Curtain closes — for now

Cold Chisel ended its national tour in February 2020 with two very wet shows at Sirromet Wines near Brisbane.

Cold Chisel. Picture: Daniel Boud

After playing to more than 210,000 fans across six states in the past six weeks, Cold Chisel ended its national tour last weekend with two very wet shows at Sirromet Wines near Brisbane. For the Adelaide-born rock act, that might have been its very last stand, with the instruments now packed away and neither recording nor performing plans on the horizon. I was at the Saturday concert, which was my first – and probably last – chance to see the band in action. As a relative newcomer to Cold Chisel, I was struck by the quintet’s remarkable chemistry, and particularly impressed by the mighty playing of guitarist Ian Moss and drummer Charley Drayton, whose swing and feel are up there with the very best percussionists I’ve heard. It’s that deep, diverse songbook that has kept people coming back to Chisel’s music, though, and it was a real joy to see 13,000 or so rain-soaked punters at Sirromet revelling in a decades-spanning catalogue that has soundtracked several generations of Australian lives.

In mid-November, while preparing a feature story for these pages ahead of the Blood Moon album release and tour, I asked Moss whether it pleased him to know the public hunger for Cold Chisel’s music had not diminished over time; if anything, it had grown stronger. “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” he replied. “I was just thinking about it earlier. I’ve had a fairly blessed life, in a lot of ways. At the end of ’83, when we split up, part of me was looking forward to going solo. But part of me thought: ‘Shit, it could be all over. There’s your fun in a rock ‘n’ roll band; now it’s time to get new shoes, settle down and hurry up and get a trade or a degree, or you’ll be f..ked, because in two years’ time, it’ll be completely forgotten about.’­

“But that’s never happened. The fairytale — the dream — has continued. And I’ve still got massive, great big respect for [pianist] Don Walker. At times when you thought he was being overly pedantic, when he was writing songs in those early days, he’d play you these songs and you’d think, ‘Oh, fantastic – it’s finished!’ And he’d say, ‘No, there’s a word in the second line of the third verse that I’m just not happy with’. What?! I thought, ‘Chuck anything in there!’ And he’d sit on that for however long it took, before he was ready to let the song go. And when he got it, you went, ‘F..k, I get it now. That’s what this guy’s talking about when he says you’ve got to write a song that’s not going to suit today’s trend – you want to write a song that is still an anthem in 50 years’. And it was that thinking — that philosophy — that’s why we’re still able to tour around this country this many years later, and perform to sellout crowds.”

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