Naked truths
Rock memoirs by Jimmy Barnes and Phil Collins press replay on their lives.
One result of our sharing, careless world is that musicians and songwriters seem increasingly compelled to pour their heart and soul into every note and lyric. Sure, there have always been hook-up, break-up and make-up songs, but now their tweets, posts and selfies are also ending up on the song sheet.
So, when stars’ lives are already plastered all over social media or streamed out on play-lists, do we still need autobiographies? Where’s the artistry in knitting together career minutiae, aspirations and inspirations into a book when this information is available on the internet?
In recent years, some of the most successful muso navel-gazing has come from Morrissey, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards and Nick Cave’s two docos. They managed to wrap a memoir’s key ingredients of insight, revelation and honesty in a coating of creativity. But such packaging is difficult.
Among the latest musicians to press replay on their lives are Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes and 1980s battle of the blands winner Phil Collins.
In Working Class Boy, Barnes takes the cathartic decision to focus on his pre-fame days, on the premise that “Time and trauma have taken what I was born with and what I have experienced and brewed it all into what you see before you now.”
From the grim, hardscrabble streets of post-war Glasgow to the abusive suburbs of Adelaide, the young James Swan experiences violence at home and takes in the barbarous world around him. There’s brutal honesty and occasionally gripping revelation – watching a gang rape, fighting off the sexual advances of a friend’s psychotic brother, a sister’s ghostly possession – and Barnes’ way of addressing the reader directly, while largely ignoring his rock-star status, edges towards a unique voice.
But all insights are painted by numbers: he has spent a lifetime running from his past, so he’s going to self-medicate with a memoir. Even the title, he admits by the end, isn’t his – rather, it was suggested by his mate, Neil Finn.
Collins’ Not Dead Yet takes an alternative route, preferring to canter through a life of child actor, would-be muso, Genesis drummer-then-frontman, ubiquitous chart star, shoulder-brusher to lords, ladies, royals and rock stars, and serial monogamist.
There are lots of glimpses into his rock, pop and Disney worlds; brief tabloid-feeding mentions of Princess Di’s colonoscopy, Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, songwriting with Adele; some straight-talking about his three marriages; and soul-searching around the alcoholism that nearly killed him. But about the only revelation is that “rumours of my comeback may have been exaggerated, not least by me”.
Not Dead Yet is an oddly prosaic read, possibly not helped by having been ghost-written from months of “ramblings”.
Its most naked moment – when he’s told deafness must end his touring – reveals Collins resenting his performer-persona: “this
‘Phil Collins’ doppelganger [who] has splintered families and embittered partners and distant children. I don’t like this guy.” By the end, you may feel similarly.