From The Australian. I'm Claire Harvey. We're hoping you're having a great holiday break and today we're bringing you one of our favorite episodes from the year. This episode originally aired on September twenty seven. As legendary rockers Cold Chisel prepared to hit the road for their Big five Oho tour. The Australian went inside the rehearsal room to talk love, grief, healing and joy with Jimmy Barnes, Charlie Drayton and Cold Chisel. The Front will return with all new episodes on Monday,
January thirteenth. Just hit follow or subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.
Spy Away you remind mettle bit.
Of you know that voice that scream we all do. That's Jimmy Barnes and this is Cold Chisel playing together for the first time in years. The Australian was invited into a place not even the most hardcore Chisel fans get to go, the rehearsal room for their forthcoming national tour. This is what Chisel chose to play first, a ballad written by Don Walker in twenty ten, All for you, Once upon a time, Jimmy Barnes would have warmed up for this with a bottle of something hard In twenty
twenty four. His poison comes in a porcelain cup.
You could get me a coffee when yeah yeah exist, what flat white with white white to please make this sound?
I'm music writer Andrew McMillan sat down with the band.
I am the luckiest man in the world to get up every night and sing this, this set of songs, you know, like they sing Don Walker songs every night. What a blessing.
You know.
I'm the luckiest going in Australia to be able to do that.
You know.
Barns guitarist and pianist and lyricist Don Walker, bassist Phil Small and drama Charlie Drayton last played together in twenty twenty at the end of their last tour.
I think it's going to be even better than it's going to be because we've had this chance to think about why we want to play. We're not coming in exhausted from a studio recording. I can just feel the excitement everybody. I can't wait again in front of an audience with this band.
This tour is called the Big five Oho and it sees the band older, grayer, yes, but also in Barnes's case, fresh from a brush with death. He's been through open heart surgery and two major hip operations, all connected to a raging staph infection. Barnes has had to strengthen his battered body, especially his hips, to adopt his classic pose standing with one foot upstage, one foot downstage, using his full body to project that remarkable voice.
This tour is going to roll more than it rocks, you know, which is a really cool thing. I think it's going to have a lot more swing and a lot more groove, which it doesn't mean it's going to be less intense, but it's going to be not as frantic maybe, which I think is going to be a
really cool thing. My thoughts are seeing in a just a back off, you know, half a degree and a load of the songs to swing a lot more as I opposed to pushing all the band, you know, because normally I want the play faster and harder and lowder. I'm going to let them do their own thing and find the grooves that work for the songs and singing with them.
All for you is especially meaningful for fans and for the band themselves.
It's a very clearly a love song written from one to another. Don Walker wrote this for his partner at the time, Good Shoe. Ginny Barnes loves singing this song that has since it was written because it's a song that he sings to Jane Barnes, his wife, all day and it's you, and you can extrapolate that to the listener. It's easily become any of people's favorite love song because it's just so direct, and it's written from a man to a woman who's very earnestly and directly explaining what
she means to him. It's very bald and unpretentious and almost like a country song in the way in that there's very little artifice or pretension. It's just very direct. And John Walker would have been about sixty when he wrote this, I'm guessing release he's seventy two today, So it's kind of funny. These great songwriters, the allder they get, sometimes they strip away the metaphors and the messages and say it real straight and it works just as well.
All for You was the last song the band recorded with their former drummer Steve Prestwich. He died in twenty eleven after surgery for a brain tumor, a loss that is still raw.
Steve was one of my favorite people in the world, one of my favorite drummas in the world.
At the time, Presstwitch seemed irreplaceable. But then Charlie Drayton came along, already established as an outstanding drama in his own right, living in New York, married to another Australian musical superstar, the Divinyls, Chrissy Amphlet.
Charlie's like a totally different a beast, complete to Steve. He's got the swing in this groove. He's relentless. He doesn't let you miss it. You know, he's a king of groove. Listen, if Charlie hadn't joined the band, if we hadn't met up with Charlie, I don't think cultures or whatever got back together after Steve Die.
Hi, Charlie, Andrew, how are you doing? Love for you too?
Get your hand.
When Andrew talks to Charlie Drayton after they rattle through All for You in the studio, the emotion is momentarily overwhelming. Back in twenty eleven, Chrissy Amphlet was suffering multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, which eventually would claim her life.
The first time you guys have full five played together in years right just then, how you feeling?
There's a music that's like medicine in that songbook been there's some healing in us playing together because we play one way together, different to how we play with the other musicians. So they have just played one song together again. It's emotional because we've been We've been through a lot to get back here, and I love playing music with these guys. If you had told me in twenty eleven, hey, Charlie, have a feeling is you know you might link up
with Coach Chisel, I'd be like, you're crazy. I was sitting with my wife, Christie, who had just entered a major change of life. We were sitting together when we heard the news about Steve's passing. She said, the coaches still decides to play again, they'll come looking for you. Three days later she got an email from Done.
She knew, she just knew so.
And that's initially what brought us together. Playing music was about healing, and every chapter we've come together, we learned the value of like life.
We have music at.
The top that's medicine, but you know it's healing. Right now. That's why I'm feeling some happy.
Joy coming up the meeting behind another of Cold Chisel's deeply moving smash hits. This story is from The Australian's Review section. Each week, it's the home of the best reviews, previews and interviews with artists, authors and musicians by some of Australia's best journos. Check us out at the Australian dot com dot au and we'll be back after this break. On the drums is Steve Prestwich, Cold Chisel's late lamented drummer.
Kids Bab sadabs Basma fire, I'm just saying for me you sad.
This is, of course Flame Trees, the nineteen eighty four song that never went to number one, but it has become an enduring part of the soundtrack to Australian Life.
Got It's music was composed by Steve Prestwich. The drama and oddly the drummer composed it on bass guitar first. From what I've read, he composed it across many months backstage at Colchissel shows while they're on tour. He was constantly playing with a chord progression the bassline that became the driving force of the song, but he never could get lyrics to it. He also was an eight lyricist a songwriter, but this one, for whatever reason, eluded him.
And it wasn't until I think either Don Walker heard him playing it backstage or Steve asked him directly, do you want to write something to this?
Love s.
The pai Man dram sets down.
Don Walker got in a nostalgic kind of frame of mind thinking of his growing up in Grafton and also just the notion of being a young man on the cusp of adulthood and what that all represented and worked into what became this song. It's a song of coming and going. As in the character in the song, the protagonist has left, but he's coming back for the purposes of this song and seems to disdain or look back with some regret on what this town represented to him,
and yet he's drawn back to it. And there's elements that he assuming it's a heat I mean, it's from mal perspective, elements that he can't get away from that kind of magnetic pool that so many of us have to our hometowns where we grew up. And it's such a young person's song, and I suppose that's why it's resonated with Chisel's audience at that time, and it was released initially young people who are now what forty years older, which is primarily the fan base. I suppose middle aged
people and above. But it's a young person's song because it's talking about that cusp of young adulthood where you're trying to find your place in the world and you come from somewhere and you're looking back at it with a certain sense of emotion and you're hoping what's ahead of you is better than where you came from, but you never really know.
This has never been a band that feels so good for me as this band. You know, there's just something about the way the rhythm section play, the way that Dawn approaches a peer. I don't know anybody else supposed piano again and Mossy. The interaction between Mossy and Don. Sometimes you can't tell where Don's leaving off and where Mossie's felling in the chords, and it's real.
It's really unique.
And as soon as the band starts playing, I just I feel comfortable. And that's where I've literally learned how it's seen doing that, so to be able to do it fifty years down the track is a real gift.
They acknowledge that these songs mean a lot to a lot of people. They're currently gearing up to play this great songbook once again, to reopen the songbook for a generation of Australians perhaps who didn't get the chance to see them last time around. There was five years ago, and with every passing year, more and more people find this great band because the songs that they've written are timeless.
You can read all the nation's best news, sport, politics and business anytime at the Australian dot com dot a u