by Jimmy Barnes
I got to him just as he was shouting down at her, laughing, ‘Fucking gook.’
Bang! I hit him way too fast and way too hard. His teeth smashed and he crumpled into a heap on the ground. I was over him, waiting for him to get up or his friend to move. He looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Barnesy. I’ve travelled five hundred miles to see you sing tonight.’
I glared at him and his mate. ‘One more move and you’re going home in a box.’
I helped Jane up and we left. But I’d hit him too hard. It was an automatic reflex. My body had done what it was trained to do. I had a bad attitude. A bad temper. A bad coke habit. So I stopped training until I had some control. It would take years. The harder I tried, the closer to the edge I got.
RELENTLESS TOURING WAS WEARING us down. Jane and I loved each other but we were seeing each other less and less. We weren’t making any headway with our finances either. I was working more than ever and struggling to pay interest on loans, never mind paying the ever-increasing tax bill. A tax bill would come in and I would have to work to pay it. Then that meant I needed more money because I’d made more money so the tax bill kept getting bigger. The wheels kept turning and I couldn’t get off. Running, constantly running, and never getting anywhere.
I was playing big tours to big houses. The huge, state of the art sound systems I needed to ensure that we sounded better than anyone else in the country were costing more every tour. I was happy to pay as long as my sound was great and the people were getting their money’s worth. I had The Rolling Stones’ lighting guy, Patrick Woodroffe, design a massive light show with moving trusses and a million lights for a tour that was the size of a Rolling Stones warm-up show. Patrick was a nice guy and charged me a fraction of what he was charging anyone else in the world, but it was still more than I could afford. I knew I was never going to make money like this, but I felt this was an investment in my future touring. If I kept spending more each time, then the tours would get bigger each time too. I was still selling a truckload of records. Two Fires sold over 400,000 albums. It went six times platinum. It was my fifth consecutive number one album. The tour was massive. It seemed I could do no wrong, but bad money management on my behalf was dragging me down. I tried not to think about it. I could always make more money.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
higher and higher
IN MY STUDIO, 1990–93
CHRISTMAS 1990 WAS GOING to be spent in our home. I would tour right up to Christmas and then take a short break. My band would stay with us over the holidays and then continue touring through the New Year. Don Gehman, who had produced Two Fires, loved my family and wanted to spend Christmas with us. We were going to have a house full of people. In reality, Jane and I probably needed to spend time together, just us and the kids, but that never seemed to happen. There was always somebody; most of the time a lot of people.
A few of my band were travelling from North America every time we toured. Tony Brock and Jeff Neill had become regulars, Tony coming from Los Angeles and Jeff travelling from Canada whenever I needed them. Jeff eventually moved to the Southern Highlands to be nearby in case I needed him and to help me with the costs, but Tony wanted to stay in Los Angeles even though he only played for me. Tony’s airfares and the wages were adding up. I was paying him in US dollars. A lot of US dollars. It was a lot of money to be taken out of the pot. I tried to talk him into moving. ‘It’ll be better for both of us, Tony, if you move over here. You’ll save me a fortune in airfares and you’ll get to see your family more often.’
‘Na mate. You see I moved to LA from England to make it in the big time. I got me green card and things are going well. I want to be famous in America, you know what I mean, so I’m staying there.’
I never understood this. With the money he was making from me he could have been set up for life in Australia, yet he preferred to live in a small apartment in LA. I thought he was crazy.
But at the time Tony wanted his wife and two kids to come over and stay for Christmas. Don brought his wife too. Then there was Jeff and the rest of the band, all staying with us. The White House was big but it wasn’t big enough for all this. Still, it was easier and cheaper to keep all my band in Australia than send them home for Christmas and then fly them back immediately after to tour. So I decided that rather than have everyone sitting around the house getting under each other’s feet, I would make an album over the Christmas break. This of course didn’t really make things easier. Now we needed roadies and an engineer.
I discussed it with Don and the band. We would make an album for fun. It didn’t matter if we never released it. We decided to record all the songs I’d liked as a young guy. Songs I heard on the radio. Songs I sang at parties or at soundchecks. We started making a list. It became apparent that most of the songs were soul songs, so we decided to make a soul record. Don had a lot of ideas. Budget restrictions and the unavailability of good horn players meant we wouldn’t use real horns on the record. Anyway, we would make it sound more modern by using samples. Tony by this time had a definite idea of the sounds he liked for his drums too, and they were modern, with drum samples as well, so the record would not sound like a traditional soul record at all. It would be either really good or it would stink.
Don had gotten even stranger by the time he arrived in Australia. He was constantly fasting and on radical cleansing diets. This made him moody and he could at times be difficult to be around. But he was a great guy, dry and funny and full of great stories about the music industry. Don had done it all, from building Elvis’s concert sound system to helping record some of the Bee Gees’ biggest albums. He had lived a hard fast life. But he’d had to change his ways or die by the time I met him. He no longer drank or took drugs. Making records was the only thing besides his family that brought him joy.
I would sometimes walk into the control room and there would be Don holding court with the rest of the band. ‘You know if you only eat raw food and nothing else your bowels start to –’
‘Enough Don!’ I would cut him off
Anyway, Don wanted to make the record his way. But this was my record, so we fought each other to get it done our own way. It wasn’t that we had big fights. It was a bit like arm wrestling. I’d lean on him until he bent a little and did something the way I wanted and then he’d lean on me until I let him do his thing. But even when he was at his most difficult, Don knew what he was doing. And as strange as he could be sometimes, I liked Don a lot and I trusted him. I put my career in his hands.
WE FINISHED THE RECORD and sent it to Mushroom. There was an obvious silence from Michael. I’m not sure he got it. In fact, I know he didn’t like it at the time.
Eventually he called. ‘What are you doing, mate? Your fans won’t know what the fuck you’re doing singing this shit.’
I had to convince him. ‘For a start, this isn’t shit. It’s soul music, Michael.’
‘I fucking know that. It’s not bad, it’s –’
I interrupted him. ‘It’s better than not bad, Michael. I think it’s pretty good.’
I could almost see Michael pacing as he spoke on the phone. ‘Yeah, all right. It’s good, but can we just wait until Two Fires is gone before we confuse the fuck out of your audience? I know what I’m doing, trust me. We wait until Two Fires is off the charts and then we slip this one out without too much fanfare. We’ll see what happens.’
As we got closer to a release date for Soul Deep, which is what I called the record, Michael was even more unsure. ‘Listen. Why don’t we just shelve this fucking thing for a while and make a rock’n’fucking roll record?’
It was a battle. Michael was sure that my audience would hear the record and think that I had lost my mind. I wasn’t sure that they wouldn’t either. And to be fair, some of them did.
We had to wait a long time, nearly a year. Two Fires would not die. It just kept selling. This was a good problem to have, but during that time the soundtrack of the movie The Commitments came out. It was all soul musi
c. When we finally released Soul Deep at the end of 1991, some people thought we were jumping on the soul bandwagon. Luckily for us it entered the charts at number one, making it six number one albums in a row for Mushroom and myself. It also went on to become one of the biggest albums in Australian music history, going more than nine times platinum and making Michael Gudinski a fortune. To be fair to Michael, as soon as he got it, he went into action. And when Michael gets something, he knows how to sell it better than anybody else in the business. I used to hear Michael on the radio, taking the credit for the record. ‘Yeah. It was a gamble but that’s what Jimmy and I do. We take risks. This one paid off and I’m glad I got him to make it.’
MY KIDS THOUGHT THAT everybody played music. Our house was always full of musicians and singers and producers, so why would they think any different? It was only a matter of time before they asked me if they could make some music too. As parents, Jane and I always thought that there weren’t enough albums of kids singing for kids. It was always adults singing to kids, acting like kids. We decided to let them try. There was never any pressure to make anything great. It was all just fun.
David Froggatt was a friend of the family and, besides playing great guitar, he knew his way around a studio. David loved the kids and volunteered to take on the job of producing the band, which we called The Tin Lids, after the rhyming slang for ‘kids’. It was great to watch. You can’t force a five- or a six-year-old to do anything they don’t want to do. Dave would sit and wait for that moment when they were ready and hit the record button. Then as quickly as they were ready to record, they would be finished and running out the door to play again. He was extremely patient.
We decided that a Christmas album would be fun and David came up with some arrangements for a few classic carols. The album, Hey Rudolph, worked. It had a sense of fun and seemed to connect with a whole bunch of children out there, who wanted to sing songs with other children. The album was released for Christmas 1991 and tore up the charts, hitting the number one spot in a few markets around the country. And the kids had a great time. They even went on tour. But we never made them do anything they didn’t want to do. Music had to be fun for them or they wouldn’t be a part of it.
Our kids made a couple of records, did a few tours, and then lost interest until they got a little older. Now I can’t keep any of them out of my studio. In fact, I have to book to get time to record myself. I’m often asked if I was worried about bringing my children into the music business. I know it can be hard and cut-throat. But the way I see it, they’re in a business where their job is to bring joy to people’s lives. That’s not a bad thing.
WITH SOUL DEEP SMASHING records all over the place, we prepared to go out on tour, which not surprisingly ended up being a bit of a costly exercise. To play this stuff well, we needed a big band. Bigger than usual. We needed a horn section and three backing singers. It wouldn’t be an arena type of show so we planned to use smaller theatres, like the State in Sydney and the Palais in Melbourne. These venues fitted fewer people and cost loads to hire, so it was more expensive all across the board. I soon found out that touring with a large soul band was not the best way to make money. Just like the title of one of my singles off the album, the costs kept getting higher and higher, and so did I. But it kept the album in the charts and selling, which was why we were doing it.
Every show for a long time was a soul show. They were quieter and less aggressive. It wasn’t long until I wished I had never made a soul record. I wanted to get out and scream and pin people to the back wall but that wouldn’t happen for about a year. By that time, I was chomping at the bit. I would go on to revisit my soul roots quite a few times over the years and every time I did I learned more about singing and how to pace a show. I made Soul Deeper (2000), an imaginative title if I don’t say so myself, then The Rhythm and the Blues (2009) and lastly Soul Searching (2016), each time working with amazing musicians from Memphis to Nashville. Every time I did it was an education that was invaluable to me as a singer. Eventually the shows would morph into one where I could play soul songs and rock songs in the same set. But that would take time.
TINA TURNER HAS ALWAYS been one of the great singers for me. Since I first heard ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ as a single back in 1966, I was hooked. Even as a young boy I could feel the electricity. I could feel the heat. I didn’t know what was generating that heat. I was too young to understand the raw sexual power of Tina and her look. But I knew I liked it. Nearly ten years later, I heard that Ike and Tina Turner were coming to Adelaide and I wanted to be there. By this point I knew exactly why I liked it. It was more than the sound.
Myself and a few of my mates drove to Kingston Avenue in Richmond and kicked in the back doors at the Apollo Stadium so we could see her. Nothing was going to stop me. That night was more than a concert, it was part of my education. I watched, mesmerised by the singing and dancing and energy of Tina and the Ikettes. I had made my way down to the very front row. I stood right in front of Tina, eyes wide open as she danced in front of me. In fact, it was as if she was dancing just for me, sweat dripping from her brow as she screamed and moaned her way through her set.
Behind Tina, I noticed something else going on. There was someone else driving the whole thing along like a steam train. Ike, her husband, was in the background, pushing and shoving the band until they played better than they thought they were capable of playing, pushing them to the very edge and beyond their playing ability. This, in combination with the sexual energy generated by Tina, made me sit up and take notice like never before. I watched as Tina poured her heart and everything she had out on the stage and as Ike drove the band harder and harder as every song started. By the end of the night the band, the singer and the crowd were ready to explode.
So, imagine how I felt when I was asked to join her in a campaign promoting rugby league. This campaign was one of the greatest collaborations of music, sport and advertising I had ever seen. Since 1989, Tina had taken rugby league, a game strictly for blokes and blokes alone, and made it accessible to women and families. To the masses. The game went from strength to strength. The whole idea was absolute genius. In 1992, the NRL asked me if I would consider joining Tina in the TV ads. This meant I would have to travel to Holland to record and make a film clip with her. They would pay me a fortune. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing. I would have paid them to let me sing with her. It was one of the great moments in my life to stand next to Tina as she sang in the studio.
Everything I remembered from being that ten-year-old kid listening to her sing on the radio was right there in front of me. She was strong, beautiful, emotional, sexy, warm, loving and incredibly powerful. Tina was the real deal. I stayed in touch with her for a while after that, jumping up to sing with her whenever she asked.
Tina and I shared more than music. I had watched as my mother was beaten at home by her husband, just like Tina had been. But Tina escaped from that pain. She never let the violence define who she was. I often wished my mum had done the same, but everyone deals with things in their own way, I guess. Tina took that pain and it made her stronger. She took everything life had thrown at her and tossed it straight back, proud, strong and defiant. No matter how old she got, she never changed. She was committed to her life and her art. She shared her soul and her pain every night with her audience. The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up when I hear her sing. Just like they did in 1966.
AFTER A YEAR OR so of soul music, I decided to make a hard-sounding record. Grunge had taken hold, with new bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden playing louder and heavier. I don’t try to follow trends, in case you haven’t noticed. All I knew was that rock’n’roll was getting played on the radio again and I liked it.
I set about writing songs that I could record. I think it was Jeff Neill who showed me G tuning on my guitar. This was an old blues tuning that was made popular by Keith Richards. I loved it, and as soon as I picked up my guitar, new songs started pouring out of m
e. The songs I was writing with Tony and Jeff were heavy. The guys were practically living at my house by this point. All Jeff wanted to do was work all the time. Tony and I liked to work but we also wanted to have fun. A lot of my writing time involved consuming lots of booze and cocaine, which as I have said was becoming more and more readily available in Australia. It wasn’t cheap. Tony would laugh and call it ‘Dandruff of the Gods’. The price of coke was obscene. I hate to guess how much I spent in those days but – spoiler alert here – it was nothing compared to the ridiculous amounts I would spend later. I’ll tell you more about that when we get there. Tony seemed happy to stay and write with me.
THE SONGS WE WROTE had potential. Some were hard and political, others were trippy and twisted. But I still needed more songs for my record. Something was missing. I reached out to Don Walker for the first time since the Cold Chisel break-up.
Now, let me clarify that it wasn’t exactly the first time. I had asked Don for help in the past but he hadn’t responded. I probably made it sound like I didn’t really want his help that much. Anyway, I was brushed off. Don was happy to help Ian with his career but was reluctant to help me. I’m not sure if he was still angry that I’d left the band or if he thought I was doing well enough without him. I think it might have been a bit of both. Anyway, much to my surprise, this time Don responded positively.
‘Yeah. All right, Jim. Let me have a look and I’ll see what I can do,’ he said in that Queensland drawl that I knew so well.
What he did was write the best song on the album. ‘Stone Cold’ sounded to me like a classic Don Walker song. Bluesy and soulful and full of great melodies for me to sing. It felt great to be singing one of his songs again. We recorded the song, with Ian Moss playing guitar. I can see now that this moment was the start of the big thaw for us. For all the reasons you know and some that even we don’t know, the break-up hurt each one of us in a lot of ways. Wounded, we scattered, trying not to think too much about the mistakes we had made. But from this recording on, we got along better.