Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  We were having a break when I heard a familiar-sounding voice. ‘Fuck me. You’re Jimmy Barnes. What are you doing busking on this street?’

  The voice was croaky and hoarse and obviously Australian. It belonged to a scrawny-looking young guy, dressed like a hippy, who I soon found out was attending university in town. ‘This is how I pay my rent. I busk on the Cours.’ He could speak French but with a hard Australian accent. Even I knew it didn’t sound good. I thought maybe we had taken his spot.

  ‘We can move if you normally work here. We’re just fucking around. I’m thinking of moving to Aix for a while and we thought we’d test out the vibe of the town.’

  He stood with us and drank one of the many free drinks we had lined up, and went on to tell me his life story. He was studying in Aix, but he was doing it tough. He was nearly flat broke, and he hadn’t been able to sing for a week because of a bad throat. He was hungry and needed some help.

  ‘I tell you what we can do. Why don’t you walk around with your hat while we sing and we’ll give you a commission at the end?’ I suggested. This seemed to make him happy. By the time we had finished we had made a lot of money, more than he could fit into his hat. He had already folded quite a lot away and put it in his pockets. He pulled it all out and handed it over to me. I looked at Jeff. We didn’t really need the money. This guy did, so we gave it to him.

  ‘Here you go, mate. You look like you need this more than us. Maybe you could finish these drinks too.’

  Jeff packed up his guitar and we started to leave.

  ‘Thanks guys, this is a great help. I would have been fucking starving this week if it wasn’t for you bastards.’

  Then we walked back to our hotel. This town was all right. It was happening. The people seemed nice enough. I thought that the family would be fine here.

  AIX WOULD BECOME OUR home for a few years. We rented a few different places. One in the foothills, set back against a hill. It was rustic and surrounded by lavender. It was like a painting. Late afternoon we would see men smoking cigarettes as they walked into the bush carrying guns. They were hunting rabbits. I could hear the sound of rifles firing in the distance as I sat out in the garden. But eventually Jane found a house she loved that was for sale. We rang Australia and asked Michael Gudinski to buy it and then rent it to us. We told him it was a good investment, and Michael was our friend. He was happy to help.

  The house was a two-hundred-year-old bergerie, a shepherd’s house, surrounded on all sides by grapevines and wheatfields, with red poppies growing all through the wheat. It was breathtaking. It was like we were surrounded by living art. The wheatfields changed thoughout the year, from bright green to brown to golden yellow, each season offering something new and more beautiful.

  Somehow we had managed to set up a new life that was perfect for us. Despite the damage I had done in Australia, Jane had found this home. It had a room that I converted into a studio so I could start to write music again. The smaller children attended the local French school, and within a few months they were all speaking perfect French. Mahalia was starting high school, and this was a little more difficult. We couldn’t find a place that was right for her. Jane’s Thai father, Khun Suvit, wanted her to go to a great school, and he let us know he was happy to pay for it. We found an amazing one on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, called Le Rosey, one of the best and most expensive schools in the world. John Lennon’s son Sean had gone there. Mahalia was happy, the little ones were happy and Jane was happy.

  I was sort of happy too. Life was perfect when we were home. On warm summer mornings we would set up easels outside the house to paint Mont Sainte-Victoire, which stood in the distance, a few miles from our backyard. This was the mountain Paul Cézanne had painted so many times. After dropping the kids to school, Jane and I would walk through the town to the markets and buy fresh produce, stopping to drink hot coffee and eat baguette with jam, with me trying to talk to people in broken French as Jane blended in with the locals. I was the only member of the family who hadn’t mastered the language. The people of Aix-en-Provence were friendly and warm and were quick to excuse my broken French. We made beautiful friendships that have lasted until this day.

  For anyone else and for me at any other time, this would have been the perfect life. But, like I’ve said, I was troubled. Troubled by my past. I had issues to deal with before I could settle down to enjoy a life as idyllic as this. I didn’t belong in the South of France. I belonged in the gutters of Adelaide. I didn’t deserve to be wandering around the marketplace like I was. I deserved nothing. I was good for nothing and I knew it.

  I felt like it was all happening again. I’d watched Mum start to get ahead, only to be dragged back by Dad’s drinking and bad behaviour. This seemed to be the cycle that my family were all doomed to. I didn’t know how to get off this merry-go-round. I would start to get on top and then the rug was pulled out from under me. I can see now that it was me pulling the rug from under myself. It was self-destruction. But at the time, I only knew I was afraid. I tried to hide my fears, but it was affecting my moods.

  Plus, in the back of my head was a nagging sense of loss. I had failed in Australia. I hadn’t been able to look after my family properly. I’d lost my home and all the things we had surrounded ourselves with. I had nothing. And I felt useless. I was in a strange country and not making money yet, living on handouts from Jane’s father and from my friends at home. I couldn’t enjoy this. How could I?

  I tried to ignore all these thoughts that were eating away at me. Every day I would get up and try to relax. But I couldn’t make money here. The longer I was away from Australia the less chance I had of making it back to the top of my business. The family loved it, but I was different here. There was no rock’n’roll, and none of the trappings that go with it. I couldn’t get smashed and go crazy because no one did that in this town. Our friends would come for dinner and sip wine with their meal and that was it. I never saw any of them drunk. They didn’t take drugs. They liked jazz music, not rock. And God help me, I started liking jazz too. The sound of Miles and Coltrane began to fill my home. I’d never thought it would happen but it was calming to me. To Jane, jazz was like fingernails on a blackboard. She couldn’t take it at all. She would turn off my records and play The Carpenters. I was starting to like them too. What was happening to me? Jazz and The Carpenters. Fuck me. I’d gone soft. I met a lot of musicians but not one rock’n’roll musician.

  Some of our friends would have music nights. A few of them even had a band. Drums, upright bass and piano.

  ‘Hey, Gimmy. Why don’t you sing a song with us?’ they would ask, but I would say I didn’t know the songs.

  ‘You must know this one.’

  But I knew nothing. I started sneaking out and buying albums by jazz singers like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, but I didn’t really like them that much. I would occasionally get up and sing ‘Georgia on My Mind’. I sort of knew that. It was Ian’s song really, I’d heard him sing it a million times with Cold Chisel. But he would never know.

  My French friends loved it when I got up with them. ‘Oh Gimmy, you sing so loud. It’s like you ’ave a, a, how you say, a speaker system built in or something.’

  They would all laugh. These people were happy, well-balanced human beings. I wasn’t used to people like that. At home in Australia I had spent my life surrounded by people like me, who were going crazy trying to fit into a world where they didn’t belong. And as much as I loved being in France with my family and our newfound friends, I knew I didn’t belong here either. Not now anyway.

  I WAS GOING AWAY on tour a lot and getting more and more wasted while I was doing it. Jane could feel it and so could I. I didn’t plan it. It just happened. Like I was waiting for a chance to break loose. Just a little at first, but slowly I got worse and worse. It was as if I wanted to fuck up all the peace of our new lives. I had these problems before I left Australia but I’d never even admitted that they wer
e problems. If anybody suggested I get help or anything of the kind, I just wiped them. They didn’t exist.

  I remember flying to London for a recording session and going out with a few mates and going ballistic. This was around the time that house music and hallucinogenic drugs were all the rage in England. Raves were popping up in disused factories all over the country. My friends took me to a rave. I swallowed a handful of ecstasy tablets and went to an old rundown factory that had been cleaned up for the night. Whoever did it up knew what they were doing because when we got there the place looked like a spaceship. I had never heard anything like the music they were playing there. How did musicians come up with this stuff?

  By the end of the night we found ourselves in a little house near the factory and the drugs got harder. Sheets of blotting paper infused with LSD were handed around like lollies. And of course, I had pockets full of cocaine too.

  At five in the morning I came to my senses a little. ‘Shit, I’ve got to get back to London and check out of my hotel. I have a plane to catch back to France this afternoon,’ I pleaded with the mate who’d brought me.

  ‘Fuck man. I can’t help you. I won’t be able to drive for about three weeks, I think.’

  I looked at him. He was right. His eyes were like saucers. He wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t any better.

  ‘Well, how the fuck do I get back to London then?’ I asked.

  ‘You can get the Tube. The fucking train goes right to your hotel door, Jim.’

  I was worried. ‘I can’t go in this state. Look at me. How am I going to get there by myself?’ I was having trouble standing up by this point.

  ‘Here you go. Take these. They’ll help you keep it together. Have a fucking line too.’ And he pushed a sheet of LSD into my top pocket. I snorted another half gram and walked to the door.

  I stepped out of the house. It was dead quiet and snow was falling. Crunch crunch crunch. I could hear my feet breaking through the fresh snow as I walked. Everything looked like a dream. The cold on my face made me feel alive for a second. I walked down the street with my head tilted back and fresh white snow falling on my equally white face. How would I get out of this?

  Somehow I managed to find the station and got on a train. I hoped it was the right one. I was standing on a busy train absolutely shitfaced and I could still hear the rave music rolling around in my brain. I was trying to take my mind off the journey by going through the music in my head, to work out how they had come up with music like this. The big album of the day was by a band called Leftfield. All I could hear in my head was Leftfield. Then the music started drifting, blending into the clicking of the tracks as the train cut through the snow, heading for central London. The rhythms were the same. That was what they were writing. Urban rhythms. The sounds of the city. The sounds of the Underground. I was happy I had got it, but it wouldn’t help me get to my hotel and then out to the airport and back to France in the state I was in.

  I made it to the hotel and rang my mate. ‘I fucking can’t do this. I’m fucked,’ I begged him.

  But there was nothing he could do. ‘In your top pocket are some of those acid tabs. Take one or two and you’ll be right, mate,’ he said to me. He didn’t have to walk through Customs and travel internationally like I did.

  I packed, snorted a line and headed to the airport. I made it onto the plane and was feeling closer to human when I remembered the acid in the top pocket of my jacket. I would get busted for sure. How did I get through customs in England? I went to the bathroom and flushed the acid and any cocaine I had left down the toilet. All except one line and one piece of blotting paper, which I thought I’d better swallow to help me walk through Marseille Airport. Jane wanted me to come straight to a friend’s house for dinner. I couldn’t face it. I decided I would call from home, saying I was sick.

  I arrived and walked straight though the whole airport without any problem. Outside, I was looking for cab when I heard a voice I knew. The thick French accent trying to speak English was unmistakable. It was Gerard, our friend.

  ‘Hey Gimmy. It is me, Gerard. I ’ave come to pick you up for dinner. Jane said to bring you straight to the soiree.’

  I was in trouble. Gerard laughed at me in the car. ‘You are a crazy person, Gimmy. I want to be like you too.’

  We got to the house and I couldn’t eat or drink. I sat and tried not to look anyone in the eye.

  I MADE ONE RECORD while I was in France, Psyclone. The name said it all. My life was like a cyclone and I needed psychiatric help. We recorded most of the album in Chateau Miraval in the south of France, a beautiful place with its own winery and chef. This was one of the most beautiful studios I had ever seen. Pink Floyd had recorded tracks for The Wall there. It was state of the art. We hired a Southern boy from Memphis called Joe Hardy to produce the record with me. Joe was great. He had at one time, years earlier, contemplated becoming a priest, but decided to make rock’n’roll instead. I think the choice still haunted him. He was wild and clever and troubled and had made a few of my favourite records. Psyclone wasn’t my best work but I had begun to write songs about the real issues I faced. At this time I was staring into the abyss, not sure if I could make it through life in one piece, and the lyrics reflect this. Maybe this was the start of a change, but it would take a lot of work and time to get my head above the water. Time until I could just breathe. I didn’t start working on myself for a long time after making Psyclone, but I do see this record as the start of peeling away the layers that would reveal the real me. The me that in the end would either sink or swim. Some nights I prayed to God, even though I’d stopped believing a long time before, that I would eventually learn to swim.

  WHILE I WAS LIVING in the south of France, I started to get messages from Rod Willis and the band. It seemed enough water had flowed under the bridge to wash away any bad feelings we had about our falling out. The music was calling out to each of us. I was happy making music alone but it wasn’t the same as Chisel. Even the success felt empty in some way. I had it all and couldn’t keep hold of it.

  MY LIFE SHOULD HAVE been full and satisfying. A change of scene. A brand-new life in a new country with new friends. I had peace and I had time to think. But that time to think only made me afraid. Afraid of what I had become. All the drugs and all the music, nothing could stop the noises in my head. Screaming at me, telling me I was no good. I knew it.

  Leaving Australia the way I did had hurt me. I would speak about it in interviews, saying, ‘Oh yes, when the tax man took my house I realised that I didn’t need it. I didn’t need things. I didn’t need possessions. I have all I need right here with me.’

  But I was fooling myself. I felt like a failure. Inside, where no one but me could see it, I knew I was fucked, and it was eating me away. I wanted to go back and prove something to everyone in Australia, but more importantly to myself. I wasn’t only worth something if I was successful, if I owned a lot of stuff, if people threw themselves at me. But secretly, that was how I measured my own self-worth. It was shallow and I knew it. I wasn’t that stupid, was I?

  In 1996 we made plans to move back to Australia, away from the peace and quiet of rural France and back into the firing line of the music business. Jane didn’t want to leave, I think she knew what was ahead of us. I convinced myself that I was going back to make music.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  love songs don’t sell anymore

  AUSTRALIA, 1996–98

  I RETURNED FROM FRANCE determined to get everything back on track and before long it all was – I was back on the same track I had tried to jump off. Only now it was worse. I was drinking more than ever and taking more drugs than ever before. In 1996 I released Hits, a greatest hits anthology that came in at number one. I had a single at number one on the radio charts as well, so I should have been on top of the world, but I was falling apart again. Jane and I were fighting more and more, mainly because I was fucking up in every way possible. To make things worse, Jane was starting to party t
oo. I was tearing down everything we had tried to rebuild. It was one step forward and ten steps back. Cocaine was easy to find in Australia by now and I found it all the time. I would be on tour and come home smelling of booze and women. Smashed and not even capable of making excuses for myself anymore. Instead, I would just storm out of the house and find more of everything.

  WHILE WE WERE IN Europe, I had recorded a song that Jane and I wrote. I remember reading the lyrics and squirming in my chair. Was Jane trying to let me know something? I had to stop myself from thinking about it. The song was called ‘Lover Lover’. It was poppy and catchy. I felt it was something that people might get to like.

  When Jane decided she wanted to write songs I was surprised. She started walking around the house with a clipboard, counting to herself, deep in thought.

  ‘What are you doing, baby?’ I asked her after a few days of this.

  ‘I’m writing a song. I think I’ve worked out how to do it.’

  Great. I hoped she would tell me once she’d figured it all out. ‘That’s good. But what are you counting?’ I was curious. It was like she was doing a maths problem.