Cold Chisel’s wordsmith Don Walker all booked up

Cold Chisel lyricist Don Walker launches his new book, Songs, on Monday but is already looking ahead to new music projects.

Cold Chisel lyricist and author Don Walker, at Jimmy Barnes’s studio in Botany, Sydney. Picture: John Feder

Having collated the lyrics to about 240 of his best songs for his second book, Don Walker has now turned his attention towards another hotly anticipated project: working up new material for Cold Chisel, the Adelaide-born rock band he co-founded.

“Writing is going well for that,” Walker told The Weekend Australian. “I’ve demoed six or seven songs for that already, and the five of us have been together in the studio in Sydney this week, bringing in songs to see what comes out. We’re recording in August.”

As well, the pianist who penned lines to such beloved Cold Chisel creations as Flame Trees, Cheap Wine, Choir Girl and Saturday Night is starting to get traction on his first solo album since 2013, and also plans to contribute songs to new solo works by bandmates Ian Moss and Jimmy Barnes to be released next year. “There are a lot of projects out there to write for at the moment,” he said. “One day, I’ll wake up and there won’t be. But I’ve been there before.”

Published on Monday, Songs is a collection of Walker lyrics spanning the 1970s to last year, from Khe Sanh to Darwin, an unreleased 13-minute romp built on the notion of fleeing to the Top End to escape a troubled past.

Songs arrives a decade after his literary debut, Shots, an unusual book wherein he avoided rock memoir tropes to focus on crafting a sense of place and his inner world via evocative snapshots.

While the new book is largely composed of his lyrics, there are a few expository interludes, such as when Walker was booked to play a solo show for a charity at the Grafton Jacaranda Festival — only to be struck by a bolt of cold terror on seeing a sheet hanging from a pub balcony in the centre of town that read “Welcome Cold Chisel” in big red letters.

“I just played on through the afternoon, with my head down, while drunks spat bile and hatred across the piano,” he wrote. “I hadn’t played for a year or two, so my fingers were soft, and after an hour they blistered then split. All in a good cause though.”

Chris Feik, publisher at Black Inc Books, played a part in bringing both titles to print: “I think he’s continuous with someone like Banjo Paterson — that’s where he sits. He’s written words that mean a lot, to a lot of people.”