He’s one of the great survivors of the rock and roll industry, so famous he’s in the Aria Hall of Fame but after all these years, it’s all about the music for Jimmy Barnes and he’s still in demand.
Most of us first heard of Jimmy Barnes with Cold Chisel (and with a voice so loud it was not hard to hear him).
His distinctive vocals brought to life the amazing words of Don Walker and inspired a generation. He was hard-living and hard rocking and little did we all know back then that he would be still going more than 30 years later.
In fact, over the years he has had so many hits both with Chisel and as a solo artist, that he jokes that it’s hard to keep his shows to two-and-a-half hours. I mean, what do you leave out? The answer is to play as many as you can across as much of his career as he can, from the classics of Cold Chisel to his current single Largs Pier Hotel – a tribute to the iconic Adelaide venue that helped kick-start his career with Chisel in the ’70s.
And despite no longer being in the first flush of youth, Jimmy Barnes is still in demand. On the day we chatted about his trip north (it’s almost becoming annual these days) he’d already done seven interviews. Not bad for an old rocker just a month shy of 55.
He is currently out on the road promoting his newest album Rage and Ruin, released late last year. The album, his first collection of original material since 2007, debuted at number three on the album chart and has now spawned three singles.
And while his career was once about making music to survive it’s now about making music to be true to who he is to be inspired (or in-spirit – true to who he is, as he explained).
Barnes still loves to perform more than anything and is looking forward to Twin Towns for the venue and the crowd “you get people from all over Australia up there”, he said, describing the diverse and always different crowd that this iconic man of rock performs for in the now equally iconic local venue.
