From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, September twenty seven. Jim Chalmers met with his Chinese counterparts on his first official trip to the People's Republic on Thursday. Chalmers is the first Australian treasurer to visit China in seven years. He says it's vital in rebuilding mutual trust with our biggest trading partner. Will Glasgow
is the only Australian journal resident in China. You can read his expert analysis right now at the Australian dot com dot u. Nobody does exquisite nostalgia like Cold Chisel, with a catalog of songs that can make any Australian tear up from the first note. Today we have a rare treat inside the rehearsal room as Jimmy Barnes, Charlie Drayton, Don Walker, Phil Small and Ann Moosse get together to make the magic happen.
Maybe maybe 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 route 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, would ye? Yeah, It's just a flat white.
With white white. Please make it 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 Moss, 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 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 studio recording. I can just feel the excitement from everybody. I can't wait to get 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 singing just to back off, you know, half a degree and a load of the songs to swing a lot more as opposed to pushing all the band, you know, because normally I want Everton
played 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 very clearly a love song written from one to another.
John Walker wrote this for his partner at the time, good Sho 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 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 Don Walker would have been about sixty when he wrote this. I'm guessing police he's seventy two today, so it's kind of funny. These great songwriters, the alder they get, sometimes they strip away the metaphors and the messages and just 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 Prestwitch. He died in twenty eleven after surgery for a brain chew, a loss that is still raw.
Steve was one of my favorite people in the world, one of my favorite dramas in the world.
At the time, pressed which 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 is like a totally different abeest, 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 I've got back together after Steve died.
Hi, Charlie Andrew, how are you doing love for me 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, Christy Amflett was suffering multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, which eventually would claim her life.
That was 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. Then 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 we've been do a lot to get back here, and I will playing music with these guys. If you had told me in twenty eleven and Charlie have a feeling it's you know, might link up with coaches, well I'd be like, you're crazy.
I was sitting.
Was my wife, Christy, who had just entered a major change of life. We were sitting together when we heard the news about Steve's passing. She said, if coach has 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. In every chapter we've come together, we learned the value of like life.
We have music at the top.
That's the 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 journals. 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 A dam sads basfar, I'm just saying, man for your sad.
This is a 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.
Its music was composed by Steve Prestwich. The drummer, 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 bassline that became the driving force of the song, but he never could get.
Lyrics to it.
He also was a lyricist songwriter, but this one, for whatever reason, eluded him and it wasn't until I think either Don Walker heard him playing at backstage or Steve asked him directly, do you want to write something to this?
Say all the Rage Mandriver then else Set Fautys down.
Gone.
Walker got in a nostalgic kind of frame of mind thinking of his growing up in Grafton and also just the notion of a young man on the cusp of adulthood and what that all represented and worked into what became.
This song, Set Fauty.
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 written from a 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 when it was released. Initially young people who are now what forty years older, which is primarily their 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 he came from.
But you never really know.
This has never been a band that feels is so good for me as this band. You know, there's just something about the way the rhythm section play, the way that Don approaches a piano. I don't know anybody else who plays piano like him, and Mossy. The interaction between Mossy and Don. Sometimes you can't tell where Don's leaving up and where Moss's felling in the chords, and that's
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. That 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.
Andrew McMillan is a music writer with The Australian. You can read his full interview with Cold Chisel right now at The Australian dot com dot au. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team is Kristen Amiot, Jasper leak Leat, Sammaglue, Tiffany Dimak, Joshua Burton and me Claire Harvey,