Frontier Touring & MG Live. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 7 Jun 2025
I was checking into Sydney migrating to Australia in 1982 and sadly Cold Chisel was close to checking out. But their catalogue reverberated, and the songs were a huge part of my soundtrack while acclimatising to Australian ways. Cold Chisel was armed with a fistful of Don Walker songs like Choir Girl, Saturday Night and Khe Sanh. I, too, wanted to hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long but I didn't have the PTSD to do it. These and other Chisel songs - many band members collaborated on songs, including Jimmy - haunt me to this day on nostalgically lost weekends in Sydney’s pubs and lanes, and whenever they catch me by surprise on the radio.
Open heart surgery precipitated by a bacterial infection in late 2023 led to wildly premature obituaries of Jimmy Barnes’s stage demise. He appeared at Byron Bay’s Bluesfest in March 2024 and at some dates of the Red Hot Summer tour. And then he really hit the road. Jimmy eased in with the Hell of a Time tour comprising a more stripped-back intimate style, two months after his second hip replacement! The Big Five-0 tour late last year celebrated Cold Chisel’s 50th anniversary in a 16-show national extravaganza over one-and-a-half months - a grand nostalgic celebration with guest artists. Andrew Stafford wrote in The Guardian that there was a collective understanding that the Big Five-0 tour could be the last. Yet here we are, with Barnesy’s third tour in thirteen months! Phew!
The current 6-date tour celebrates Jimmy’s 21st studio album, DEFIANT, matching his unprecedented 21 number ones on the Australian album charts (15 as a solo artist and 6 with Cold Chisel). This tour is certainly not intimate and not entirely nostalgic, but it is familiar territory.
Opening act Taylor Sheridan was a soothing throat lozenge to Barnes’s true grit. He expressed huge gratitude for the gig of opening for this tour and for being a new dad. “Does life get any better than this?” He sang a love song to his hometown of Kyneton, Victoria, and another to his new baby, being nursed in the wings. A mate declared him to be a troubadour and that became the title of his self-produced debut album released last year. Sheridan’s guitar and body musically intertwine, his themes of whimsy and love are thoughtful and evocative. He won’t have to self-produce his next album after this gig. “You can remember my name - Taylor (Swift) and Sheridan (towels).”
The main event took the stage in the face of huge anticipation. A quick succession of familiar songs rippled through the audience. Choir Girl syllables were spat out with melodic indifference outweighed by industrial energy.
Now, he thought, for the moment of truth. Barnes sheepishly apologised that he is going to road-test songs from the new DEFIANT album and his hometown is the first live audience to hear them since the February release. Several times through the evening he genuinely reflected on his formative years in Elizabeth. The Glaswegian migrated with his parents and siblings in 1961 as Ten Pound Poms. Childhood violence, abuse and trauma is revealed in two poignant memoirs plus books of nonfiction short stories. Life at home didn't stabilise until his mom moved in with Reg Barnes from whom Jimmy takes his name. But the big break came when Don Walker, Ian Moss and other band members of Cold Chisel auditioned him when he was 16 and he decided to leave the shopping mall fist-fighting behind.
The new songs from the DEFIANT album are vintage Jimmy. While family life and hospital strife are new and important themes for a man who understands how precious life is, they are conveyed with familiar song construction and vocal power. Damned if I Do, Damned If I Don't - I've heard that one before. The ballad, Beyond The Riverbed, is an ode to married life in a metaphor flowing from his river front property 100 kilometres south of Sydney. Jimmy and Jane tied the knot 44 years ago and their love and mutual support was evident on stage with Jane helping out with the backup vocals.
The show returned to Cold Chisel territory with the crowd taking to their feet with Ride the Night Away and up and dancing with rapturous appreciation of Jonathan Cain’s, Working Class Man.
The third and final encore was Don Walker’s Khe Sanh. This is the wrong place for this song in the programme - the nuances were napalmed into oblivion by frenetic end-of-concert energy. Sadly, the bombing started sometime earlier in the evening and the Ian Moss’s melodic counterbalances were missing.
Jimmy Barnes, and his family, have been through a hell of a lot and we love him because he’s only got stronger because of it. He touched his damaged heart every time he sang the words love, heart or soul. While the voice isn’t the one that Cold Chisel heard in that audition over 50 years ago, and the new songs have some job to prove themselves, you can't have that gutsy power until you live the gutsy life. The songs and Barnes’s performance of them are embedded on the Australian psyche forever more.
Andrew Stafford thought “the last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone”, but I think there's several more taxiing up to the runway.
David Grybowski
When: 7 Jun
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Bookings: Sold Out Nation Wide
Tour Info: jimmybarnes.com
13 to 14 Jun - St Kilda, Australia
20 to 21 Jun - Brisbane, Australia
27 Jun - Sydney, Australia
28 Jun - Canberra, Australia
