It’s late March and he’s in Auckland, ostensibly to talk up his new album, The Barnestormers, recorded remotely during a Covid lockdown with London-based pianist Jools Holland (whom he has yet to meet in person), Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom in Los Angeles, and Kevin Shirley (bassist-producer) and Living End singer-guitarist Chris Cheney isolating in Australia. It’s an enjoyable rockabilly record that Shirley seamlessly welded together after each player laid down his separate part.
That’s supposedly the topic, but the former Cold Chisel frontman is just back from five weeks’ R&R in Thailand with Jane, his wife of more than 40 years, whom he mentions as if we know each other from backyard barbies.
He’s so energised that questions are just a key in the Barnesy ignition. So, what does he do when he’s just a 67-year-old husband, father and grandfather? Turns out he’s writing another book. After his autobiographical Working Class Boy and Working Class Man, this would be … Working Class Pensioner?
“Nah,” he laughs, like gravel down a drainpipe. “It’s fiction.”
And – contrary to most authors who superstitiously won’t reveal a work in progress – away he goes. Although he left Glasgow more than 60 years ago, an accent remains and his new book – two-thirds done – is “loosely based on my life, but even more of a horror story than mine was”, he rattles. “It starts around the 1960s in Scotland when I was there, but then there are vindictive ghosts and it goes back to the 16th century. It’s also in the trenches in World War I and ends up in Adelaide.”
Whatever it’s about, Barnes has diligently researched in Scotland, speaks of the Reformation, the killing of more than 500 women suspected of being witches (“it was all about controlling women”) and 17th-century Thomas Aikenhead (“the last person hanged in Britain for blasphemy”) as an anchor character.
Barnes enjoys the discipline of writing “because I’ve never had it in my life”, and in Thailand – away from the phone and requests for interviews, radio or charity events – he could do two hours of workouts in the morning then write for six hours.
Working Class Boy and Working Class Man confirmed he could “write and riff”, and the energy and singular focus of his music career mean he can stay in the moment: “If you sit down and write, you’re going to get something eventually. Like any job, the best thing you can do is turn up.”
Speaking of the job, The Barnestormers is a tribute to music that influenced early rock’n’roll, “hillbilly music by Scots who went to Kentucky, so I could connect with that”.
Although he grew up in the era of the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart, his favourite singers were Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis of the 50s rock’n’roll generation. But the earlier rockabilly was always there, “that music that has the potential to set a room on fire, the minimalist sound and clean twang of the guitar players that cuts like a knife.”
His older brother John used to play it, but there was an epiphany in the 70s when Cold Chisel were on the road in a Toyota van. They were coming out of a Melbourne gig and about to drive to Queensland when a guy handed him a cassette of Johnny Burnette’s Rock ‘n Roll Trio, and he loved it.
“It lived in the car, so there’s a lot of Burnette’s influence on this record. The first thing we thought about doing was Burnette’s Lonesome Train.”
The album includes their take on Bill Haley’s Thirteen Women that he used to sing as a kid – originally the A-side of a single until a DJ flipped it over and found Rock Around the Clock – and Roy Orbison’s Working for the Man. “I think the vocal on that is one of the best I’ve ever done,” he says.
There’s also the much-covered Australian classic Real Wild Child by Johnny O’Keefe: “I worked with him, didn’t get on well, we nearly had a fight. But I have so much respect for him because as a frontman, he literally kicked down doors so people like me could come through.” When Iggy Pop covered it, “he made it more rock. Ours is closer to Jerry Lee Lewis’s version.”
Barnes says the idea for The Barnestormers started in New Zealand in 1990 when he toured with rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats and became close friends with singer-guitarist Brian Setzer and drummer Slim Jim, “who was good mates with Chris and Jools”. They’d long talked about making a rockabilly album, and Covid provided the prompt.
The album brought Barnes back with Cold Chisel’s songwriter Don Walker, whose Johnny’s Gone they covered. It had appeared on one of Walker’s solo albums, “so he said no one had heard it”.
There is also another version of their co-written Land of Hope from the 2009 Chisel reunion album Blood Moon, which Barnes felt needed to be more sleazy.
“It’s dark, angry and anti-American. I love so much about American culture, but when we first went over with Chisel in about ‘79, it was just all big cogs turning and nothing about a feel for the music. I’ve felt uncomfortable about that ever since, which is ironic because everything I do is based on American culture, like rockabilly.”
In a freewheeling and digressive conversation, we inevitably come to his health: he’s had open heart surgery, a bad back, knee operations and a skirmish with Covid. He’s increasingly aware of mortality and recently sang a moving Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond in tribute to the late chef (and MasterChef Australia judge) Jock Zonfrillo, his friend and fellow Glaswegian.
“I’ve grown a lot over the years. I was always on tour, but then I’d go to the mountains of northern Thailand and meditate with monks. Then I’d go on tour and go crazy again.
“But finally, as happens in your 60s,” he says, rattling the gravel once more, “the penny dropped about how to keep my sanity and health”.
The Barnestormers by Jimmy Barnes is out now.
‘The voice of a demon’
Jimmy Barnes was one of Tina Turner’s many duet partners, putting him in a club that also included Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams, Tom Jones, Cher and Beyoncé. The pair re-recorded Turner’s (Simply) The Best in 1992 for a promotional anthem for the NSW Rugby League.
He’d first encountered her as a teenager at a concert in Adelaide in the 1970s, he and his mates having kicked in a venue door to get in for free.
“My mates really just wanted to start trouble, but I ran down the front and I stood there and I watched Tina Turner perform. It was the voice of a demon and it was incredible, but just the best energy I’ve ever seen,” he told an Australian television show.
“And I remember thinking, ‘That’s the way I want to perform, I want to sing like that.’”
Recording and filming a video with Turner was intimidating, he said, especially when it came to the choreography,
“Anyone who has seen me dance knows I dance like an elephant tied to a tree, and Tina must have seen the panicked look on my face because she leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Stand still, honey, and I’ll make you look good.’”
