Jimmy Barnes and his complicated life.
Cold Chisel’s songs described the childhood of lead singer Jimmy Barnes – tough and uncompromising, he tells
Jimmy Barnes had a hell of a childhood. Pick up a copy of the Scottish-born Aussie rocker’s new book, Working Class Boy, and you can read all about it.
You can read about how he and a friend, both barely 5 years old, were cornered by a Glasgow gang. Jimmy – James Swan then – eventually got away. His friend didn’t.
‘‘They pelted him with rocks and bottles until they were bored and then they cut him up and set fire to the shelter. He ended up in hospital for a long time.’’
Later, during his school years in South Australia, while living in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth, young James witnessed a girl being raped.
‘‘There in the shadows was a group of young guys, grabbing at a young girl who had no clothes on. They looked like animals to me, snarling and baring their teeth at one another and pushing each other out of the way to get at the girl.
‘‘She wasn’t fighting them off. She just lay there saying nothing, staring straight up at the sky.’’
And then there was the time his older sister Linda got married.
‘‘Linda looked beautiful in white, with white flowers setting off her long dark hair.
‘‘This was the perfect day. She threw her bouquet to her friends at the end of the night and drove off with her husband to spend the first night of eternity with the man she loved.’’
‘‘Unfortunately, the man she loved had drunk way too much. A few miles down the road he stopped the car and dragged her out by her beautiful flowing hair with the flowers in it. He wrapped it around a barbed-wire fence and proceeded to beat her within an inch of her life.
‘‘Linda was left alone and bleeding, draped across the barbed wire like an angel at Gallipoli.’’
Not to mention the many, many times James and his siblings barricaded themselves in a cupboard while their parents went to war with each other, voices raised and fists flailing.
And yet, from all that, ask the now-60-year-old Jimmy Barnes what memory stands out, what has stuck with him the most through all these years, and he’ll tell you about a day he spent with his dad – just the two of them.
‘‘I went into work with him for a day,’’ says the gravelly voiced singer, rasping down the phone from Sydney.
‘‘I remember we didn’t have a car, so we hitchhiked through the Adelaide hills. We ended up in the rain, but it was like a camping trip, you know?
‘‘We had no money for food so he had a couple of bits of stale bread and he made tea in a billy. Really, the fact was he had to go to work and my mum made him take me with him, but for me he made it feel like a great adventure.
‘‘We got home and I just felt like I was really special because I got to spend this time with my father.’’
Working Class Boy is Barnes’ third attempt at writing the story of his life.
The first time around he started writing in 1994.
‘‘I can’t even really remember what I was writing about then,’’ he says.
‘‘I think I was sort of just getting the idea of how to write a story really, about my life. So I don’t know if I’d written about any of the issues.
‘‘I had about 30,000 words or so, but at that time my family and I moved to France. And when I got to France, it was as far away from Elizabeth and the life I’d grown up in – and as far away from rock ‘n’ roll really – as you could get. It was a different world. So I just sort of stopped writing.
‘‘Then somebody robbed the house – they stole all the electronic stuff and one of the things they took was my computer. I didn’t have it backed up or anything so that was the end of the book.’’
Fast forward to the year 2000 and Barnes was again bitten by the writing bug. But other things got in the way.
‘‘By that point I was really heavily in the throes of alcohol and drug addiction,’’ he says. ‘‘So I wrote about the stuff that was important, but the way I wrote about it, it wasn’t clear, and I was making too many jokes about the situation, about stuff that was really important. So I stopped again.
‘‘I’ve still got that stuff in my computer – it’s very interesting and some of it’s funny, but it just wasn’t right.’’
It would be another decade and a half before Barnes once more put pen to paper.
‘‘A couple of years ago, I just started writing again after I got inspired by a few different things,’’ he explains. ‘‘One of them was a film. There was a film called Snowtown that came out about the bodies-in-barrels serial killers in Adelaide – this true murder case.
‘‘In the opening parts of that film, the place where they set it looked like my street. It was set in Elizabeth, where I grew up. But it looked like my street, it looked like my house, and watching it, suddenly I could smell the house – and I could feel the fear again.
‘‘I just turned the telly off and started writing and I literally never lifted my head until I had well over 100,000 words.’’
The end result is Working Class Boy, a childhood memoir recalling Barnes’s life from his birth in 1950s Glasgow to the formation of Cold Chisel when he was just 17.
A second book is planned – the rock ‘n’ roll years if you will – but lately Barnes has been wondering whether it might end up being a trilogy.
‘‘I don’t want to just tell rock ‘n’ roll stories, I want to examine the impact that the trauma I write about in this book had on me as a human being, and how that ripple-down effect affected the people around me,’’ he says.
Working Class Boy is his first book but Barnes has, of course, been writing for years – songs like Too Much Ain’t Enough Love and Lay Down Your Guns have helped make him one of Australia’s most successful music acts.
So it stands to reason that he must have poured some of these experiences into his songwriting before, surely?
‘‘There’s nothing I’ve particularly said,’’ he says. ‘‘But I think there’s bits of it in every song – the loneliness, the fear. I think you can tell just by the aggression and the anxiety and the way I sing as a rule, you can definitely see that I can feel bits of it in every song.
‘‘Even the Cold Chisel songs – I mean, Don Walker [Cold Chisel’s keyboardist and primary songwriter] sounds like he was reading my mail from when I was a child, you know?
‘‘The song Flame Trees for instance – at the end of the book when I say I was leaving Adelaide and never going back, Flame Trees is about that. When you do have to go back to your hometown and it’s not great and it’s not perfect and the ghosts of the past come back to haunt you while you’re there.
‘‘I was like that for years going back to Adelaide, so it’s all in every song I sing. These stories, this book, these emotions – they’re in every song I’ve sung, every show I’ve done. Literally every time I’ve sat crying alone at night – they’re in there you know?’’ Working Class Boy
by Jimmy Barnes, HarperCollins, $49,99, hardback.