From banned on radio to sacred anthems, how Cold Chisel worked their way into our hearts.
Sweat's flying, the crowd's pulsating and the raw, unfettered power of Cold Chisel is skidding towards a squealing, screeching halt.
It's December 1983, and Jimmy Barnes, the wild frontman of one of Australia's most loved rock groups, prowls the stage as the band goes hell for leather, fingers flying over keyboards, guitars and drums.
"Hold me mama, don't let go," Barnes sings, feverishly heading towards the crescendo. He flings his microphone away, the band hits the final notes and that's it, Cold Chisel has finished its Last Stand, the final concert of their final tour, ever.
Except, it wasn't. The fans would not let Chisel go.
Because for a huge cohort of Australian music lovers, Cold Chisel was more than a band. It was our voice, our confidante, our story. They were the bad-boy poets who reached deep into our ordinary life and shone it back at us, with all its grit and muted glory.
As Barnes tells Australian Story: "These songs have become a part of people's lives. People come up to me and say, 'I played your songs at my son's 21st. I danced my first dance with my wife to your songs. I buried my father to your songs'."
Chisel's legendary concerts grew the fanbase in the 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when radio wouldn't play them and record companies were wary.
But 51 years since Chisel formed (and reformed and split and reformed), multiple generations of Australians can blast out the words to Khe Sanh, Cheap Wine and Flame Trees.
Not all those fans were there in the early days, when fisticuffs and flying vodka bottles were part of the frisson of a Chisel concert. Many weren't even born. But they'll all have a favourite Chisel song, one that speaks directly to them.
And that, says lead guitarist Ian Moss — the perfect foil for Barnes, with his velvet vocals and low-key style — is the reason for Chisel's longevity. The songs.
"When we split up, I thought within two years it would be 'Cold who?' All gone," says Moss, as the band prepares to go on tour again.
"But it's just a great legacy to the songs. It's the songs. It all comes down to the songs."
Barnes' recklessness was 'part of the band's success'
Moss smiles as he recalls that day in 1973 when a 16-year-old Barnes walked into the Adelaide apartment of keyboard player Don Walker, the mastermind of Chisel's success.
Walker, Moss and some mates were forming a band and looking for a singer. Their first choice, John "Swanee" Swan, was busy but he suggested his little brother, James Barnes, who sang in a band in the gritty outer suburb of Elizabeth when he wasn't hanging out with his gang.
As Moss went to shake Barnes's hand, "Jim kind of just held back and eyed me kind of suspiciously … I wondered, 'What've we got here?'."
The makings of an Aussie rock legend. Volatile and insecure, Barnes admits he went into that room defensive, fearful of being insulted, and thinking if "worse came to worse, I could always swing at them". In later years, he would address his childhood filled with alcohol and violence but right then, the migrant boy from Scotland was swamped by a jumble of emotions.
But he could sing. Barnes pumped out a song by the British rock band Free and got the gig. Soon to follow was drummer Steve Prestwich, a quick-fisted Liverpudlian, and Phil Small, the even-tempered bass player. Cold Chisel was formed.
They hit the pub scene, playing in rough venues such as Adelaide's Largs Pier Hotel and found an audience that revelled in the cheeky wildness of the band — especially Barnes who was "out of control on booze and uppers", jumping off PA systems and picking fights.
"I started in Cold Chisel, troubled and became more troubled as we went on," Barnes says.
"In a way, my recklessness was part of what made the band successful, because there's other people out in the audience who were going through the same shit as what I did.
"They wanted to just lash out and have a big time. We gave them that opportunity. Anything could happen on stage. We were volatile. We were on the edge. It could go anywhere."
Often to fisticuffs. Chisel started to build staunch crowds but couldn't get a record deal. Industry reps would turn up to see Barnes and Prestwich – good mates and quick brawlers – going toe-to-toe.
"Steve and I would be at each other," Barnes says, "because I wanted to push him to play faster [and] he wanted me to bloody sing better and he'd throw things at me and I'd, you know, belt him." Barnes admits he "constantly argued with everybody" and left the band in a huff countless times.
"All that tension and all that friction was all created because we were so into the band," Barnes says. "If anybody didn't do their best on the night, the other ones would turn on him."
By 1977, they were living in Sydney and travelling in beat-up cars to far-flung gigs, doing mostly covers with a smattering of originals by Walker. The burden of drumming up gigs and money fell on Walker who was a few years older than the others, a bright bloke who'd ditched a career in quantum mechanics for life on the road with a rock band. Barnes was the showman but Walker was the methodical schemer, always planning the next move.
Says Small: "It was quite a chore for Don. All he wanted to do was just play and devote his time to reading and writing more songs and just enjoying himself like the rest of us."
They needed a manager — and Rod Willis needed a band to manage. Willis had worked overseas as a tour manager and went along to Chequers in Sydney's Chinatown to watch Cold Chisel play.
Says Willis: "The piano player started, he did this sort of Jerry Lee Lewis rolling thing. Then this good rhythm section kicked in and I was just going, 'Wow, this band can actually play'.
"Then suddenly this vocalist, this kid, started singing and I was going, 'Wow'. It was a unique voice."
Willis was on board. His advice: get some original songs. He booked a studio, despite Walker's protestations they couldn't afford it.
Walker came along with a song he thought might work: Khe Sanh.
The song 'not suitable for airplay'
To lifelong Chisel fan and music writer Mark Mordue, Khe Sanh rates right up there with Waltzing Matilda, a song that tapped into the Australian psyche and wouldn't let go.
"We love a song filled with defiant tragedy," Mordue says. "Waltzing Matilda is a swagman who drowns himself, who refuses to be arrested. Khe Sanh is the veteran who's psychologically damaged from his experiences in Vietnam and meandering around the country. But there's something heroic in that; the vet hasn't given up, he's still searching.
"It's all there in Khe Sanh. It's in a lot of Cold Chisel songs. This sort of feeling of damage — and of possibility."
It was Cold Chisel's first single, released in May 1978 — and soon rated "not suitable for airplay". The censors took umbrage at references to speed and Novocaine, and the lyrics, "And their legs were often open but their minds were always closed".
The fans loved it. They knew that those words and the searing lines that followed — "and their hearts were held in fast suburban chains" – evoked the Australia they were living in.
Publicity about the radio ban piqued interest and Chisel's live performances took off. "Literally things made a quantum leap," Barnes says. "Our crowds immediately doubled."
Says Walker: "It wasn't getting any airplay, but that was in 'radio world', we were in 'live world'. That's where our band was."
They were "the people's band", says Mordue, who recalls the dripping sweat, swirling smoke and full body impact of Chisel's thundering gigs. That only intensified when the band started playing its own songs from the 1978 debut album, Cold Chisel, and Breakfast at Sweethearts the following year.
"Young people [saw] themselves in the band and they liked the energy and the intelligence of the songwriting," Mordue says. "Barnes in the band brought the energy and Don Walker brought that lyrical intelligence."
Says Barnes: "Don would write songs for me to sing, which were about destroying the place, about kicking up. He must have known what I was going through, and he was writing songs about me and for me to sing and because he's a great songwriter, every single person in our audience thought that song was about them."
Then, in 1980, came their third album, East – and radio could ignore them no longer. "When East came out," Walker says, "it just blew from clubland out into the general population."
A big part of the success was Walker's commercially crafted songs such as Choirgirl, Cheap Wine and Standing on the Outside. "I saw how having songs on the radio can transform your life and I wanted a bit of that," he says. "I was trying to figure out how to write commercially successful melodies. In the end, it worked."
Plus, with Walker's urging, other members tried their hand at songwriting. Small brought the classic My Baby, Barnes poured his love for his future wife, Jane, into Rising Sun, Prestwich gave us Best Kept Lies and Moss wrote Never Before.
"It just seemed to be this … period of we were in love, that kind of feeling," Moss says. "Everything we were doing felt like gold."
And Australians basked in their reflected glory. Author Trent Dalton, a Chisel "super fan", believes the band continues its hold on Australians because "they took the time to speak to us".
"They're talking about working class Australia … most of us can recognise that," Dalton says. "The characters that they've noticed are all the people we know in our lives — it's so easy to transplant yourself into any number of those situations that they're singing about.
"What happens is the songs start out as hits and then they become anthems. And then with time, they become sacred."
East, with an album cover featuring Barnes passed out in a bath wearing an upside-down Japanese bandana, was the biggest selling album that year. That meant music industry recognition – and a spot at the 1980 TV Week Rock Music Awards presented by Countdown.
After all the years of being shunned, of struggling on the road and in the pubs, now the industry wanted to celebrate them. Cold Chisel had their own ideas. "We thought, f**k them, they did nothing for us," Small says.
As they appear on stage, Barnes takes a swig from a vodka bottle, Moss starts the riff to My Turn to Cry and the drums kick in. It's a fairly loyal rendition – until the lyrics change into an admonishment of all those who snubbed Cold Chisel on their rise to stardom.
"I never saw you at the Largs Hotel, I never saw you at Fitzroy Street, and now you're trying to use my face to sell TV Week," screams Barnes.
He hurls his microphone stand, yells "Eat this" on repeat and heads off with his vodka while Moss bashes his guitar against the amp.
It's wildly rock and roll — except the cheap guitar Moss bought for the occasion won't break.
He'd even taken a saw to it beforehand to make the job easier but "try as I may, and I gave it a good, good shot, I couldn't break it".
Within a year, they'd be on their way to the US – and find that was tough to crack, too.
'They just didn't get us': The US tour
Five different people, five complex personalities, all pumped up by their raging success at home but back on the road, trying to make it in the US. The Holy Grail, says Moss.
Their crusade didn't start well. Says Walker: "We went there into the teeth of a record company that actively hated us for one reason or another." The feeling became mutual quickly, the band objecting to being squeezed into a marketing style that was not them.
The band's US release, My Baby (the wrong choice, they thought), was sent to radio stations wrapped in diapers. "They didn't get us," Barnes says.
They had some good gigs, says Moss, but had left their run too late. After so long on the road in Australia, adds Walker, "we had neither the stamina nor the focus to go back to tours and do the hard stuff that you have to do in a new territory such as America".
Small also ponders if the Australianness of their sound was a barrier to US success. "They couldn't really understand the Australian culture in the lyric."
The pressures built. Some of them had girlfriends back home and missed them badly. Some didn't and wanted to cut loose. "There were some funny tensions on the road the whole time," Moss says.
Less than six weeks in, they bailed. It's a deep regret for the band but as Barnes says, he got a great song out of it. "You Got Nothing I Want," from the 1982 album Circus Animals, was one giant "up yours" to the record company executives.
Frictions followed Cold Chisel's next bid for international stardom in Europe, especially a second tour in Germany in 1983. Their music was gaining traction there but the band was falling apart.
Walker remembers Prestwich saying "we shouldn't f**king be here" the moment the plane landed. It set the tone. Says Moss: "We weren't knitting, weren't gelling."
Barnes and Prestwich were at each other. "I was trying to make him play too fast," Barnes says. "The songs were losing the groove and all that pushing and pulling … it was just becoming manic."
Then, one night, Walker had enough. He stood up, tipped his piano over and walked off stage.
Barnes knew the band had fractured. "[Walker] put everything, every waking minute of his day into making that band get to where it was and it was out of his control."
Cold Chisel came home, sacked Prestwich, started work on what was planned to be their fifth and final studio album, 20th Century, and began planning the Last Stand.
The Last Stand ... that wasn't
Sporting a very 1980s perm, 16-year-old Annette English is being interviewed as she waits with friends for the Last Stand concert to start. She's upset Cold Chisel is breaking up. "You can sort of really feel Australia through their songs," she says, "and really identify with it because you know what they're talking about."
Forty-one years on, through a call-out on Cold Chisel's social media, Australian Story tracked down English and one of her mates with her that day, Margie Brown — and found Chisel fandom doesn't die.
"The authenticity, that's what's lasting," says English as the two catch-up over a drink, joking about cheap wine. "It's not just the music, it's the authenticity of the language."
They remember how bad their seats were — right up the back, barely able to see the band, which had recalled Prestwich for the tour. But surging through the venue was a "freight train of energy".
Says Brown: "I remember going for it, I'm loving it, but deep down in my heart, I'm thinking, 'There's no way this beautiful band is going to stop here'."
Her intuition was spot on. In a wonderfully ironic twist, radio kept Chisel alive in the years after they split. "Every time we switched on the radio," Moss says, "there was a Cold Chisel song".
"I was 16 years old and had to be there ... I didn't want to miss out."
Rex Morris of Triple M says FM radio was all about albums, and Chisel had some great ones, demanded by listeners. "For a lot of Australians, Cold Chisel was the soundtrack to the best years of their lives," Morris says. Their manager, Rod Willis, capitalised on the nostalgia, releasing Last Stand's live recordings and compilation albums, gaining huge sales.
As the rest of the band adjusted to life beyond Chisel – Walker was happy to move on, Moss accepting, Small played with a range of bands and Prestwich toured with the Little River Band – Barnes moved quickly into a solo career. By September 1984, he'd released the album Bodyswerve, which topped the charts, followed by his signature song, Working Class Man.
Then, in 1989, Moss released Tucker's Daughter, written with Walker, and it went to number one.
"When you have two people that were the most visible members of the band having hits 10 years later, that has to be a factor in the long running interest in the band," Walker says.
Time moved on. Wounds healed. Momentum built. Come the mid-90s, all five Cold Chisel members were back together.
They kept their reunion secret for as long as they could, an impressive feat given they were rehearsing in such a prominent building: the Sydney Opera House.
Says Willis: "All those Chisel fans are out there wondering whether the band's ever going to get back together again and there they are, down in the bowels of the Sydney Opera House."
It wasn't always pretty. Barnes says band members were wary about getting back together, afraid ghosts would be disturbed.
"And those ghosts were evident … it was chaotic," Barnes says.
Walker remembers a lunch overlooking the harbour when the band was choosing which songs would go on the album, Last Wave of Summer. "That created a bit of tension," Walker says now, a more diplomatic response than in a 2007 interview when he said the choices were made through "psychological manipulation, sullen looks, petulance, tantrums, insane rages both faked and real, sexual coquettishness and pathological violence".
There were problems with engineers and producers, niggles and slights but, "there was great joy the moment we first lit something up and realised, 'Yeah, we can play together'," Walker says. "It's a bit rough, needs a bit of work, but it sounds pretty good."
The album hit number one and the band hit the road on tour. "It just felt like the old days," Small says, "and it was good to see the crowds turn up in the numbers they did."
Just like the old days, though, the tensions returned. "And the band imploded again," Willis says.
That's been the rhythm of Cold Chisel. Get back together, do great work, get on each other's nerves, split. Do it again. Says Barnes: "As we got older, it's not that Cold Chisel kept breaking up, it was just we had to lay it to rest, because we could only take so much of the intensity of it at one time."
And now, to paraphrase Khe Sanh, "they're drifting back to check things out again".
History repeats itself
One by one, they file into Barnes' home and into his studio. He turns on a track and Cold Chisel is in the groove, their heads nodding. In unison.
They've always loved each other, says Barnes. Sometimes they haven't liked each other but the bond is strong.
Says Walker: "There's good mutual history, there's bad mutual history. The bad mutual history tends to fade and get lost in the sepia until next time we try and do something."
Now's the time.
From October, under giant circus tents, Cold Chisel will reform for a national tour. There's some trepidation, says Moss, mostly because each muso believes he's still to deliver his best.
Says Barnes: "Our behaviour has mellowed, but our approach to music hasn't. I still want the same thing from that band that I've always wanted. And that's to be the best rock and roll band in the world."
Someone will be missing. Steve Prestwich, the irascible contrarian who kept the beat for most of Cold Chisel's career, died with a brain tumour in 2011. "It was like the world had fallen apart," Barnes says.
His music remains. Prestwich penned some of Cold Chisel's best-known songs: When the War is Over, Forever Now, and Walker put the words to Prestwich's music to create the crowd favourite, Flame Trees. US drummer, Charley Drayton, now plays with Chisel.
"Whenever we play [those songs]," says Barnes, "I still get misty, I get teary, thinking about Steve."
Barnes had his own brush with death late last year, when bacterial pneumonia spread to his heart, requiring open-heart surgery. "I could have died, and came close to it."
The scrappy bloke who walked into a suburban apartment in the 1970s and became a rockstar is 68 now. Moss and Small are 69 and Walker is 72. The musician Tex Perkins, who Walker collaborates with now, says Cold Chisel is Australia's Rolling Stones. "Our home example of, 'How long can you keep this going?'."
Whatever that timeframe, Cold Chisel's music lives on. Its timeless lyrics and fervent delivery, coupled with a romanticism for a time that looks rosier in the rear view mirror, continues to seduce new fans.
Trent Dalton, 45, says there are three generations of Chisel fans: the "lucky ones" who grew up with them, his own generation which found Chisel through parents and compilation records, and teenagers like his daughters who came to Chisel via modern-day versions, such as Sarah Blasko's rendition of Flame Trees.
"What a gift," Dalton says "This music that's just connected all these different generations of Australians."
Like the Vietnam veteran, listening to Khe Sanh and reminiscing about those nights in Saigon. Or the party crowd, getting ready to hit the town, with Saturday Night on repeat in their heads, or the middle-aged woman, visiting her hometown, Flame Trees blaring on the car radio.
It's the songs. It all comes down to the songs.
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Graphics: Nina Maile Gordon
Photos: Australian Story: Tom Hancock, ABC Archives, Bob King, Getty Images, Cold Chisel
Watch Australian Story's Cold Chisel: On the Outside Looking In documentary on ABC iview and YouTube.
