Jimmy Barnes won’t go down without a fight: Cold Chisel frontman faces his demons
The Australian rock star’s second memoir, Working Class Man, tells how for 40 years he tried to ‘drink himself to death’, only to finally see the light. Catch him at the Parisian Macao on December 9
“I’m friendly but I’ll want to have my back to the wall. I know where all the exits are and I’ll know who I have to hit if I want to get out,” says the former frontman of Australian rock band Cold Chisel, who’ll be performing a solo show at the Parisian Macao on December 9.
Don’t get him wrong; Barnes is known for his geniality. He’s light on his feet (like a boxer, like his dad), ready to smile, and has a patience with journalists quite unbecoming to a rock singer. But that hyper-vigilance he learned in childhood has never left him.
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Barnes was the household name no one expected to get real about domestic violence. His first memoir, Working Class Boy, shocked even his own bandmates when it was published last year. It’s a graphic account of a childhood steeped in neglect, abuse and abject poverty. In the 1950s, his family migrated from Glasgow to a close-knit Scottish community in Adelaide’s Elizabeth. Close-knit, because no matter how many mums had black eyes, you didn’t embarrass each other by talking about it.
“For 40 years, in front of the public, I was drinking myself to death,” Barnes says. “If you did that in any other job, people would say, ‘You’ve got problems, mate.’ But people didn’t see it like that because they were living vicariously through me.”
The 17-year-old who joined Cold Chisel was an incendiary hothead, wired to take offence. He never paused to consider the childhood he was escaping. In fact, he was running full tilt, leading with his fists. “I’m homicidal, not suicidal,” he’d joke to himself. As he observes now: “If anything hurt me emotionally, I’d want to belt someone. That was my take on life in general: I’m not wounded, I’m the aggressor.”