How Jimmy and Jane Barnes used music to beat the isolation blues
Jimmy Barnes wanted to keep singing for his fans while in self-isolation, so his wife Jane stepped up and learned a new skill.
Nine days into their self-isolation at home after swiftly returning from a curtailed holiday in Thailand, Jimmy Barnes sets up his phone to begin recording while his wife Jane sits beside him on their bed. “This is our humble attempt to cheer up everybody who’s locked up at home together,” he says. “Jane doesn’t normally play guitar with me and she’s learned this song especially, so good luck.”
With her right hand tentatively strumming chords to drive the rhythm while closely following the music book in front of her, Jimmy gives a raw, intimate reading of You’ve Got a Friend, the 1971 song written by Carole King and recorded by both King and James Taylor.
“Winter, spring, summer or fall / All you’ve got to do is call,” Barnes sings, while his best friend sits beside him. “And I’ll be there, yes I will / You’ve got a friend.”
It is March 26 when the famous singer and his partner record this bedroom performance and share it on Barnes’s social media accounts accompanied by a note: “Day 9 and I wanted to sing so Jane stepped up for me. She’s learnt this on her own so bear with us.”
It’s a Thursday, but in the weird time flux of self-isolation, the days have begun to flow listlessly from one to the next. King’s beautiful lyrics are meaningful to this moment of national lockdown, when Australia teeters uncertainly on the brink of viral ruin or salvation.
Her words also hold true for these two, who have been together for four decades and now find themselves at their home in the Southern Highlands of NSW with a whole lot of spare time on their hands — which is why Jane has elected to pick up an instrument she has barely touched since her 20s.
Towards the end of the ballad, she needs to turn the page of her music book, momentarily losing the rhythm. She laughs nervously while her husband keeps tapping his foot and remains stony-faced, committed to the melody. And as the song winds its way towards the five-minute mark, it all falls apart when they can’t find a way to conclude in unison.
“Aww, I nearly made it to the end,” Jane says with a sigh, clearly disappointed in herself. “You have to follow the singer,” replies a grinning Jimmy. “The singer is always right.”
That first performance becomes the opening page of a songbook that could be named The Ballad of Jimmy and Jane. On March 28, they take on traditional Scottish song The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond, complete with a bagpipe solo that Jimmy plays on his electric practice pipes. “We’re both new at these instruments so again bear with us, warts and all,” they write when posting the video.
Two nights later they take on Danny Boy, with another new twist. “Like me playing the bagpipes the other night, I challenged Jane to play piano,” says Jimmy. “Jane does not play piano, so she rang Jackie [our son] today to do a quick lesson on the phone, and this is the result.”
After taking inspiration from watching The Big Lebowski, Jimmy suggests they do Lookin’ Out My Back Door by Creedence Clearwater Revival on April 9. “Hell, I like that music!” he says. “That was pretty good, ay? Next Jane’s going to start using a plectrum; it’s going to get really loud and rock then. We’ll be doing Highway to Hell before you know it!”
On April 12, the pair go a little more hi-tech to link with their children — Jackie in Brisbane, Mahalia in NSW and EJ in New Zealand — to perform a remote version of the Cold Chisel song When the War is Over, while Jane and Elly-May perform backing vocals in the same room as the man of the house.
That same approach is given a reprise a fortnight later when Chisel guitarist and singer Ian Moss joins the Barnes family for a more polished version of the same song for Music From the Home Front, which screens on national TV on Anzac Day.
As the songbook grows each week, so does the social media impact: each video attracts tens of thousands of views, shares and comments, as an international audience cheers on Jimmy and Jane’s efforts to express and challenge themselves.
They dedicate a version of the Crowded House single Better Be Home Soon to their friends Neil and Sharon Finn on April 10; Jimmy overcomes his misgivings about Frank Sinatra’s flat vocals to sing Strangers in the Night at a friend’s request on April 11, and on May 22 they play Words by the Bee Gees, which Jimmy chooses to celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary, as he reckons no words can sum up what he really feels for his wife.
“A lot of our performances are very flawed, in case you didn’t notice,” Jimmy tells Review in mid-September. “I’m the first to say about my bagpipe playing — really, it leaves a lot to be desired. But it’s more about the effort and the spirit of what we’re trying to do than the perfection. That’s what we find about each other, too. It’s not just about always making each other feel great; you’re going to make each other feel bad, too. But that’s part of the beauty of life.”
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It was about 4pm on November 29, 1979, that Jimmy first laid eyes on the woman who would become the love of his life. “Sitting in the corner of the room, not saying a word, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he writes in his 2017 autobiography, Working Class Man. “She looked like a princess, not someone you would see in the Motel 7 in the outer suburbs of Canberra. But it wouldn’t have mattered where I’d seen her. The impact would have been the same. She was something else.”
Soon after that first meeting, Jane picked up an acoustic guitar at a party and offered to sing and play a song to her future husband: Puff the Magic Dragon.
“I’d met a lot of girls in my life but no one had ever stopped me in my tracks like that girl, that day,” he wrote. “Her name was Jane Mahoney, not a very exotic name for a girl so mysterious. I later found out that she was born in Thailand. Her real name, her Thai name, was Ratana Dejakaisaya and she moved to Canberra when she was five years old. […] Not only did she speak five languages but she spoke better English than I did. She was way out of my class but I loved her from the minute I saw her. Jane would change my life.”
They married in a civil ceremony at the Sydney Registry Office on May 22, 1981, and later had four children together, all of whom feel the same musical DNA flowing through their bloodstream as their father. But while Jane joined Jimmy’s live band as a back-up singer years ago, it was a while longer before she took the role seriously: if she didn’t feel like singing some nights, then she’d just sit it out.
“I think it must have been at least 10 years ago — I don’t really remember because at the very beginning, to be honest, I didn’t do it professionally,” Jane tells Review. “It was an excuse for me to be on the road, and then I had some life advice from my therapist, who said, ‘Look, you need to get paid for this, and you need to not let people down. You need to turn up, even if you don’t feel like you’re in the mood to do it.’ ”
It was good advice, and when the couple returned from their curtailed holiday in March, just as COVID-19 began to bring the ordinary machinery of society to a grinding halt, she brought that same sense of discipline to continuing her re-education of how to play an instrument she had not had much to do with since she serenaded Jimmy at a Canberra house party 40 years earlier.
“Over the years, they’ve always tried to get me to play guitar,” Jane says of her musical family. “But it always hurt my fingers, so I would just give up after a day. My brother-in-law Diesel said, ‘Look, I’m going to set up a guitar for you and give you a few basic things.’ It didn’t hurt my fingers, it was just so perfect. I started working on a few things that he’d taught me and I ended up playing every day.”
On their trip through Thailand via Singapore, Jimmy was tapping away at his laptop each day, writing what would become his third book, Killing Time, while Jane built up guitar abilities. After returning to Australia on March 18 for two weeks of self-isolation, both of those routines continued unabated.
“When we got back here and we realised that the country was going into lockdown, that’s when we started, because Jane’s skills had already improved enough so that we could play songs together,” says Jimmy. “We thought it’d be a good idea to just show that we’re making an effort; to show people they can make good use of their time. You can do this. I started mucking about with my bagpipes, Jane started playing her guitar, and we put it out there just to cheer people up — especially people who are away from their families.”
As the months ticked by, Jane’s proficiency with the instrument has become readily apparent. That tentative player strumming You’ve Got a Friend while closely studying a music book has been replaced by a confident musician who unintentionally has become a source of inspiration for many of those who have followed this long-running series of domestic performances.
“I play at least an hour a day; sometimes two hours,” says Jane. “I just go and have my time by myself. I’m in my 60s, and to pick up an instrument and learn just shows that you can do anything, really, if you just take the time to do it. I’m good with patterns and numbers, so I think that’s really helped in listening and looking. I’m old-school, so I use old [music] books, and there’s some masterclasses online that the kids have set me up with.”
The pandemic of 2020 has thrown up its fair share of well-documented downsides, some of which will continue to echo in Australian life for decades to come. Amid the gloom of an economic recession and shockwaves that have threatened the foundations of entire industries — not least the arts and live entertainment sector, where the Barnes family ordinarily ply their trade — there have been a few glimmers of hope.
The ballad of Jimmy and Jane is one small but mighty example of a public good that has come from an otherwise unpleasant situation. By learning to listen, play and sing as one, as they’ve never done before, the experience has brought the couple and their tight-knit clan closer together.
And by broadcasting these unpolished performances online, warts and all, they have offered a consistent source of light and joy to the legion of fans that Barnes has amassed across more than 40 years in the public eye.
Never before had followers of Cold Chisel or Barnes’s solo work heard him singing as he did in these videos, sitting on his bed beside his guitarist wife; now, these intimate bedroom performances have been commonplace for months, winging their way to screens around the world and offering a few minutes’ respite from perhaps the strangest year of our lives.
“This has been a really good period for us,” Jimmy says. “As horrible as it’s been — and as much as we’d have loved for the whole COVID thing not to have been — it’s been a godsend to us as a couple, as a family and as human beings.
“The truth is, because I’ve had heart surgery, I’m a bit of a target. I’m mid-60s, I’m in the [high-risk] demographic, so we’ve had to be a little bit more isolated.
“But at the same time I sit down and think, we’ve worked and done all this stuff to get our lives together, and we never get a moment to sit still and enjoy the fruits of what we’ve done. And it’s just been so nice to stay in our own house, in our own bed, and just be.”
The pair speak of the vague idea of getting a little more serious and recording some of these songs in a studio somewhere, rather than on an iPhone, although perhaps that would rob the project of some of its naive charm. As well, Jane recently made her successful debut as a live guitarist at a concert held at the Darwin Ski Club in late September — a feat that was all but unthinkable when she first picked up the guitar again near the start of this year.
In the meantime, though, they’ll continue recording a few videos each week and sharing them with an online audience that has become accustomed to seeing inside the family home from a range of angles.
This peculiar Barnes songbook continues to grow: on August 24, almost five months to the day since they sent that first recording of You’ve Got A Friend out into the world, Jimmy sits beside Jane on their bed to introduce the 100th performance they’ve clocked up since March.
“This song is really important because it was such a milestone in my career as a young solo performer, freaking out about leaving my band Cold Chisel and going solo,” he begins, as Jane sits grinning beside him. “This is one of the songs that cemented my career, but I’ve got to tell you — I never thought I’d be sitting doing this song acoustic with my wife.”
With Jane’s hands driving the rhythm, they move through a one-of-a-kind version of his signature song, Working Class Man. “Have you met my working class chick? My working class guitar player?” says Barnes afterwards, with evident joy.
Like so many of the performances that came before it, and those still to come, this one was sealed with a kiss.
Killing Time is published on Wednesday, October 7, via HarperCollins. The podcast Story Time with Jimmy Barnes is online now.
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