Cold Chisel and other Australian rock bands came up performing in pubs - an art form that has since died out.
Pub rock’s origins may be in the UK but its glory years were surely Down Under. Two of the era’s most iconic bands are in New Zealand this month. Mike Thorpe spoke to their founding members about finding fame the old-school way.
Smoke-filled bars, packed with a sweaty mass of punters facing a small stage and a band that wanted to make it big. Some of them did. Really big.
“It was a great way for pubs to make money because it was all cash across the bar. So every pub was putting on a band,” Cold Chisel founding member Ian Moss says.
That live music scene was vibrant on both sides of the Tasman, producing a swathe of iconic groups, solo artists and venues throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and into the ‘90s.
“But all that’s gone. Yeah, I miss those days,” Moss says.
Cold Chisel’s popularity coincided with the rapid rise of pub rock across Australia.
“We emerged. We got up from little old Adelaide to Sydney in about 1976.
“You could have the likes of Cold Chisel, The Angels, Rose Tattoo, Midnight Oil or whatever, all playing in a different pub in the same suburb and each pub would be packed out and you could do that six nights a week, seven nights a week.”
They were the halcyon days of Aussie rock, where bands like Cold Chisel cut their teeth and honed their stagecraft with immediate feedback.
“In retrospect, I thank my lucky stars we came along when we did. You thought, oh well, this is just normal, you know, this will go on forever,” Moss says.
It didn’t go on forever but, as Iva Davies and Icehouse found out, it wasn’t all that normal either. Even at the birthplace of pub rock.
“The first night we landed in London on our very first international tour and Keith [Welsh, original bassist for Icehouse] and I, we looked at each other and we thought, ‘We’re here, we’re finally in the mecca of music. Let’s go and see a band’,” Davies says.
“We were absolutely gobsmacked because we couldn’t find a band. We couldn’t find where anybody was playing because the pubs were too small for bands to play, so that didn’t exist.”
That was when Davies realised just how good the Australasian music scene was.
“By the end of the evening, Keith and I just concluded that, there were 50 pubs in Sydney with amazing bands that night, and there were 50 pubs in Melbourne and 50 pubs in Adelaide and probably a whole bunch in Auckland and Christchurch and yeah, that really sort of changed our thinking,” says Davies.
After almost 50 years of Icehouse (and Flowers – before the name changed), Iva Davies is still touring – though he points out that the schedule is nowhere near as demanding as it once was.
In his words, Icehouse can “pick and choose” its shows nowadays.
While much has changed for him and his band since those heady days of the 1980s, he says the thrill of performing live has never left him.
“It’s always exciting. Once you step on a stage, you’re kind of running on adrenaline. Hopefully it won’t give me a heart attack because it is actually very exciting and unpredictable. I guess that’s the difference between a rock and roll show and a classical concert,” Davies says.
Davies was a highly regarded oboist before he was a rock star (he combined both in the song Man of Colours).
“It’s incredibly nerve-wracking playing in an orchestra - and I’ve done plenty of that because there is no room for error. You have to play the notes that are on the page that Mozart put down there hundreds of years ago, and you shall not deviate and if you get it wrong, everybody knows about it.
“In a rock and roll band, there’s a whole lot more licence and it’s a lot more fun.”
The 69-year-old is among Australasia’s greatest songwriters with an extraordinary catalogue of hits. He says the fact they’re still popular surprises him.
“I can remember when we were not only working absolutely flat out and kind of living hand to mouth but there was absolutely no thought in my head of any kind of legacy. The demands were so immediate: we need a new single, we need a new album, we need a new song.
“That would happen regularly every nine months or something. You know, you’re on this kind of spinning wheel. It’s going incredibly fast and there’s no capacity left in your brain to sort of think, ‘What will have happened to this song in 40 years’ time’?”
The songs, Icehouse and Davies himself are now very much part of pub rock’s legacy.
In many ways, Cold Chisel is the definition of Aussie pub rock. Worshipped locally but largely unknown abroad, their blue-collar sound and working-class lyrics are delivered by the unmistakable voice of Jimmy Barnes.
That partnership began in 1974 when Moss and the Cold Chisel originals heard about a potential lead singer.
“That was funny. I still see it as clear as a bell. It was real early days in Adelaide. We’d jammed somewhere and a couple of other people rolled up and the other guy in the room came along for a sing. And then he got up and sang like Robert Plant with the same range and the same power,” says Moss.
“Who’s this guy? Man, what’s he doing in Australia, in little old Adelaide? Why isn’t he famous? It was that impressive. And so I’m going, ‘Is he going to be... is he gonna be our singer?’” Moss recalls.
“They said ’No, he’s in another band, but he recommends his younger brother’. That was John Swan. That was Jim’s older brother.”
The chemistry that Cold Chisel are famous for took some time to emulsify.
“I got called to go and meet Jim, and Don [Walker – Cold Chisel keyboardist] at that stage was still finishing up a physics degree, so he had some kind of student one-room apartment in North Adelaide.
“I walked in and Jim’s down one end of the room, Don’s halfway down and said, ‘Oh, this is Jim’, and I set forward to shake hands and Jim just sort of kept his hands against the bench behind him and kind of almost glared at me and it was like, sh*t! I’ve never seen that in my life before.”
Moss says Barnes is less confrontational nowadays.
“He’s a lovely bloke. Very affable kind of man.”
Still, Chisel have lost none of the pub rock attitude that has won over their audiences for half a century. Keeping the memory of a cherished genre alive and well.
Cold Chisel and Icehouse are touring New Zealand alongside Everclear and Bic Runga with Greenstone Entertainment’s Summer Concert series. They play Queenstown (Jan 18), Taupō (Jan 25) and Whitianga (Jan 26).
Dobbyn feels his musicality has been affected, but remains in good spirits.