Unstoppable voice and mighty punch

Press, 25 January 1989, Page 20

Unstoppable voice and mighty punch

Pop performers

Jimmy Barnes, the Australian rocker, comes on strong in concert but retreats to quieter surroundings when not playing to crowds in towns and cities. COLIN HOGG talked with Barnes, whose tour of New Zealand will be at Addington Show Grounds on Saturday, in Melbourne:

Jimmy Barnes isn’t big in Australia. He’s humungous. If he was ever to cast more of a shadow than he does right now, they might have to consider moving him to the outback and renaming him Ayers Rock. It’s that serious. And it’s hard to adjust to, coming from a country like New Zealand where we’re so reluctant to celebrate our musical talent that we export it and occasionally catch it on the rebound from foreign acclaim. In Australia, they think that being Australian is much better than carrying some foreign brand label. They celebrate Australiana with an enthusiasm that is likely to send , the average understated

Kiwi reeling back in horror.

They mightn’t be the coolest people in the world, but their self-belief extends very thoroughly to their heroes. The kids love INXS, the mums and dads and the under-assistant trainee merchant bankers love Johnny — sorry, John — Farnham.

But the working class girls and boys, jokers and sheilas, louts and petrol heads love Barnes with a

ferocity that on this particular night, is shaking

the walls of a rock’n’roll barn called the Melbourne Entertainment Centre as a chorus of 10,000 chants, “JIMMY ... JIMMY ... JIMMY.” It is the third of what will be four sell-out shows in the space of a couple of months at the 10,000-seat venue by Barnes and his

band. To say the 32-year-old rocker has made it in his adopted home — he was

born in Glasgow — is an understatement akin to suggesting Michael Jackson’s bank manager smiles occasionally. Barnes has achieved it all by wrapping himself in rock’n’roll’s root values — hit ’em hard and loud between the eyes with the sort of show that sends everyone reeling home, ears ringing, convinced they’ve just had the best time of their lives.

On this particular hot and sticky Melbourne night, the crowd is as hellbent on having a rowdy good time as Barnes is determined to give it to them. Which he proceeds to do with a raw, rocking two hours of blood-boil-ingly loud rock’n’roll prominently featuring that unstoppable Barnes voice which sounds as if he marinates it overnight in sharp stones and kerosene.

Subtlety doesn’t get a leg in. Barnes simply gives the show everything, including, on this particular night a guest appearance by two-year-old son Jackie, who takes the stage with Dad, his little head book ended in big ear muffs, a mini electric guitar hanging from his tiny shoulders. He knows all the moves, too, miming power chords. When Dad reaches down to touch his guitar, he slaps the paternal hand away. Don’t mess with this kid

' All the heat and frenzy is a bit much for a lowkey Kiwi and, precious “access all areas” pass clutched firmly, I stagger backstage briefly in search of something cold and, preferably, faintly alcoholic. But the tubs of ice and the chiller cabinet aren’t filled with Fosters or Castlemaine.

Not unsurprisingly — considering who is sponsoring the Barnes tour — the cold, bubbly stuff on offer here is called Pepsi. Oh well, any oasis in a desert.

Perhaps it is as much a tribute to Barnes’ considerable profile in this part of the world as anything that a huge corporation such as Pepsi is prepared to pump six figures into an Australasian tour by the singer without in any way being allowed to ripple the surface of his credibility. Pepsi is sponsoring Baines, Barnes is not sponsoring Pepsi. Despite the array of cans available backstage, Barnes is not obliged to let a drop penetrate that rugged throat, in private or public.

Pepsi picked Barnes, they say, because his appeal is so broad-based — even more broadly based, their research claims, than the hugely successful INXS and the too-nice-to-be-true John Farnham.

More importantly, the soft drink hustlers say, is the fact that “he’s a figure people actually trust.” Since launching his solo career five years ago, after the demise of his previous claim to fame, the very successful Cold Chisel, Barnes has released four albums, “Bodyswerve,” “For the Working Class Man,” “Freight Train Heart” and, last November, the double in-concert set, “Barnestorming.” His album sales in Australia now total more than one million, while in New Zealand they’ve spiralled up past an impressive, bearing in mind our relative lack of bodies, 130,000. The Barnes boy is not short of bucks though, apart from buying the Aussie equivalent of a country estate two hours outside Sydney and a ’62 Chev Corvette, he hasn’t exactly turned into Mr Flash. , , Barnes’ only real problem right now lies in taking the next logical step in his career — cracking the American market, something Cold Chisel failed to do, a fact that doubtless contributed to the band’s demise.

Barnes, looking cleareyed and fighting fit backstage at the Entertainment Centre while his band runs through a lateafternoon sound check before the show, adopts an offhand outlook on that one.

“America’s been the next step for the last five years. Same thing with Chisel. The first time we went, in ’79, it was a big step. After that it was a matter of plugging away. “Now it’s a'matter of making good records and if they sell there, they sell there, I’m not going to go out of my way. “With Chisel, we didn’t go there till the ‘East’ album, and really the songs were very diverse as far as styles go. “It was very hard to label us and, particularly back then, American record companies and marketing people liked to be able to say: ‘They’re like this or that.’

“Half of them just didn’t understand us and at that time radio was particularly soft. They thought REO Speedwagon or Toto were hard rock bands. Really we were closer to someone like the Doors.

“I guess if The Doors had come out in 1979 it would have been difficult for them. We were a band you needed to see live, and you know what we were like live.

“I guess it was a bit scary for them.”

The solo Barnes still seems to be “a bit scary” for the delicate Americans. American reviews of the “Freight Train Heart” album, recorded with the States very much in mind, are nervous of Barnes’ full-on approach to his songs.

As fans know, even a Barnes ballad, like his current hit, a cover of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” comes on with the sort of sonic force some heavy metal acts might have trouble mustering. . “Yeah, I’ve seen those reviews,” says Barnes. “But with the heavy metal band boom of the last three or four years, radio is more likely to play hard, guitar-based rock ’n’ roll. They’re used to it now.

“I think they still find me a little hard to pigeonhole. The thing you have to watch about being successful in America is being successful too quick.” Oddly, considering his runaway success since, Barnes seemed like one of the members of Cold Chisel least likely to carry his career on solo.

Barnes might have been the raucous, vodka-swill-ing focus of Chisel in concert, but keyboards player Don Walker wrote the vast bulk of , the songs. Even : lead guitarist and singer lan Moss seemed a more likely candidate to spin off into a successful solo career.

(Both Walker, with a band called Catfish, and Moss, operating solo, are only now in the process of releasing albums and getting acts on the road). Despite the music industry’s current obsession with cover versions, writing original material is an essential for anyone wanting to pursue a credible rock’n’roll career. In the beginning at least, that was a skill that didn’t come easily to Barnes. In the beginning, even being serious about a career in music didn’t come easy.

/‘When I first joined Chisel, I thought: ‘Hell these are good players. This is serious.’ But to tell you the truth it wasn’t until 18 months down the track, once we’d established ourselves, started to play our own material, that I started to become very serious. “It took a long time. Don had to push the rest of us into writing. “There was a helluva lot of pressure for him to come up with that many songs and I guess he had a lot of emotional pressure on him because he was starting to make a lot of money out of it and he didn’t want us to miss out. “That was why he encouraged us. Me, being such a lazy bastard, I’d probably never have started writing. Same with Mossy (lan Moss).

“Don used to' sit us down and try to match us up in writing teams.”

Barnes admits now that even a Chisel song like the angry “You Got Nothing I Want” — writterif as a gut response to

record company attitudes in America — which was credited to him, hung on a chord structure donated by Moss. And although “Barnes” appears in the songwriting credits, usually in combination with another name, on virtually all of his solo work, writing still doesn’t always come easily. “I’m not the sort of person who writes continually. If I’m writing with the right person I find it easy. “Some of the stuff that was credited to me alone was actually written with lan, because I’m such a bad musician — a bad guitar or keyboard player. He helped with guitar chords. Basically, the song would be my idea. “I wrote most of ‘Bodyswerve,’ but to me the album lacked light and shade. And it lacked class in arrangements. That made me turn to cowriting. “I worked with people like (American keyboards player) Johnathan Kane and that opened my eyes to the fact that these people were very clever arrangers. “And that made me pursue that approach with ‘Freight Train Heart,’ where I worked with people like Desmond Child, who has a very good head for melodies. I like working with keyboard players. Because I like the aggressive stuff, it makes a better combination.”

He’s already thinking about the next album.

“I’ve got some ideas together for it. We’ll record at least some of it in Australia. Some of the best things on ‘Freight Train Heart’ like ‘Seven Days’ and ‘Lessons in Love’ — my favourite tracks — were recorded here.

“The raw songs are the ones I like. I don’t want to sound American.”

Staying true to his vast Australian market is obviously important to the Barnes boy. His current tour, which kicked off at the beginning of November, has taken in the small as well as the big centres of population.

“We’ve done a lot of small towns on this tour. When you’ve got a new band, instead of rehearsing for weeks and weeks, it’s better to get out and road test the songs on some people.

“And the other thing is that ever since Cold Chisel days, we’ve tried to make a point of taking the music to the punters, even in the small towns. They’re the ones who buy the records and they really appreciate it if you make it to their towns. A lot of bands don’t bother with the smaller places.

“We don’t make much money, but I don’t think we lose anything. Anyway, it’s worth it just to see the look on their faces.”

On the subject of faces, now that he boasts one of the most recognisable ones in Australia, Barnes has to play that tricky game of balancing popularity with, privacy. "It’s annoying when you’re out to dinner and you’re mouth’s full of food and someone comes up and says: 'I hate to interrupt you ...’ That’s the only time. Usually I try to be obliging.

“I moved to the country six years ago when my daughter was born (Barnes and wife Jane have three children) because there were people round the house every night, all night. Half the people coming round weren’t friends. And when I was a kid I always wanted to live in the country.

“It’s not an island, but it’s set up so that it’s fairly secluded.”

Meantime, Jimmy Barnes can sustain himseif and his career on the fact that he is a legend in his own considerable backyard. “I don’t think I’ve peaked. My market’s expanded, but it’s still not like Farnham. Being this big doesn’t frighten me. I just do what I do. “I think a lot of the reason I have the following I do is because I work live so much and my records are representative of what can happen live. I don’t do. anything on record that we can’t reproduce live. ~

“So it’s a combination of making the record and delivering live as well.’’ Something he’s about to do i|i New Zealand. «