Cold Chisel live review: Brisbane gets a masterclass in sustained intensity
Familiarity can breed contempt in popular music, to the point where you may not be sure if you really need to hear Khe Sanh again. But you’ve never heard it like this.
It was about 75 minutes into the concert that Cold Chisel unfurled its mainsail: the deathless song that helped define a generation and a remarkable career that now extends past five decades.
Don Walker began to play its sprightly opening piano figure, Jimmy Barnes picked up the opening lyrics about a soldier leaving his heart in another place, and the crowd of about 9300 joined him in full voice on every line.
Khe Sanh is a storytelling song; an autobiographical account of an uneasy Vietnam veteran struggling to reintegrate into Australian society after the horrors of war.
It’s also a song you’ve heard countless times, thrashed within an inch of its life by pub covers bands and emanating from construction sites tuned to commercial radio nationwide.
Familiarity can breed contempt in popular music, to the point where you may not be sure if you really need to hear Khe Sanh again.
But on Wednesday night in Brisbane, one of the most surprising moments of a superlative show was just how fresh and essential it is.
You’re reminded of what a supreme act of empathy it was for pianist and songwriter Walker – aged 26 on its release in 1978 – to pen a set of lyrics that climbed inside a wartime experience he’d never had, as a boy who grew up in North Queensland before studying physics at an Armidale university, for the rest of us.
What a gift that song is, and remains. And how thrilling it was to be broken open anew by its shimmering core of wordy verses followed by the delayed gratification of its chorus, which hits like a bombing run.
This was the 10th show of Cold Chisel’s sold-out anniversary tour, dubbed The Big Five-0, wherein the Adelaide-born band will play 23 indoor and outdoor concerts for more than 200,000 fans.
Arenas such as the Brisbane Entertainment Centre can be unkind spaces for rock ’n’ roll bands to ply their trade, but happily, its technical crew nailed the brief.
The mix was simply superb, with all five musicians clearly separated, and the walk-on extras – harmonica player David Blight, saxophonist Andy Bickers, and backing vocalists Juanita Tippins, EJ Barnes and Bek Jensen – were given stereo oomph when required.
Frontman Barnes didn’t quite play into the role of chatty MC; there were only a couple of instances where he spoke more than a few sentences of thanks, one of which arrived halfway through the almost two-hour show.
He told us that last October, ahead of a band dinner meeting, he was planning to propose the idea of another tour, and he was worried he’d be the only one up for it.
After a few wines, he nervously laid down his cards and was thrilled to find zero opposition. For each of them, the time was evidently right to write another chapter in the long-running Cold Chisel story, which began in 1973.
That same night, Barnes recalled a dream: he was driving a car, his bandmates were all sitting in the back, and Flame Trees began playing on the stereo – but it was the slightly slower, “more dramatic” version he opts to perform at his solo gigs.
In his telling, Barnes moved to turn it down, but he felt a hand on his: sitting beside him in the driver’s seat, he realised, was the band’s former drummer Steve Prestwich, who co-wrote this song, and who died in 2011. Spooked but soothed, the singer rose from his bed, made a coffee, and relished the chance to sit with the memory of his dearly departed friend.
It was a touching story and, to a partisan crowd whose love for this music runs deep, an ideal entry point for a towering take on Flame Trees – the 1984 single which embodies the universal act of looking back at one’s hometown, and which scraps with Khe Sanh for the title of fan favourite Chisel song.
With drummer Charley Drayton, bassist Phil Small and Walker driving the rhythmic engine, the band ran through 24 songs all up. From ballads and blues to rockabilly and full-throttle rock ’n’ roll – and even a brief, gentle Moss/Walker duet – the performers never sounded less than compelling, with Barnes’ vocals a little shaky on the opener Mr Crown Prosecutor, but otherwise commanding from that point on.
The spine of the setlist was formed by the dozen or more inarguable classics in its catalogue – Bow River, Forever Now, Saturday Night and Breakfast at Sweethearts among them, naturally – but beyond those must-plays, there were deep cuts and diversions, including seven tracks from 1982’s Circus Animals.
The newest track played was All For You – a gorgeous love song that was Prestwich’s recording finale before he died following surgery to remove a brain tumour – which meant that, surprisingly, nothing from Drayton’s run of three albums behind the Chisel kit got a guernsey.
In that sense it’s truly a crowd-pleasing setlist in the greatest-hits vein, and a glance at prior gigs reveals the quintet is mixing things up considerably from night to night rather than sticking to a script.
In a band filled with pristine, expressive musicians, the undeniable star of the show was Moss, whose playing was molten and inspired.
The metallic paint on his fingernails flashed under the stage lights while he worked over the fretboards of his many Stratocasters like they owed him money. Even having seen him play previously, both solo and while leading his band, watching him on Wednesday night was a revelation; he was the embodiment of an archetypal guitar hero, to the extent that applying that term to any other player but him feels wrong.
The temptation when reviewing older artists is to frame performances in terms of turning back the clock, “victory laps’’, “going out on top’’ – those kinds of cliches, which can be read as backhanded compliments, as if ageing means grading on a different curve.
To ascribe any of those descriptors to this tour would be to diminish and disrespect what’s actually taking place each night.
What we’re seeing is five musicians – plus a few extras now and again – giving a masterclass in how a top quality songbook can sustain you, but only if you’re willing to meet it with the full intensity it deserves.
This run of shows is a shining example of how music can give you life, even as you know the songs themselves will necessarily outlive your corporeal form. It’s not so much a case of raging against the dying of the light as turning toward the inevitable, looking it in the eye and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
That mindset can only be found among artists who possess the casual confidence to perform at the highest level, as this band is doing right now.
Speaking with The Australian ahead of the tour, US-based drummer Drayton compared Cold Chisel’s music to medicine, and pointed to its alleged healing power.
This comment struck a vaguely dissonant note at the time, and the temptation was to dismiss it as new-age talk aimed at psyching up his bandmates – and perhaps himself – ahead of its first tour in nearly five years.
But having drunk deeply from the five doctors’ enviable supply of life-giving potions on Wednesday night, it couldn’t have been clearer: the drummer was right all along.
Cold Chisel’s tour continues in Brisbane (Saturday and Sunday), followed by 11 more dates before ending in Sydney (December 4).
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