Is this the Cold Chisel curtain call?
On the eve of what might could be its last major Australian tour, Adelaide rock quintet Cold Chisel reflects on its 46-year history.
On a sunny Wednesday in October, Cold Chisel called a press conference at Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion, as it had some big news to share: for the first time in its 46-year history, the Adelaide-born rock band would play a series of outdoor concerts across the Australian summer, accompanied by an impressive list of support acts including Paul Kelly, Kasey Chambers and Hoodoo Gurus.
Four of the five band members sat before the media, with drummer Charley Drayton absent due to overseas commitments. Pianist Don Walker wryly regarded the affair as a necessary formality, while Phil Small was perhaps the most reluctant participant, for as far as he’s concerned, the less people know about him – other than his bass playing – the better. Guitarist Ian Moss was the only band member not sporting a black leather jacket.
Only one of the four was truly comfortable soaking in the gaze of all those eyes and camera lenses: Jimmy Barnes, the man who also happens to be best known for being the voice of Cold Chisel.
In his thorough 2001 biography of the band, The Pure Stuff, journalist Anthony O’Grady wrote: “There always were two edges to Chisel. Those who had musical instruments played them with feel, syncopation and precision. Then there was this maniac with the microphone who, totally out of it, continually urged the musicians to play faster, louder, harder. And if they tried to haul him back to the tempo, he’d scream and holler and kick things and leave them all behind. So they learned how to play faster, louder, harder and still keep time and feel.”
On that day in October, that maniac with the microphone cheerfully and professionally fielded the bulk of questions tossed at the band. Age, therapy, grandfatherhood and memoir-writing have each mellowed Barnes considerably in the decades since Cold Chisel first parted ways in 1983, following a national tour labelled The Last Stand.
At 63, he is the youngest of the original members, yet his voice and stage presence both still burn with redoubtable incandescence whenever he finds himself in front of a band and an audience.
On the inside, though, Barnes was struggling, thanks to a bout of viral pneumonia that hit him in the midst of a national solo tour. Walker reckons he’s never seen his friend so crook – a big call, considering he’s speaking about a bloke for whom vodka and amphetamines were considered essential ingredients before, during and after most concerts the band played during much of its initial decade-long existence, not to mention the appetite for consumption that followed the Scottish-born immigrant into a platinum-coated solo career that continues today, minus the excess.
The only hint of his ill-health was a brief comment at the beginning about having a cold, but it was soon swept aside in the tide of queries centred on the upcoming tour. Conspicuously absent from any of the materials distributed to the press were the words “final”, “last” or “closing”, yet it’s not long before the matter was raised by a reporter. “We’re going to treat this like it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done, and maybe the last,” said Barnes. “I think if the fans come, they’re going to be pleased – and I think if they miss it, they’re going to be really f..king sorry.”
To the uninitiated, this might have sounded like bluster. But to several generations of Australians who have heard this band’s unique blend of blues, rock’n’roll and soul blaring from radios, stereos and concert speakers for the last few decades, it came across as more of a warning than a threat.
A few years earlier, at the 2016 APRA Music Awards, Cold Chisel accepted the Ted Albert award for outstanding services to Australian music, so named for the pioneering founder of Albert Productions.
At the podium, Walker spent 15 minutes detailing dozens of names who helped he and his bandmates get to the point where, alongside a select few acts including AC/DC and Midnight Oil, they’re a group of rock artists whose music has stood the test of time.
It was a classy speech, and memorable because of the way in which Walker rejected the opportunity to self-mythologise the band and its considerable achievements – not to mention its fiery interpersonal dynamics – but instead to use the platform as a kind of mirror, by reflecting its success back at the many individuals whose contributions allowed Cold Chisel to do what it did best.
When Review puts this to Walker a few weeks before the release of the band’s ninth album, Blood Moon, the pianist and songwriter listens carefully then says, with the hint of a smile: “Well, I think we just assumed that everybody in the room knew how good we are.”
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How good are Cold Chisel? While the efficacy of that particular sentence construction may have been somewhat devalued of late, it’s a question worth asking and weighing for several reasons – not least because the band’s existence as an active entity is just a couple of months away from being confined to our collective rear-view mirror.
Well, maybe. Most performers are loath to place an expiry date on their activities, for good reason. The last thing any sensible artist wishes to do is hoodwink their audience into buying tickets for a supposedly final tour, only to later go back on their word, whether out of financial necessity or simply because they’ve changed their mind. But with healthy notes of hesitance and qualification prefacing all such discussions, the notion of Blood Moon forming the basis of the band’s final tour is a subject the five members are willing to address, in separate interviews with Review.
“It was extensively discussed in the band over the last couple of months, because we kind of all knew – in an unspoken way, through considerations of age and the rarity with which we get together and do this stuff – that this is possibly the last time we’ll do this,” says Walker.
“At certain stages during our recording, that discussion became explicit,” he continues. “And so, how do we handle this? None of us want to come out and say, you know, ‘Get your tickets, last chance …’ – because you don’t have to go too far to find examples of people who got that wrong in our country. And also, it looks cheap. So we didn’t want to do that. We agreed that if somebody asked the question, we’re not going to tiptoe around it – but we don’t put it in the press release or make a big song and dance about it.”
Unique among his bandmates, Small is essentially retired, but for occasional band reunions, yet he makes sure to play scales on the fretboard of his bass guitar each day to keep his fingers limber. “You’ve got to live in the moment and deliver everything as if it is your last show,” he says. “I treat all our shows like that. Generally, we all try to put 110 (per cent) into it, because you never know: the plane might go down between Perth and Adelaide. We don’t know. You play each show as if it is your last. And if it is going to be the last, well, so be it. At least we know we’ve done our best, and enjoyed it – and hopefully the crowd has, too.”
Moss reckons there’s a very good chance this will be the last time. “I hope it’s not the last show – but having said that, there’s nothing planned (afterwards),” he says. “Look, there’s a strong chance it’s the last tour, but none of us has said as much. I would hope it’s not the last time we play (together), but I think it’s the last extensive tour. I’d say that’s probably pretty much on the money.”
Of the five, the maniac with the microphone exhibits the most certainty.
“There’s a certain anxiety I get whenever we get together,” says Barnes. “It’s well documented how f..ked up my life was, for so many years. And unfortunately, a lot of that was during the Cold Chisel years that it really manifested itself the worst. I mean, it did get worse than that – but it was for a long time.”
“So there’s certainly an element of, whenever I get into Cold Chisel, I feel the blessing of playing with these great players and guys who are like my brothers – but it also somehow takes me a step back into what I’ve tried to move on from,” he continues. “That’s a really tough thing, and I don’t want to lose the band just because of that. That’s not an excuse for leaving a band.
“We only get together every five or six years, and when we do this record, then this tour, there’s a good chance it’ll be another five or six years before we do something else, and everybody’s going to be in their 70s.
“I just think, well, I’ll wait and see if we’re going to be able to. Because Cold Chisel is a f..king high-powered band. It’s intense and it’s very taxing to do, and I don’t want to go out and do that half-arsed.
“I would always like to give it the energy and the power and the commitment it needs. And I think, if we had to go out and do that half-arsed, it would be bad for the legacy of the band.”
Its newest member, drummer Drayton – who joined in 2011 following the death of Steve Prestwich – says: “The band was in its 20s when it created the major set of tunes that fans want to hear every night. With Cold Chisel now growing up, maybe it’s smart to look at a different way of presenting the band in the future.
“I hope that we will continue to record and create new music and perhaps Cold Chisel can do a residency in selected cities in the future.
“Perhaps that is wishful thinking on my part; I have not been part of the conversation on how the band will move forward. I can’t imagine yet what life would be like without Cold Chisel.”
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Despite the slightly different viewpoints the five musicians hold on this subject, the proposition of seeing the band this summer has evidently been attractive to a rather large cohort. Ahead of the first concert on New Year’s Eve in Fremantle, more than 175,000 tickets have been sold to the 14 Australian shows on the upcoming tour, which will end with two nights at Mount Cotton, near Brisbane.
That’s a hefty sales figure unmatched by all but a handful of Australian acts playing today. Were that crowd to be gathered in one spot, it’d be roughly equivalent to the population of Townsville, all hanging out to hear what the band members estimate to be 13 or 14 immovable objects on the setlist – the greatest hits accumulated across four decades – as well as whatever new and old songs the band decides to throw into the mix each night.
And so, lastly, to that earlier question: how good are Cold Chisel? The group itself has never been short of confidence in its own ability. “These five guys were born to play together … They really do believe no one else, anywhere in the world, could do better,” noted the late sound engineer Tony Cohen, when he oversaw the band recording its sixth album, The Last Wave of Summer, released in 1998.
It’s also the sort of question, however, that the musicians themselves are uncomfortable attempting to answer, having lived inside the thing since the 1970s, give or take the occasional hiatus.
With his noted reputation for no-bullshit bluntness, producer Kevin Shirley jumps at the chance to contextualise this one-of-a-kind band. Having captured its last three albums in 2012’s No Plans, 2015’s The Perfect Crime and newly released Blood Moon, the South African has clocked up nearly a decade of standing on the outside and looking in at how Cold Chisel operates, from an intimate distance.
With a long recording career that includes working with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith, Shirley knows rock ‘n’ roll better than most, and this is what he has observed about the peculiarities of the Adelaide-born quintet that’s now nine albums into its 46-year existence.
“This band should have been up there with the classic rock bands of the world, really,” he says. “I think the world missed out on not having this band be mainstream and everywhere. They really are that unique. I think they’re as good as the Who, as good as Zeppelin, as good as Deep Purple and all the bands that they try to emulate. I think they’ve got that in spades. They should have been up there with U2. They should have been up there with the enormous rock bands, like the Rolling Stones. They should have been on everybody’s turntable around the world.”
Which begs the obvious question: why aren’t they? Why has Cold Chisel burned so brightly here, and nowhere else?
“I think when Chisel plays live, there’s precious few bands that can touch them,” says Shirley. “And I think a lot of that pent-up rage that they all have comes out when they play live. And I don’t know if they’d be able to handle 12 months on the road without killing each other. So maybe that’s why: maybe they can just get around doing three months in Australia, then they all have to retreat to their corners until the next one comes.”
Or perhaps, in this case, the next one won’t come. As for what happens after the final encore at that second Mount Cotton gig, on the second Sunday in February? No one knows. It might be that a few hours later, once the sun has replaced the full moon overhead, the tense of that five-word question will have shifted slightly — but significantly, with finality — to become: how good were Cold Chisel?
Blood Moon is out now via Universal. Cold Chisel’s national tour begins in Fremantle, WA (December 31) and ends at Mount Cotton, Queensland (February 9).