Barnes a screaming success
Jimmy Barnes once said he was born screaming and pretty much kept it up all his life.
At his Tuesday night sellout gig he was screaming all right, to a crowd of devotees, probably none of us born after 1970.
A miasma of smoke from the ‘‘electric puha’’ being passed around was like a potent, inescapable mist hanging in the air above the Hutt Recreation Ground – a perfect venue for a concert like this. A few boozed blokes got carried off here and there.
Yeah, it was like we had stepped back in time to when Jimmy ‘‘Screaming’’ Barnes took leave of Cold Chisel and went it alone. We were back in the 1980s, many of us just a stone’s throw from the high school we spent much of that decade in.
Despite the passing of another three more decades, Barnes has changed little.
A bit older and grizzlier, I’ll grant you, but fit as a fiddle (amazing when you consider what he has put into that body), and his distinctive voice has lost none of its rage. He must gargle gravel before breakfast, lunch and dinner.
‘‘His distinctive voice has lost none of its rage. He must gargle gravel before breakfast, lunch and dinner.’’
There’s something utterly unpretentious about Jimmy Barnes. No costume change, no disappearing off stage, despite sweating his bodyweight during the two-hour show. A bit of choice effing and blinding but mostly just singing: full throttle all the way.
On a tour like this, people expect the big hitters to be served up. The real classics that a performer who has been around as long as Barnes has are pretty non-negotiable to a crowd like this. Pity the fool who ignores the thousands who came to hear them.
Barnes and his eight-piece black-clad crew did come to play some new material, though. You have to when there’s a new album to peddle.
Shutting Down Our Town ,a song about the place he grew up in during his wretched childhood, and a cover of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero are from his new album My Criminal Record, but sound vintage Barnes already. I could take or leave I Won’t Let You
Down.
But there’s no getting away from the power and the glory of his anthems – Khe Sanh and Working Class Man – the latter sung by all, like, the whole thing.
Chris Cheney, guitarist from the Aussie punk band Living End which played earlier in the day, joined Barnes for Rising Sun, one of a few Cold Chisel originals on the set list.
The night ended with Do or Die. And we all screamed for more.