Cold Chisel

Don Walker: a real cat

Every week, Don Walker buys a lottery ticket. It’s a matter of ritual. The piano-playing hurricane force behind one of the most successful Australian bands of all time, Cold Chisel – the man who gave us Khe Sanh and Flame Trees and too many more to mention – says he’s buying his continuing right to dream.

On his new solo album, Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky, there’s a song called When I Win The Lottery. What would he do? “Most of the song is about taking your winnings and running amok, basically coursing across the landscape with your hair on fire, fighting off supermodels,” he says drily, over Zoom, the familiar sweep of grey hair sitting high over his forehead.

“That’s not what I would do, because for a long time now I could probably do that anyway – the supermodels excepted. I live with a lot of freedom.”

Walker, 71, is well past retirement age. He has no need to work, and probably no need to be buying lottery tickets, either. He continues to do both out of habit. Lightning In A Clear Blue Sky is his fourth solo album, and first in a decade. Walker is also one-third of popular trio Tex, Don and Charlie (with singer Tex Perkins and guitarist Charlie Owen).… Read more..

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Troy Cassar-Daley’s reckoning

On 1 April 2019, singer and songwriter Troy Cassar-Daley was finishing up a song with Cold Chisel guitarist Ian Moss when he took a phone call. His father, who had been depressed and in poor health following a stroke, had taken his own life. The song’s chorus – “watching it all go south” – took on a too-real darker hue.

As 2019 stretched into the pandemic of 2020, Cassar-Daley entered a downward spiral. His long-standing marriage to broadcaster Laurel Edwards, with whom he has two adult children, was suffering. The son of a Bundjalung woman from Grafton in north-eastern New South Wales, he tried to escape back to country, seeking his grandmother’s counsel.

Cassar-Daley’s grandparents are long deceased, but he still talks to them. “I consult with them a lot when I’m sitting by myself on the river where I grew up, and I distinctly felt my grandmother say to me, ‘Your problems aren’t here. I think you know where the problems are; you have to go back,’” he says.

Cassar-Daley is part of the firmament of Australian country music, the winner of 37 Golden Guitar Awards, on top of numerous ARIA and Deadly gongs. On Friday, he released his 13th studio album, The World Today.… Read more..

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Michael Gudinski 1952-2021

For more than 45 years Michael Gudinski, who died on Monday aged 68, was a dominant, domineering, polarising but above all passionate figure in Australia’s cultural landscape. He lived and breathed Australian music.

Everyone who met Gudinski had a story to tell about him, not all of which are printable. What is indisputable is that life in Australia changed in a profound way when Mushroom Records – the label he co-founded in 1972 – released Skyhooks’ first album Living In The 70’s (complete with its errant apostrophe) a couple of years later.

Living In The 70’s topped the charts for four months, selling 240,000 copies. Beyond the sales, the album changed perceptions of what Australian music could be. Many of the lyrics (by bass player and songwriter Greg Macainsh) were hyperlocal to Gudinski’s beloved Melbourne.

In many ways, the album was a reflection of Gudinski himself: brash, hyperactive, coarse (more than half its tracks were banned from airplay), unapologetic and funny. It helped that it was released just as the music television show Countdown first appeared in Australian lounge rooms, with the support of Ian “Molly” Meldrum propelling Skyhooks to stardom.

Over the next decade, Mushroom released dozens of albums that presented their own interrogations of Australian life, from the Models’ Local &/Or General (1981) to the Triffids (Born Sandy Devotional, 1986), Hunters & Collectors (Human Frailty, 1986), the Go-Betweens’ 16 Lovers Lane and the Church’s Starfish (both 1988).… Read more..

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Guardian Book Club: Jimmy Barnes

When singer Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy was released in 2016, it caused a sensation. Barnes’ account of his childhood went beyond the usual adjectives like “raw” and “harrowing” on the cover to something much more purgative: here was one celebrity memoir that hadn’t been written for the sake of a generous advance. Barnes had wrestled the demons of a traumatic childhood in private for decades. Now he was doing it in full view.

The other thing that made Working Class Boy so shocking, frankly, was that Barnes had written it himself. Wasn’t piano player Don Walker the literary genius behind Cold Chisel, with “Barnesy” the red-faced screamer out front? Barnes further upended expectations by gambling on the story of his pre-fame years first, but his way of telling it was riveting. His voice was urgent, empathetic, as wry as it was moving, with a gut-wrenching turn of phrase.

Inevitably, the sequel Working Class Man followed. This was the proverbial sex, drugs and rock & roll memoir that perhaps was originally craved, and certainly expected – but it was far more compelling for us knowing where Barnes had come from. Jimmy Barnes – the rock star, and sometimes the caricature – had been a fixture of Australian life for so long that we had underestimated him.… Read more..

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Jimmy Barnes: bio for My Criminal Record

After two best-selling, incredibly personal memoirs, Working Class Boy (2016) and Working Class Man (2017), you might think you know all there is to be known about James Dixon (Jimmy) Barnes.

You’d be wrong.

Barnes, by his own estimation, is still revealing himself. “There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about me yet,” he says.

On 31 May, Jimmy Barnes will release his seventeenth solo studio album, My Criminal Record – his first rock album since 2010’s Rage and Ruin. It was recorded with his live band: Daniel Wayne Spencer and Davey Lane on guitars, son-in-law Benjamin Rodgers on bass, Clayton Doley on keyboards, with son Jackie Barnes and Warren Trout on drums and percussion.

It was written by Jimmy, with significant assistance from his oldest sparring partner, Cold Chisel’s Don Walker, whose name appears on six of the thirteen tracks. Outstanding contributions also come from close friends Troy Cassar-Daley, Mark Lizotte (aka Diesel) and the Living End’s Chris Cheney, as well as Rodgers, Harley Webster and Jade MacRae.

The earliest of these songs were written at the same time as Jimmy was in the process of writing his two memoirs – both of which won the prestigious Australian Book Industry Award – and the rest in the aftermath, as he sorted through the wreckage and triumphs of an uncontained life that sometimes spun out of control.… Read more..

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Here are all the great Aussie protest songs

On Tuesday an Australian newspaper of repute published an earnest think-piece asking the question: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Where oh where – in this, our Age of Unreason – are the new Midnight Oils, Goannas, Redgums and Chisels, the author, Jeff Apter, asks?

“Why do the musos of today … seem more concerned with navel-gazing and their fragile broken hearts than weightier, more universal issues?” he writes. “Why the resistance? It’s not like there’s a shortage of subjects to rail against.”

Indeed there isn’t: asylum seekers, Australia Day, violence against women, Aboriginal deaths in custody, marriage equality. And if you spare a moment to actually listen to the musos of today – particularly women, who don’t rate a mention in the piece, and people of colour – you’ll find each of those subjects feature in some of the best new Australian protest music around.

So, where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Well, a lot of them are on Spotify, where it took us about 10 minutes to make a playlist. Feel free to make your own!

AB Original: January 26 (2016)

mic drop on the nation. If the mark of a good protest song is to start a conversation, this song applied a set of jumper leads to the question of when we should hold our national day of celebration – and got voted to #16 in Triple J’s Hottest 100, before Triple J decided to change that date too.… Read more..

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