and travel.

“I didn’t have a band any more, and I’m not the obvious person to step out of Cold Chisel and have a solo career. I was out of work, but I was free and thought I’ll just take off and see what develops.

“I was pretty exhausted, Cold Chisel had been a very intense 10 years. I was also heartbroken because I thought we could get a lot further than we did. And I was heartbroken by the way we split up.”

Following their success in Australia, particularly after the release of East, Cold Chisel were unable to crack the American music market, and broke up not long after a strained five-week US tour.

“By that stage we were exhausted, and we didn’t have the stamina or the strength ... to begin everything again overseas, so we never really gave it a shot. And we were past the stage of being able to really put our backs into it.”

After deciding he needed a break, Walker initially travelled to remote parts of Australia, then loaded up on overseas visas. And then, he was gone.

“I told my family I’d be gone for a few years, but I’d be in touch, and went up through Asia, through China, Siberia, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and spent quite a bit of time in Europe. At a certain point, I needed to come home and look after some domestic responsibilities.”

Walker’s 2009 memoir, Shots, comes to an end around this same time in his life, meaning none of his post-Cold Chisel music is referenced in the book.

“I’m 99 per cent focused, as is everybody else on the planet, on the real stuff,” he says now. “And that’s who you’re in love with, who you’re not in love with any more, somebody who’s not in love with you any more, your kids, money problems, real life.”

The only difference, of course, is most people don’t dust the cobwebs off Cold Chisel, tune up and roar back to life in front of thousands of adoring fans.

Walker reconvened with his Cold Chisel bandmates to record their sixth album, The Last Wave of Summer, in 1997 and went on a national tour the next year. There’s been another three albums since, including 2019’s chart-topping Blood Moon, and many more of those legendary gigs.

“It’s been a lot of fun, largely,” he says. “There’s been some tense moments, but by and large it’s been a lot of fun .... and learning to fit the band around [drummer] Charley [Drayton], where for so long we fitted around Steve.”

For now, it’s the new solo songs, such as Tommy Hanlon’s Motor Home, Jungle Pam and You’ve Got To Move that have Walker out the door, and back on the road.

“Since 1983, I’ve been an ordinary person ... like everybody else,” he says. “Every now and then, if songs float to the surface out of that, it’s like shavings on the workbench of real life.”

Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is available May 5, via MGM. For tickets and information about Don Walker’s upcoming shows, go to donwalker.com.au