Jane Barnes reveals her discoveries about the love of her life from Jimmy’s Working Class Boy memoir

JANE Barnes has stood by her man for 35 years. She reveals how she won him over and their life together — including all the ups and down.

IT wasn’t Jane Mahoney’s singing that won Jimmy Barnes’ heart.

The members of Cold Chisel had joined the 21-year-old student at her friend’s suburban Canberra home for an after-party following a gig with The Angels in November 1979.

The naive diplomat’s daughter picked up a guitar and played the only song she knew to entertain these rebellious rockers who were on the verge of becoming the biggest band in Australia.

“I was trying to entertain them and Puff the Magic Dragon was the only guitar song I could play,” she said, laughing hysterically.

“When I sing it to the grandkids now, Jimmy says ‘Oh, here we go’. I was the biggest dag in the world.”

She became Jane Barnes on May 22, 1981, their 35-year marriage regarded as one of the most solid unions in Australian rock’n’roll.

The mother of their four children Mahalia, Eliza-Jane, Jackie and Elly-May is always by his side and occasionally on his stage as a backing vocalist.

In recent months, she has been his rock as the much-loved musician became best-selling author with Working Class Boy, the memoir of his harrowing childhood.

Jane would read the chapters as he finished them and while she knew a lot about his early years, she didn’t know everything.

Her heart broke as he revealed the graphic details of the poverty he endured as a child, one story in particular striking a sad resonance with a wife and mother who has always gathered her extended family together around the dinner table.

“It may seem like a little thing but it was big to me. I got so sad when I read about this little boy who goes to the local swimming pool and he’s starving and has to steal food,” she said.

“There’s some more horrific things (in the book) but that really got to me, this boy hoping someone would leave a sandwich or something.”

Her privileged upbringing was in stark contrast to his hard-scrabble existence of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

She kicked him out of the party that fateful night in 1979, calling a taxi for the singer because the band’s fill-in drummer at the time had become a little too boisterous and she was worried her friend’s parents would disapprove.

Jane promised she would meet Jimmy at the airport the next morning before the band flew out and give him her phone number. She was true to her word, with the pair moving into together within months.

Their courtship stalled when Jane followed her family to a new posting in Tokyo, the separation inspiring Chisel’s hit Rising Sun.

But love won out, as it has at every juncture of their life when the couple have found themselves staring down demons that would shake their family to its core.

Both Jimmy and Jane have gone to rehab periodically in the past 15 years and she said one of her darkest times was watching her husband self destruct.

“In the very darkest times, I was away at rehab and I would see him on a TV show and think ‘Oh my god, it looks like the love of my life is going to die. He doesn’t look good’,” she said.

“It was scary. He had to deal with it all by himself and I felt so helpless.

“I think the first time I went must have been in 2001 and then he went a year later. And it took a year for us to get back into sync and he was the good one … we sort of took turns being crazy.”

As parents, their greatest test came when their youngest daughter Elly-May was born 14 weeks premature in 1989 and suffered a brain haemorrhage which resulted in cerebral palsy.

“You have your fights and disagreements, financial problems, scandals, whatever life that happens but when your child is in hospital and they may be dying, I don’t think there is any worse feeling,” she said.

“When Elly-May was born and she was so tiny, 750g and we didn’t know if she was going to live, as parents, as a couple, that was the hardest thing to have to deal with.”

Elly-May now has her own child, two-year-old son Dylan, just one of many Barnes grandchildren that include the offspring of Jimmy’s other children, David Campbell, Amanda Bennett and Megan Torzyn, who were born before he started his family with Jane.

The grandchildren are the reason Jane has retired from backing vocal duties in her husband’s band.

It was becoming a little difficult to keep the tiny tots from running on to the stage to play with their grandmother while she was singing.

Jane can’t stop laughing as she recalls how she was roped into the band whose ranks have featured the grown-up Tin Lids over the years, with Mahalia, her husband Ben Rodgers on guitar and drummer Jackie the permanent members.

“Somebody got sick so I got asked to sing. I can sing along to the radio, I can hold a tune but I’m not a singer like my children. I started going on just to have fun,” she said.

“And I didn’t take it seriously for a long time so if ever he gave me the s---s or I was in a mood, I just wouldn’t go. And they would say ‘That’s not professional. You can’t do that, you can’t just come and sing when you want to.’

“I wasn’t being paid, it was a loose arrangement. In the end, my therapist told me I should ask to be paid and I got paid which made sure I would show up.

“I’ve sort of retired now, I’m side of stage and backstage nanny because when I was on the stage, the grandchildren, who spend a lot of time with me, would come up onto the stage because they wanted to play with me. They just think we’re playing a game.”

Anyone who has spent mere minutes with Jimmy and Jane would be in no doubt the pair adore each other after all these years. They kiss and hug each other with passionate affection often.

Their story will be told in the next instalment of Barnes’ autobiography which will be released in 2017.

Jane said she has been in awe of what her husband has achieved with Working Class Boy and the tour which brings it to life through story and song. She feels he is finally starting to “realise his all” after all these years.

“There’s just no doubt for me, I wouldn’t go through this with any other being in the world. I am such an independent, individual person so it’s a real commitment.,” she said.

“He’s the only person I could have shared this life with.”

For all dates of the Working Class Boy: Stories and Songs tour, https://www.jimmybarnes.com/tour-dates/

Originally published as Jane Barnes reveals her discoveries about the love of her life from Jimmy’s Working Class Boy memoir