Jimmy Barnes

Kate Ceberano: still brave, still burning

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

When Kate Ceberano played the Australian Made tour with her band I’m Talking in the summer of 1986-87, she was already a veteran of the Australian music industry at barely 20 years old.

The concert series, which saw Ceberano and her band rubbing shoulders with INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls, Mental as Anything, Models and the Triffids, came at a time when most of the headline acts were making inroads overseas.

“I remember being very shy around all of the other acts, and I overcompensated by trying to pretend that I was a lot more cool with it than I actually was,” Ceberano remembers.

She describes being overwhelmed, starstruck, and hints at the sort of behind-the-scenes shenanigans to be expected of 20-year-old rock stars. “A lot went down on that tour. It was a blessing that we didn’t have social media back in those days!”

But Ceberano was far from out of her depth. She’d joined I’m Talking when she was 16, and had already been in several bands before then, where her honeyed vocals and charisma made her an instant star.

And I’m Talking were huge. Formed in 1983, with Ceberano sharing the front of the stage with co-singer Zan Abeyratne, the band had hits with their debut single Trust Me, Do You Wanna Be and Holy Word, before disbanding after the Australian Made tour wound up.…

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Cold Chisel: The Big 5-0

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

On the screens flanking the stage at Petersons Winery in Armidale, you can clearly see the scar at the top of Jimmy Barnes’ big barrel chest. It’s a visible legacy of the singer’s second round of open-heart surgery in December last year, after a serious bout of bacterial pneumonia nearly killed him.

Two months ago, he had a hip replacement that also left him fighting off an infection, which kept him tethered to a drip for weeks. You wouldn’t know it. Watching him tear through Cold Chisel’s 24-song set on the first official stop of their Big Five-0 tour, Barnes looks indestructible. At this rate, he’ll outlive all of us and Keith Richards combined.

They share some history, this town and Chisel, having solidified here in 1974 while primary songwriter Don Walker was completing a degree at the University of New England. Nearly 1,000 metres above sea level, a crowd of well over 10,000 (many of them grey nomads who have travelled from far and wide) huddles in the chilly night air.

As usual, they open with Standing On The Outside. It’s a song about the impossibility of trying to get ahead when everything is stacked against you: “No amount of work’s gonna get me through the door.”…

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Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

At first, all is darkness. There is a hiss of cymbals, followed by a rude bang, thump and wallop. The lights go up. We see the late Australian music mogul Michael Gudinski, sitting at a drum kit, pounding the skins arrhythmically with his hands, making a point at his default setting: maximum volume.

“Well, you can obviously see I can’t play any music,” the Mushroom Records founder bawls in that sandpaper and gravel voice, familiar and weirdly soothing. “And that’s why I’m good at the music business. Because I don’t wanna be a pop or rock star, but HELL, I LIKE WORKING WITH THEM!” He rubs his hands together, ready to deal.

If we believe the galaxy of stars lining up to pay homage in Ego: The Michael Gudinski Story – now in Australian cinemas – Gudinski was bigger than all of them. Australian artists whose careers Gudinski nurtured, including Kylie Minogue, Jimmy Barnes and Paul Kelly, are joined by international heavy-hitters Bruce Springsteen, Ed Sheeran, Billy Joel, Sting and the obligatory Dave Grohl.

They paint a picture of the ultimate music fan, tirelessly enthusiastic, driven by art ahead of commerce. But Gudinski was a ruthless businessman first. Ego tells the story of how, over a boozy lunch in 1975, five men stitched up the Melbourne music business via the formation of booking agency Premier Artists, and later the promotions juggernaut Frontier Touring.…

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Don Walker: a real cat

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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).…

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Troy Cassar-Daley’s reckoning

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

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.…

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Michael Gudinski 1952-2021

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

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).…

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