JIMMY BARNES

SINGER AND AUTHOR, 61

The Cold Chisel frontman followed up his 2016 awardwinning memoir Working Class Boy with its sequel, Working Class Man, another bestseller. What was a highlight in 2017? I didn’t expect to do so well on the Working Class Boy tour. It seemed to touch a lot of people and really started healthy conversations about all sorts of things, addiction and domestic violence to name a few. Working Class Man dealt with your adult years. It helped me sift through a lot of moments in my life and make some sense of them. Who knew that so many people would be able to relate so closely with my story? It just proved to me we are all in this together. So how many new books have you signed?

I must have signed at least 60,000 so far. I sometimes joke

that the unsigned ones are collector’s items! I have a very sore arm and have to get acupuncture to relieve the pain. But that’s a first-world problem and I can live with it. Outside of touring, do you have new music projects?

I talked to Neal Schon the other day and he’s an amazing guitar player, just phenomenal, and he wants me to go out there [to the US] and do a blues album with him and I might do it next year, which will be awesome. What was your favourite song or album from 2017?

My favourite album of the year is Neil Finn’s latest, Out of Silence. It is a masterpiece. I, like a lot of other people, watched as he recorded it live on the internet. It was an amazing procedure and the rest was breathtaking. Neil is a very talented man and a dear friend.