SOUL BROTHER

Rip It Up, Issue 173, 1 December 1991, Page 4

SOUL BROTHER

In the Cold Chisel days, Jimmy Barnes earned a “Wild Man of Rock” image, from the band’s over-the-top threehour appearances at Sweetwaters Festivals, from his drinking and the band'’s attempts to hide black eyes, when passion overflowed (yet again?) in a hotel foyer. It's that same manic Jimmy Barnes passion, that the singer brings to his love of the musicwe call Ilsoul.ll : )

If asked to guess what songs Jimmy Barnes would perform on an album of soul covers, | would've put three singers (all good shouters) at the top of the list, as likely sources of Barnes material — Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and James Brown. In fact Jimmy only does one Pickett song and none by the out of control Ofis “Gotta Gotta” Redding or the simply mad James Brown. When | asked Jimmy about the lack of a Redding rave-up, the singer’s also surprised there’s no Redding. “Otis is one of my favourite singers of all time and there were certain songs we could have done, one of them was ‘Try A Little Tenderness’, because that's my favourite Otis song of all fime, butthe Committments have done that. | love tons of it — ‘l've Been Loving You Too Long'. With the album Sou/ Deep, have you avoided fast songs like Redding's ‘I Can't Turn You Loose"? “That was on the list, but it didn't happen. We wrote down a list of 30 or 40 songs and then whittled it down. ‘Respect’ was on there for a while, ‘Dock of the Bay’ was. You've taken a very different approach to soul, than your cover of ‘When A Man Loves AWoman', “With this one, we fried to give them very similar treatment to what they had originally. We didn't want to modernise the songs, we didn't want to turn them into rock songs.” “| think, in retrospect, 'When A

Man Loves A Woman', as much as |

loved doing it at the fime — | think we were a little bit heavy handed with it — that’s probably the understatement of the year.” “We got one review of 'When A Man Loves A Woman' that said | was a 'vocal vandal’.” : When | hear that on New Zealand radio, | think, ‘Does Jimmy still want that on the radio?’

“No, not really. It was a period | was going through where | compensated with power where | lacked in technique. By the fime | got to o Fires, I'd got a lot more studio technique.” : You were born in Scotland, a country that loves American soul music. Did you get into soul in the UK or Australia? “l left Scotland when | was five - with my mum and dad. | listened to Nat King Cole and Ray Charles, that they put me on to, but when | was a bit older, my brother joined a band and he was continually listening to Ofis Redding and Wilson Pickett, all ihe Motown and Stax stuff. From seven to 14, all | heard was soul and then | rebelled against that for a while and got into heavy metal — Deep Purple, Free.” “By the time | got into a band myself, which was Chisel, it ended up being quite a hybrid of R&B and rock, it worked out well.” | | was not expecting you to record so many songs originally sung by women — such as the Supremes’ ‘Reflections’. Barnes doing the Supremes? “It was also sung by the Four Tops’

Levis Stubbs, but | just picked the songs for the mood of the songs. | guess | do sing really high, higher - than Lou Rawls etc, so I'm comfortable with my selection. My particular roots would be with the Memphis Stax sound but | wanted to represent soul music, across the board.” I've always thought acts like the Four Tops covering another Motown acts’ hit (like ‘Reflections’) was a throwaway or filler track. - “ljust love Levi Stubbs’ voice, | think Levi was, and still is one of the greatest singers alive. He did a tour about five years ago when he and the Temptations toured together. He's an incredible singer, Jesus, | just love the Four Tops.” Did you have any of their hits on the list2 ‘Reach Out I'll Be There’, ‘Bernadette’? ; “We did ‘Reach Out live. The hardest thing was picking the songs. Maybe in 10 years time we'll do Sou/ Deep 11. :

Do you think there's too much reverence towards sou/ music? Ifs just throwaway pop music like any other? :

“Its not really throwaway on the basis of most soul music’s emotional content. Its the emotion you put into the delivery of the song, it's what you're thinking about lyrically when you're writing, but they're very much love songs, ninety percent of them, then the odd one like Joe Tex’s ‘|

Gotcha' is throwaway. “Undying love is quite a serious subject. But there's white soul like the Style Council, where they did take it far too seriously and lost the plot. Ninety percent of it was emotion and the delivery was throwaway.” “In 1965 they did it once and that was it. They didn't get ‘Well do that 20 times and then drop a line in here or there'. That's one thing | kept in mind when we did the record. It took 10 days and most of my vocals were done when the drums were done. | never touched them. | didn't-

want fo fall into the trap of the white soul singer trying to make it perfect and ruin the whole feel.” You say 10 days? You're 10 months to two years usually? : “Not really, it may take that long to write the stuff, but even Two Fires, a major production, that took three months.” ' Your next tour — what will you perform? “I've just done a series of Sou/ Deep shows, straight off the album and we did ‘Reach Out and ‘Stagger Lee'. i ‘Stagger Lee’ is a great number. “We should have picked that one as well. Live it was my favourite song of the tour.” Will Soul Deep get USA release? “'m not really sure. Someone else asked me that.” Did you have fun making the retro cover? “Yeah, that was totally -~ tongue-in-check. We staged shots very similar to a Sam Cooke cover. We slicked back my hair, with my ears | looked like a taxi with its backdoors open.” Did you try any other duets? (Jimmy sings with Farnham on Sam & Dave’s 'When Something Is Wrong With My Baby’ and Johnny Diesel on ‘Bring It On Home To M¢'). “| really wanted to do one with Tina Turner (Tina's managed by - Australian Roger Davies) but as | was thinking about it she released a Marvin Gaye song with Rod Stewart. So | didn't bother asking her. In the future I'd love to sing with her.” Was Soul Deep held back waiting for wo Firesto drop down the ‘charts? “Yeah, | did it at Christmas last year in my studio. Everyone came and spent Christmas at my place. A big family get together and we spent six or seven hours a day in the studio. Then the guys could be with their families for a normal Christmas. “It was all mixed in the States.” There's a tendency for Australian singers to migrate to the USAto record.

- “I've done that but | get fo the point where | don't feel | have much control over my record. | did that with Freight Train Heart, | almost started fo think ‘ls this going to be a Jimmy Barnes record’ In the end | stormed off in huff, grabbed the tapes and mixed the whole lot, anyway.” Where to now? “I'm already making the next album. I've started in the direction | want fo go with o Fires, a rock & roll album with R&B roots flavour, R&B type chops. | want to take what ¥'ve learnt from Soul Deep and incorporate it into my own rock format for my next record.” I was surprised you chose Joe Tex's kooky ‘| Gotcha’ as the first single. “I had said so much about having «asoul album | didn’t want something too predictable. | wanted something left of centre.” Do you think some of the legendary soul singers who are sfill dlive, like Wilson Pickett, are being .unfairly overlooked? “Wilson Pickett's apparently a quite screwed-up guy, | guess because he's been ripped off by management ... Have you read Nowhere to Run? (Gerri Hershey's soul music history.) Some of the stories in that are terrific. It hurts me a lot, because | think Wilson Pickett's one of the greatest singers of all time and he’s still out there. But when you think about the background and what he went through, then it's probably understandable. “You can almost understand Chuck Berry’s attitude, the money he's been ripped-off for, and not just the money, the fame too.” Jimmy's still passionate about life and music, he remains a music fan, he can still pick up the phoneand rave-on about other singersand somebody else’s songs. That old Jimmy Barnes “Wild Man" passion is why he hits the mark with such ease on Soul Deep.

MURRAY CAMMICK