Hear a stream of the new Cold Chisel album The Perfect Crime

THE good old days of excess are now the better days of great songs and gigs. Cold Chisel gives you an exclusive listen to new album The Perfect Crime.

IF Don Walker had managed to convince his band mates it was a good idea, Cold Chisel’s ‘70s uniform would have been body stockings.

It is impossible — and disturbing — to imagine Jimmy Barnes, Ian Moss, Phil Small and the late Steve Prestwich in skin-tight onesies.

But it was 1976, the band were desperate to get more gigs and a record deal, and their piano player spent hours each day writing songs, hassling booking agents and venues or concocting grand plans to get Cold Chisel noticed.

“There was a period before we were signed when Don thought we should all be wearing body stockings. He was deadly serious. It’s disgusting, right? Just after that was when he started wearing the ski mask,” frontman Barnes recalls.

“Don wanted to do anything to get the band noticed. We all immediately said no and have never let him forget it.

“He was always thinking about how he could get this band to work and he had a lot of pressure on him, also writing the songs at the same time. It was pretty miraculous he managed to do that.”

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They’re back ... Chisel release new record The Perfect Crime on Friday. Picture: Supplied.

Fast forward four decades and Chisel are not only indelibly stamped on the Australian soundtrack but remain just as determined to book that next gig and blow everyone else off the stage.

In order to do that, and not be relegated to being a nostalgia act just spitting out the hits like a human jukebox, they need new songs.

So they made a record, their eighth studio album The Perfect Crime. It’s a rock’n’roll record, think 1960s garage rock with boogie woogie piano, disco, surf music and even rockabilly flavours. And its vintage Cold Chisel.

“Why make a 60s garage rock’n’roll record? Because we’re in our 60s and we made it in my garage,” Barnes quips.

The Perfect Crime is also an anachronism in an era where rock music just isn’t on the airwaves anymore. Chisel don’t care what radio is playing. And neither do their fans.

Their motivation to keep recording is because they want to keep playing. They want to keep playing because their friend and drummer Prestwich died in 2011 after surgery for a brain tumour. His four mates stopped taking Chisel for granted in that moment.

Football rocks ... Cold Chisel could be one of the first bands not to suck at a grand final. Picture: Craig Greenhill.

You can feel the excitement pulsing off them about the new songs and the two months worth of One Night Stand gigs, which kick off this weekend with the NRL Grand Final and Deni Ute Muster.

“As strange as it sounds, Steve’s passing helped make this happen because we realised when we lost him, we lost something we loved doing and we took it for granted that we could do this whenever we wanted,” Barnes says.

“His passing made us want to do it more. We think about him every time we play. We are lucky as s ... we found Charley.”

Charley Drayton is lucky he found Chisel too, joining the band as his late wife Chrissy Amphlett battled breast cancer and multiple sclerosis and deciding to continue with them after her death in 2013.

What ball? Recording sessions for Chisel’s early albums were dominated by marathon table tennis games. Picture: Supplied.

The band made The Perfect Crime over two sessions, the first at Barnes’ home studio in Sydney’s south, where they would work a solid six hours a day on a song with producer Kevin Shirley pressing play the second they stepped on the “carpet”.

“We would go onto the carpet, a little setup in the corner with a piano, a bass and a guitar, Charley playing drums on his laps, the rest of us working out what we would do for five minutes and then do it,” Barnes says.

“Back in the early days, we used to go in for 24 hours a day and play 15 hours of table tennis and drink. Back then, when we played table tennis, I don’t think we would even know if we had a ball or not. You would drink, fuss about, talk and bulls ...

“This is a no-nonsense production. We would think we were rehearsing and Kevin Shirley had pressed record the minute we got in there.”

The Perfect Crime has been introduced by the single Lost, which Walker co-wrote with Wes Carr, and the album is populated with those kind of songs Chisel fans want to sing at the top of their lungs, arm-in-arm with their mates.

It also features possibly the first lyrical use of Chiko Roll, if you wanted any further evidence of just what an astute chronicler the band’s chief songwriter is of Australia, its characters and its haunts.

The reference to the infamous Australian foodstuff on the disco-tinged Bus Station (yep, Chisel sort of does disco) will raise eyebrows.

“Yeah, the fat girl holding a Chiko Roll under a blanket line. Don, being a voyeur, thought it was sexy. It’s very symbolic. Don is a very sick man. Every time that song goes past, (Barnes’ wife) Jane asks ‘What was that lyric?’,” Barnes says.

“I love the fact the opening line on the album is ‘I wake up in the morning feeling like shit’. A classic Cold Chisel statement.”

Playing hard ... Chisel keep going simply because they love performing together. Pic: Noelle Bobrige

Everything about Chisel remains classic. Barnes still gets sick in the stomach with nerves before he walks on stage. Walker and Moss still go quiet and introspective.

When they do get on stage, Barnes is still a “vocal vandal”, as he describes himself, almost choking Moss in a headlock as he in the middle of shredding a solo or chasing Walker’s fingers across the keys with his mic, trying to hit them for some unfathomable reason.

They love each other, they fight. They need the tension to be Chisel.

“Even before, in my alcohol and drug-fuelled times, the band playing eight gigs a week, sometimes three a night and I didn’t even know where we were, somehow we would get lost in the music and find the magic,” Barnes says.

“Now we know how to access that a bit more, how to get to that point. I don’t think any band always gets on and we don’t always get on even now.

“But being able to ride out the ups and downs of the relationship and be able to play and make music, that’s what it’s about now. We love each other and when we get on stage we savour the moment.”

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The Perfect Crime is released on Friday. All tour dates: coldchisel.com

Originally published as Hear a stream of the new Cold Chisel album The Perfect Crime