andyr

great read

great gig.

Don Walker revisits some old terrain on Cold Chisel’s new album ‘No Plans’. Words by ANDREW RAMADGE.

I’m trying to ask Don Walker about Darlinghurst, one of the inner-city suburbs of Sydney bordering Kings Cross – but he’s not having a bar of it. “I never lived in Darlinghurst,” he says sternly. “I was in Kings Cross.”

Walker lived in the Cross, and the places around it, for more than three decades. Woolloomooloo. Rushcutters Bay. But definitely not Darlinghurst.

“Darlinghurst was a foreign country to where we were in Kings Cross. There was a border on William Street – we’re on one side and all the arts and film students were on the other.”

When you say ‘we were on one side’, who was ‘we’?

“‘We’ being everybody on the Kings Cross side who had complete contempt for any kind of collective or community whatsoever. A whole suburb of people who were alone.”

Walker laughs at the thought. Later, when I ask him if he feels like an outsider, he says: “I think most people do.” It was in Kings Cross that Walker sat down to write the first draft of ‘Khe Sanh’ at an all night place called Sweethearts, “a very unremarkable cafe in the middle of Darlinghurst Road where McDonald’s is now”.

“It had been there for quite a while before I moved into the area. It was just one of a few places where you could go to get a bite to eat. It was very small, there’s nothing remarkable about it.” After a pause: “Nice people owned it.”

Despite being small and unremarkable, Sweethearts would end up with a song of its own on Cold Chisel’s second album. The title song, in fact. “Drunks come in/Paper bag, Brandivino/Dreams fly away / As she pulls another cappuccino.”

Walker arrived in the Cross in 1976, before anybody knew who Cold Chisel were. It was only meant to be temporary – a room at the Plaza Hotel for $12.50 a week. “Holes in the ceiling, I can see the floor in places through the frayed string of the carpet, I dunno who’s next door for months on end,” he wrote in his book Shots.

On the phone, he says: “I always kept to myself. It was part of the culture of the place that you pretty much kept to yourself. But you know, when you’re keeping to yourself, it takes a lot longer to forge friendships and they are therefore a little deeper.”

Over the next 30 years, Walker saw Kings Cross go from a forgotten corner of the city that had seen its best days in the ’30s to one of Sydney’s most expensive locations. “When I first moved there it was a little bit sleepy. A little bit of a dead spot. It was the only part of Sydney that was open 24 hours, but it was definitely not an upmarket area. The whole of Kings Cross down Macleay Street, beyond the fountain, just in the last couple of decades has become very upmarket. You know, a ‘young people with lots of disposable income’ type of area.”

Above: view from the William Street Tunnel to the city in the 1983 film 'Going Down', and the same shot taken in 2010.

The last Cold Chisel record, the first time around, was called Twentieth Century. It was a “nightmare” of an album recorded while the band were in the process of breaking up, but still playing together on stage for “The Last Stand” farewell tour. It was released in 1984.

Twentieth Century included the single which would become Cold Chisel’s swan song, ‘Flame Trees’. The video clip showed a man returning home to a country town, and all the nostalgia and symbols of regional Australia that that involves. Tooheys. Utes. Akubras. Tiled pubs and leather jackets lined with wool. Walker, who wrote the lyrics, was born in a small town in Queensland and grew up near Grafton, in New South Wales.

The video for ‘Flame Trees’ is probably the most enduring image of Cold Chisel to this day. But there was another swan song of sorts of Twentieth Century, called ‘Saturday Night’, which romanticised the inner-city as much as ‘Flame Trees’ did the country. It was a strange and sad song. Walker once said of it: “The band I’d been in for 10 years was breaking up. I think it’s just a ‘kissing all that goodbye and moving on into the unknown’ song.”

The video clip for ‘Saturday Night’, directed by Richard Lowenstein a few years before Dogs in Space, was filled with scenes of Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Kings Cross. Oxford St. Neon lights. Traffic. The mesmerising image of the city skyline at night.

On Lowenstein, Walker says: “He was a younger generation guy who was, I think, a friend of Michael Hutchence, and so that’s where the connection came from to get him to do a video. We wanted some Kings Cross footage in it, which we got. We went along to one of the early Mardi Gras, and there’s some footage from that in it as well.”

The video complemented the cover art for Twentieth Century. It was a painting by Eduardo Guelfenbein of the view from a high-rise bar in Kings Cross, looking out over the rest of the city. The Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the northern business district, and way way off in the background, Parramatta – all fading into the distance.

One day that same year, in 1984, Paul Kelly got off the bus from Melbourne on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. He walked across the invisible border of William Street to Walker’s house and there either wrote, or began to play ‘From St Kilda To Kings Cross’. In his book How To Make Gravy, Kelly says he got to Walker’s house and started working on the song on the piano. Walker remembers it differently. He says Kelly came in and played it on guitar straight away.

“My memory of it is that Paul came through the door, off a bus trip up from Melbourne. He was staying with me at the time. He came through the door after walking over from Oxford St, where the bus terminal was, with the song completely formed. He said, ‘Oh, I’ve got this song’, you know, ‘just written this song’ and sat down on the lounge and played it. Got his guitar out and played it. But that’s my memory. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he did write it on my piano.”

Either way you were probably one of the first people to hear the song. Did it strike you straight away as something memorable?

“Absolutely. Paul was in a bit of a purple patch at that point where, you know, every day he was, ‘Oh, I’ve just written this thing’, and sitting down and playing something. All those songs that finished up on Post, those songs were popping out every day, sometimes a couple a day. I certainly knew that I was watching him in a pretty good period.”

If everyone feels like an outsider, maybe that’s why so many people identify with Walker’s songs. “It could be one explanation. Or the other explanation could be that they’ve been performed by a succession of superb bands and people just like good music.” Those superb bands have included Cold Chisel, Catfish, Tex, Don & Charlie, The Suave Fucks and now Cold Chisel again. They reformed in the late ‘90s to record The Last Wave of Summer, and again recently for seventh album No Plans. Walker has also written songs for the late Jimmy Little, Jeff Lang, Mick Harvey and others.

Has there ever been a particular story you really wanted to tell but just couldn’t express in a song?

“No. There have been, from time to time, songs that it’s taken me a long time to finish and I couldn’t find a way to finish them or make it work. And there still is a couple like that. But in the end they get finished, by and large, and if they don’t, well they just get put away and not revisited for … maybe forever. It’s not a big loss to the world if a particular song doesn’t get finished.”

One of the songs that took Walker the longest to finish was ‘Three Blackbirds’, from his first solo album We’re All Gunna Die. An 18-minute ballad about slavers capturing and selling Aboriginals near Cape Leveque, north of Broome in Western Australia, it mines the same vein of colonial horror as the more recent ‘Sixteen Straws’ by The Drones: “Harry Hunter came among them all in violence and stealth/With a rifle and a club and iron chains/And shackled them in misery and marched them to the coast.”

Walker came across the story in 1984, while travelling through the Top End after Twentieth Century and the break-up of Cold Chisel. He recorded it more than 10 years later, in 1995. Walker returns to the setting of “a highway out west” for two of the songs on No Plans – ‘Summer Moon’ and ‘I Gotta Get Back On The Road’. The former took even longer than ‘Three Blackbirds’ to finish.

“One of the songs on the new Cold Chisel album, ‘Summer Moon’, that [guitarist] Ian [Moss] sings, that was a song that I was working on in the ’80s, and then forgot about and lost. I found it somewhere two years ago, when I was going through some old stuff, and finished it off.”

Like all the best Chisel songs, ‘Summer Moon’ has a workingman hero. “Driving the night shift again,” it begins. The song is an ode to youth, and recovering that long-lost feeling of innocence in the white lines of the highway speeding by. You don’t need a degree to get it.

Walker is an intellectual, and a poet, but he’d probably be loathe to say it. More than anything else, Walker says he’s just a regular guy. When Cold Chisel were starting out, much of their success came from seeing themselves reflected in the crowd. Almost 40 years later, that hasn’t changed. “Mostly I’m too busy to do much looking out (from the stage), but when I do look out and see the kind of people that are coming along to see us, they just look like normal people and not too much different to us.”

Outsiders, maybe. Lovers, no doubt. Cafe waitresses. Kids who grew up in the country and moved to the city, then go home one day, older and wiser. Drunks. Nightshift drivers. People who like good music. Pub rock poets. Don Walker.

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Cold Chisel’s ‘No Plans’ is out now through Warner.

cosmopolis trailer

you should go and heckle for khe sanh

+1

brilliant

brilliant

11 . josejones

fantastic story

you can download (some) old issues of distant violins at the toytown blog below

http://toytownmusic.wordpress.com/distant-violins/

if anyone has the missing issues you should totally scan them in and send them to wayne