Larry Schwartz
He’s been growling in a portable room at the back of the stadium, preparing the vocal cords for another punishing show. Now he stalks the gravel in shiny black leather, a shock of bleached-blond hair, a ring wagging at his left lobe, a glass of water in one hand.
The skies are cloudy but the word is the band’s manager has a word with “Dad” and He’s promised there’ll be no downpour tonight in the NSW town of Bathurst. From somewhere out there comes a dull, muted roar: “Churzl. Churzl.” Jimmy Barnes wanders towards the back of the stage at
Carrington Park, home to the Penguins rugby league club.
Barnes opens his mouth and closes it, as though barking back at the baying from beyond the towering scaffolding, draped in black canvas.
Once a self-styled wildman of Australian rock, he’s the Cold Chisel member who’s remained in the limelight with solo success and economic woes since the band split up in the early ’80s. He says Bathurst is just another gig. But tonight he’s as anxious as ever: “I get tense at bloody rehearsals.”
Soon Chisel will be leaping across the divide to take up where it left off 15 years ago at a farewell concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. “It was a real relief,” Barnes says of the concert he remembers all too well. “It was also really, really sad. Really mixed emotions.”
Cold Chisel has re-emerged in recent months with a platinum (140,000 sold) new album, The Last Wave of Summer. And though there have been subsequent performances at smaller venues, tonight’s concert will effectively launch their sellout national tour.
While some may play down the Bathurst show, others here are attaching to it a certain significance. “Tonight, I hope we’re going to witness an incredible event,” says Michael Lawrence, author of a new book on the band, who’s driven up from Geelong to watch them play.
It’s 20 years since he first encountered Cold Chisel sipping beer at a hotel in Sunshine Road before a show. He remains convinced that Cold Chisel had the talent in its heyday to become as big an international act as Led Zeppelin or U2, and is looking forward to a performance that will be
“a historic event in Australian rock’n’roll”.
“From our point of view, what this show does is it breaks the ice,” says Chisel manager Rod Willis, a big man with short-cropped hair, who honed his spiel on the road in recent months promoting the album. Willis has remained a custodian of sorts overseeing the band’s interests and says
he is “big brother, father, uncle, dictator, best mate, worst mate”.
“Everybody wants to get on with it,” he says. “We’ve got all these shows sold out around the country and it’s good to fire the gun and get started. You sit around waiting for the race to start. It gets on your nerves.”
A crowd of 50 or so well-wishers and autograph seekers met a reformed Chisel at Bathurst airport mid-afternoon. Some members of the band have been up to Mount Panorama and around the track in cars that will contest the weekend’s FA 1000 Classic. Guitarist Ian Moss has come away
with a photo of himself alongside Sir Jack Brabham.
“What pulled us apart was we needed to get away because we’d learned all we could from each other,” Barnes says, “and it was as simple as that … What brought us back is that we’ve grown up and we’re ready to make more music. The music is what’s brought us back.”
There appears to be a sense of shared purpose here. Still, it’s tempting to wonder about rumored conflicts that kept some members apart. “There’s tension,” says Barnes, now 42, “but we deal with the tension a lot better. We’re older, wiser, you know. We’ve not come to blows yet.”
Manager Rod Willis says, “It can be quite volatile and we all fight like cats and dogs. But don’t let anybody outside the circle criticise anybody inside the circle because everybody goes to their defence.”
Drummer Steve Prestwich was sacked by the band after a disastrous German tour in ’83 then reinstated in time for the final shows that December. “I think we’ve learned to understand each other a bit more,” he says. “But to tell you the truth, I think it’s our differences that are our strength
… If we were all similar, the chemistry wouldn’t be the same.”
Prestwich went to what he recalls as “a soft landing” with Little River Band. He and bassist Phil Small have been the least visible in the post-Chisel years.
Six burly Mac trucks had rolled into Bathurst, a farming and industrial centre 205 kilometres west of Sydney, earlier this month with equipment for the first Chisel show in the town since March 1983. Soon a younger crowd than you might expect for a band of its era will be treated to a two-
hour show in which Chisel will run through old hits and new songs, accompanied at times by a saxophone player, three back-up vocalists and for the single, Yakuza Girls, three blonde women waggling naked breasts and treating the crowd to a display of widespread thighs and g-stringed
behinds.
Minutes before the start, keyboard player Don Walker ambles past, looking nonplussed. The band’s chief songwriter, his participation is vital to the success of Chisel’s re-emergence. One of the great live bands of the ’70s and early ’80s, it is probably less known now for for the onstage antics
and excesses of a heavy-boozing frontman Barnes than the extraordinary talents of its songwriter.
Barnes insists that Walker’s material was the key ingredient and it is “a gift to be able to sing songs as good as Don writes”. “He has his anger and he has his twist that he has to get out and I was the vehicle to sing it for him,” he says.
Walker has quietly pursued a solo career that has won more critical than commercial acclaim. “The kind of area that I love to work in in music is not an area that works on radio,” he says. “People don’t listen to it and buy things. It’s not a mass taste thing. It’s like bebop jazz decades ago …
and you don’t do that with the expectation of selling a lot or getting rich.”
He has no illusions about Cold Chisel’s return. “I kind of joined in with the idea that if this ever gets overly uninspiring I can always jump off,” says Walker, tempted back by longtime manager Rod Willis.
“I don’t think it’s a rest-of-the-life thing. To me, it’s getting back together for an album and to play anywhere that’s interested me. That obviously happens for a limited time. I have no plans beyond that. When this runs its course, which it should do at some stage in 1999, I’ll be getting back
to doing my own next thing.”
Even so, such has been the interest in the new album and concerts, you’d swear they were back for good or ill. Sales have ensured strong interest in the tour. “In my mind, all we’ve really done is ship the album to an audience that already exists,” says Warren Costello, Mushroom’s managing
director, who has has flown up from Melbourne for the concert. “We haven’t really tapped a new generation of potential Cold Chisel fans, I guess.”
Just a few minutes to go before they’re up to face a modest crowd of about 3000, the bulk of the audience male and in their 20s. The venue is in the centre of town. To minimise disturbance the band has been asked to finish early. We walk on thick grass on a field that seems empty. You can
buy plastic cups of beer, doughnuts or hotdogs around the periphery. There’ll be brisk sales too of Chisels merchandise: T-shirts, singlets, stubby holders, key rings.
Now they’re on. “G’day boys and girls of Bathurst, how ya doing?” says a man in blue announcing the band. They start the set with Baby’s On Fire, a Don Walker song from the new album. Through the night, they’ll mix old and new. And though none encounter the cry of recognition you hear
at the start of Khe Sanh, the later songs go down well.
Cheap Wine, Rising Sun, Way Down, Painted Doll, Things I Love In You, Merry Go Round, Last Wave, Standing On The Outside, You Got Nothing I Want, Flame Trees, Pretty Little Thing, Good Bye, Astrid, Saturday Night, Forever Now, Red Sand, even ol’ Johnny Cash’s Big River and more.
The floodlights go on. It’s all over now bar the shouting. The crowd disperses slowly to the sound of a Jerry Lee Lewis record. Musicians, strippers, management, media, publicists and others will board a coach to the airport where a girl in her late teens waits to have a flimsy garment
autographed and says her job is to turn out the lights when the 15-seater planes ferrying the entourage back to Sydney have gone.
Michael Lawrence will head back home in his Camira. For him this will have rekindled something of the past. “When I was 15 or 16, I saw the band play back in the days when drivers’ licences didn’t have pictures on them and you could get into some of the hotels,” says the 35-year-old author
of self-published book The Cold Chisel Story, distributed by Five Mile Press and selling quickly too tonight at $29.95.
“I remember seeing them at the Tottenham Park Hotel in Sunshine Road. We got in really early because we had to. We all had false IDs. The whole band was sitting across from us. They were having a few jugs of beer and so on. We stood right on the front leaning on the monitors. It was a
really phenomenal show.
“I was into Zeppelin at that point. But I’d never seen someone live play like that. They just blew me away. I remember they were in the middle of Wild Thing and we were calling out down the front, “Jimi Hendrix!” and they just launched into Purple Haze. We just thought this was amazing.
I’d never seen a band play with that sort of intensity or passion.”
The Sunday Age, 22nd of November 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 