Jimmy Barnes: Different sort of pain

With volume 2 of his memoirs, Jimmy Barnes leaps into the maelstrom of addiction, trauma, and Cold Chisel.

Australia was genuinely shocked when Jimmy Barnes wrote the first volume on his memoirs. Rock bios are not new, and Barnes’ rollercoaster career had no shortage of the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll that typically feature in such tomes.

Except Working Class Boy wasn’t a bacchanalian celebration of rock star excess: it was an unflinching and often harrowing story of poverty, addiction, child abuse, violence and a family tearing itself apart which ended right at the point where Barnes joined Cold Chisel – the point where you’d assume a typical rock bio would begin.

The response was incredible. It became a bestseller, it spawned a theatrical tour playing music and reading aloud sections from the book, and it started a national conversation about the cascading social costs of poverty. Barnes became an unlikely spokesperson for social justice, and the bar was set high for what everyone – Barnes included – assumed would be the sequel.

That book, Working Class Man, just debuted as the number one bestseller in the country.

And with the first book as his model, he wanted to show what sort of man comes out of such a violent, unsettled childhood and answer the question: what happens when someone with a lot of demons gets into a situation where he’s rarely forced to take responsibility for them?

“It was sort of me trying to sift through a lifetime of good, bad, and ugly,” he told TMN.

“Without using the childhood as an excuse, I wanted to look at the impact all that sort of stuff has on an adult. And it just so happened I was in a rock and roll band, which made a lot of it worse.”

It begins right where the last book left off, with the young Cold Chisel hightailing it out of Adelaide, and follows Barnes through the band’s rise and eventual split, the ups and downs of his solo career, his courtship of Jane Mahoney (his wife of almost four decades), and the arrival of his children.

That’s juxtaposed with the fallout of his addictions, his self-abuse, and at least two very-near deaths – including a drunken mid-tour suicide attempt in a hotel room in Auckland.

“I remember lying there with this thing tied around my neck and going, ‘well, this isn’t fucking working, I want to go to bed,’” he says now.

“It was sort of like I was just seeing how hard dying was, but really by doing that I could have found out how easy it was. And it was only five years ago – but that seems like a fucking lifetime when you’ve only been really living for five years.”

He credits his survival to therapy, his family, and a fierce determination to make some difficult changes, but there are reminders in the book that lives rarely feature neat happy endings – as Barnes’ friend and former Models frontman James Freud tragically demonstrated after writing two books declaring his happiness and sobriety before ending his life in 2010.

“Those same demons are still there and they’re still snapping at my heels,” Barnes insists. “The only thing is that I can see them now and I’m trying not to react the same way as I would, but they are still there. I talk about James in the book, and I talk about Hutch [Michael Hutchence] – and I can’t speak for them, because nobody can speak for them – but I sort of think those times for both those guys could have just been this moment of bad chemistry, one step too far, one stupid decision.”

A childhood memoir is one thing, when many of the stories are historical and many of the characters have passed on, but in Working Class Man Barnes is writing about people that are very much alive and who are going to read what’s said about them – from his family and Chisel bandmates Don Walker, Ian Moss and Phil Small, right through to record company executives like Mushroom’s Michael Gudinski and Geffen Record’s Gary Gersh, former managers, ex-producers…

“Every one of those people I wrote about, I felt like I was straddling a razor blade and sliding down a big hill. It was delicate, and I was worried about writing it,” he admits. “But before I released it, I let Don read all the Cold Chisel stuff and he went, ‘Yeah. I really like it. It’s not exactly the way I remember it, but…’”.

While the book takes us up to the present day, Barnes isn’t not planning to stop anytime soon.

“I think I have a bit more to write. I’m not sure exactly what I want to write about yet. I’m thinking about just because it’s been so intense to write about such personal stuff for so long, I’m thinking seriously about trying to write some fiction.”

Why so?

“Well, there’s some things I haven’t written about that were just so surreal and so outrageous that if you wrote them people would think you were lying. I think I can put them in fiction and they might believe it,” he laughs.

“I love the process of writing. After 45 years or whatever I’ve been screaming out at people, and to sit down and so to spend time at looking back in, trying to find stories and writing them down on paper, I’ve discovered is a process I really like.”

He pauses briefly. “Some of it’s been painful, but I’ve also enjoyed that pain. It’s a different sort of pain.”