G'day, I'm Jimmy Barnes and I'm going Back to School with Student Edge.
Hi, I'm Simon Miraudo and today, we are going Back to School with Jimmy Barnes.
Who would have thought?
Jimmy thanks so much for chatting with us.
My pleasure.
You have far too many musical accomplishments to name, but now you’re also a hit author.
That's a great shock, I wrote this book, because I had a story I had to sort of get out of
me, but the fact that it's become sort of a best seller is really great.
No it's fantastic and 'Working Class Boy' is the book.
I guess I'm curious you know, you had to get this story out of you, but was there a point
were you, were thinking okay this is a pretty painful part of my past and my childhood,
were you hesitant about kind of letting people into that side of you?
Well that was always there, well this, literally why it's taken 60 years to write a book is
because these are stories that I've never spoken to anybody about. I mean there is things
that happened to me as a child and happened to us as kids, my siblings
that since they happened, we haven't spoken about, even to each other.
So this is all pretty dark stories and there's a few things that actually in the book I hadn't
even remembered myself, my mind had blocked and something stimulated it, I suddenly felt
the need to get these stories out and I sort of likened it to a wound; if you just keep
it hidden in the dark it doesn't get any better.
These things in the book have caused me pain for my whole life and of course we know a
lot of problems, the way I behaved the way I coped or didn't cope with the issues, that's
probably unfortunately for me a lot of, the way I didn't cope with a lot of these issues
has been on national television, for most of my life.
What a way to cope.
But it's okay, because I'm glad to get this out now.
Well early in the book you do say you felt like you were running away from this time,
now you've kind of stopped turned around and confronted it, I mean how does it feel to
be on the other side of that?
Well it's good, when I wrote the book I sort of stopped and you know and started facing up
to stuff, actually doing all this press and talking to people about the book, I feel like
I'm charging back at it now, running at it, so you know I think it's good you know,
you can spend your life running, it doesn't matter what you're running form, whether it's
metaphorically or physically running, but eventually stuff is going to catch up with
you and if you spend your life running... I was running from fear and shame and pain and
I say in the book I was running from hope by the end of the book and so when you
actually stop and face it, it's really not half as hard as I thought, it was much harder
to keep running and it was much more dangerous to keep running, because you know, you hear
about people committing suicide or people you know having accidental death by drinking
and all that sort of thing and that's what happens when people are running away.
These are the results of running from fear and shame, so I've stopped running.
Your dad was a prizefighter, did he want that life for you or was a part of coming to Australia
to put you on a different path?
You know what, my brother ended up training, my brother became South Australian school
boys champion and later on he actually became Australian Army champion as a boxer, but I
trained with my father for years, but you know, it's a certain kind of person that can
go in and have their head punched for nine minutes or 12 minutes or whatever it is. I love the
sport of boxing. I love pure boxing, I hate seeing corruption
in fighting and stuff, but when my father fought he was an amateur and it was all very,
it was like the Olympic sort of boxing, it was very sort of pure; it was man against man and
nobody was out to kill each other.
I like that, but it wasn't really for me, I was sort of you know, I was happier like reading
or singing.
So what was, I guess was music the path that you did see for yourself, even at a young
age, because, you joined Cold Chisel, well you know you formed the band at such a young
age, in your teenage years?
Music was always part of my life, at school I used to be sent at five, six years old, I used
to be sent around the whole school every morning to sing, because I think they were trying
to get rid of me, but no, I liked to sing and apparently I was okay at it at an early
age.
So I sang, I was in the school choir, I was in school bands, I played the bagpipes, I
played the trumpet with the Salvation Army band, so music was always a huge part of my
life, but I never for a minute thought it was going to be a career, which was something
I did because I loved it.
Was music the only part of school you enjoyed, was It kind of your relief from the rest of
it?
No, not really, well earlier on, particularity earlier in school I was, because I came from
a bad home where there was a lot of violence and a lot of alcoholism and stuff, a lot of
kids who come from that sort of environment tend to over achieve and I was top of my class,
I was, the first few years of high school I was dux of the school, I enjoyed school.
I was the guy who can get up the front and be very conscientious, I'd be the one trying
to get the teacher's attention, I guess it's because of the environment I came from, I
wanted people to like me and I particularly wanted the teachers to like me, which meant
I had learn, so it was a good thing for me. School was good to me, it was only when things
got really, really bad at home and things you know, it got so bad that I couldn't concentrate
when we had no money and had no food, that's when became hard for me and you know, we were
going to school with clothes from the Salvation Army and people would laugh at us and if they
laughed at us, I learnt to deal with problems from my parents, so if they laughed at us
I would fight them.
So it was only when school got too hard, it wasn't the learning itself that I didn't like,
it was not being fit to learn; I was hungry or tired, then we know
our parents have been fighting all night, we had holes in our shoes, would be wet feet
and we would be cold, so it was just difficult, but otherwise I was always very stimulated
by the idea of education. By the time I got to second year high school, there was so much
damage done, we were pretty well damaged goods and I sort of lost track and lost interest
and really all I wanted to do was chase girls and be in a Rock'n'Roll band by that point
and it wasn't you know, that wasn't because I didn't like school, it's because I had no
ambition; no drive left.
Well you ended up having such great success so early in Cold Chisel as a teenager. Did you
think that this would be your life, music, was it hard to look too far ahead at that
time?
No, I joined Cold Chisel when I was 16 and a half and I left Adelaide when I was 17 which
is basically into the end of this book and then we went around, we played for four years,
constantly all over the country, we played everywhere, got to the point where we're doing
eight shows a week, playing every night of the week and we ended up, you know, we couldn't
get arrested, but eventually we got a deal and music became, well in that process of
working every night, learning our craft and learning how to write songs, we got to the
point where we became really, music was the most important thing in our lives and that's
when music became very serious to me.
Even then I didn't think about, I didn't do music to make money, I made music because
I needed to do it and I wanted to sing, I wanted to share something with an audience,
I wanted to take people on a journey, I want to make people watch our band and escape from
the troubles, so it wasn't till much later that really, once you have a success, like
when we had a hit record, that was two records in, then people are going "the pressure's on you
to make a better record," but you know pressure's always on you to make better records, we just
wanted to be a better band; wasn't really just about making money, you know.
And it was an escape for you as well?
Music was always an escape for me. I could run away in my head. In the
end I was running away by drinking way too much and that's when it became dangerous,
but music always took me on a journey and always took me away from where I... what was
hurting me. But in saying that, all the stuff that I wrote about in this book you know,
although they're not, people ask me if these stories are in songs, they're not really,
but I can look back in it now and I can see that these emotions are in every song I've ever sang you know.
When I'm singing, if I have to access the emotion
or the feeling of fear, I go back into myself to where I was. if I have to go back to love,
I can go back to when I was a child and seeing my parents. If I have to go back to anger
I can go where my family is breaking up and I'm sure I've accessed these emotions and
these emotions have made me a better singer, because I've used them.
Well it's kind of the old trick that actors do of sense memory and playing from that.
Yeah, but I did that unconsciously, because I'd never want to think about this stuff,
but the reason I think people connected with me as a singer, just because I was a raw nerve,
they could feel all the stuff in me before I could.
Well just wrapping up, you talk in the book about mistakes are good you know, we learn
from mistakes and we build on them, but do you have regrets of your teenage years that
you wish you could undo, that not even the experience
You know what, I've made lots of mistakes and from those mistakes I have a son, David
Campbell, who's one of the best people you could ever meet in your life you know, it's
hard. There's things I've done wrong; there's things I wouldn't like anybody else to go
through you know, I wouldn't put my kids what I went through, but everything takes you to
where you are, no matter how many mistakes you make, if it takes you to a place where
you're happy, then it's good, I mean I think you have to learn from mistakes, it took me
a while to start learning from my mistakes, I made them over and over again and eventually
I started to learn from them. When you do learn from your mistakes then they’re not
mistakes anymore, they're opportunities to learn and that's the good thing about life, I think with life no matter
how far, no matter what you've done, it doesn't matter what you've done you can always make
it better you know, you might not be able to live the same life you had before, but
you can make it what you you've done better, just by being a better person and obviously not
being like that way again.
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