‘I FELT LIKE I WAS DYING’ Jimmy
Barnes shares his secret pain
Kicking, screaming, boozing. Over and over. Jimmy Barnes’ life was out of control. Stuck in a dead-end town, with no money and seemingly no future, he’d fallen headlong into gang life and was going nowhere in a hurry. Without even realising it, the tearaway teen was becoming his own father, whom he’d watched, as a traumatised child, repeatedly beat his mother senseless.
Barnes knew this wasn’t the right way to be living, but he didn’t know how to stop. “I was hanging around in gangs and fighting, but I didn’t want to kill people,” the 62-year-old recalls. “My mates didn’t give a s--t. They didn’t care if they killed people. What did they have to lose? No doors were opening for us.”
And then Barnes was offered an audition to sing in a band. That band was, of course, Cold Chisel. And it was like he’d been hauled out of a tar pit. “I think if music hadn’t come along, I’d have run away to Melbourne, where I might have ended up in more trouble,” he says. “Or I might have wound up dead.”
The rocker’s painful past is on full show in Jimmy Barnes: Working Class Boy. Based on the autobiography of the same name, the feature documentary (airing on Oct. 1, 8.30pm on Seven), is a stunning, raw bones account of Barnes’ younger years. Here, Barnes rips off the bandaid and opens up about his painful past.
Working Class Boy is a very personal journey. Have people now said, “I never realised that about you?”
That’s my friends saying that. People have said they’ve enjoyed it. And they didn’t know my story. Some have said they’ve had similar experiences. They’d been affected by some of that, not all of it. It’s been a very interesting time. It’s sort of started a conversation, I think. It’s one of the things I’m pleased with.
Looking back, did you think it was a tough childhood at the time?
I thought it was a normal childhood. And in a lot of ways, which makes me really said, it was. There were a lot of people who went through the same stuff as me. And it’s horrific to think about it. When I started writing it down I realised there was nothing normal about that. That’s not how life should be. It was abusive and violent and frightening, and it was traumatising. And, unfortunately, like I said, there were a lot of other people out there who were going through the same stuff as me, so it felt normal.
That’s really scary to think, right?
For that trauma to be normalised is a sad thing. That was 55 years ago that I started going through all of that, and it’s still going on in the suburbs of every city in Australia today, you know. People are still living with that poverty, with that violence. We haven’t done enough as a society to try to stop that.
It’s true, you can see the confusion and disillusionment in the poorer communities, especially among men, can’t you?
There are a whole bunch of these issues that I think are sort of related – #metoo, equality, domestic violence, male suicide. I think all of these issues are tied into that notion of what we’re brought up to think a man is, and how men deal with problems. And if you add into that poverty, violence and alcoholism, a lot a lot of damage gets done to people.
What you’re taking about, to some extent, is trying to stamp out toxic masculinity, right?
I think we’re dealing with basic issues of what it is to be a man, where we can talk about things, where we can feel. And where we don’t have to be this blokey, kind of king-ofthe-tree sort of thing. It’s just not real and it never has been. And it’s caused nothing but pain. That’s the bigger picture of it, really. I’m just starting to see that my story is a little snapshot of the effects of that.
Can you take us back to your early years in Glasgow, Scotland, which you say in the movie was where the domestic violence and the alcoholism started. What are your memories of that time?
I thought they might be sketchy, but I have memories of the place I was born in. There were no photos, but I have drawn pictures of where I grew up and shown them to my parents before they died. So, I think I my memories are pretty good. Some of it was because of the violence inside my home. Some of the memories are scratchy, but most of them are fairly vivid, which is surreal.
Your family moved from Glasgow to Elizabeth, South Australia. Did your parents think a fresh start might solve all their problems?
They were running away from stuff without dealing with it. No matter where you run away, you’re just bringing your problems with you. They came 12,000 miles and had the same problems they had in Glasgow. But they didn’t have any friends here. If anything, the problems got worse.
You describe your own home as a “horror house,” which you’d escape from, with varying degrees of success. What was it like elsewhere?
There were lots of things in that street that made me feel sick to my stomach. But there was the odd house where I remember good families and friends. It was such a mixed time. You could walk down the street and within 100 yards feel safe or that your life was in danger. People planted flower gardens. But there were a lot of underlying issues and social problems that really took over like weeds and ruined the place.
You grew up fighting, which is what you’d learnt from watching your father bash your mother, right?
Kids learn from their role models; the people you look up to, the people who are teaching you how to live. If they see people dealing with their problems with violence, that’s what people learn to do. It wasn’t just me. People down there, if things didn’t work for them they were violent. It was quite dangerous. I had a lot of friends from Elizabeth who died violently or from drink driving or from heroin. Others ended up in jail and just disappeared off the map.
No wonder you were desperate to leave town once you were in Cold Chisel…
“There were things that made me sick ”
I wanted run as far away from my past as I could. I just wanted to get away from there; run away from my problems. I had no idea how to deal with them at that point in my life. Your son David Campbell was being raised by his maternal grandmother. Were you running away from him, too? He wasn’t a problem, he was a beautiful boy. I guess I ran away from the responsibility of [ being a parent]. I just felt like I was dying. I thought there were no prospects, no hope, it was all down. It was just a matter of time before I died. That’s why I was trying hard to flee.
Have you found it at all difficult to talk about your past?
A lot of it is cathartic. Sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. In a way, I have to let it go. I need to actually do the work, as opposed to just talking about it.