STACK #146 Dec 2016

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COLD CHISEL Michael Dwyer ponders the ins and outs of Cold Chisel's Cold Chisel ('78) , Breakfast At Sweethearts ('79) , East ('80) , Circus Animals ('82) , and Twentieth Century ('84) , reissued on vinyl by Universal.

Circus Animals is what they were by '82. Slaves to the grind and plenty mean about it. It opens with Barnes's furniture-upsetting kiss-off to the US label stiffs, then Mossy's slow-burning rattle and burn back out to Bow River . Prestwich hits his straps with a couple of classics FM radio will play forever now. Walker's ornery menagerie – Taipan , Houndog , Wild Colonial Boy – lurks in the back of the tent. The wheels were falling off by Twentieth Century . Tempers had frayed and Prestwich split after the matchless Flame Trees and Barnes's fed-up dressing room tantrum, No Sense . Mossy feels Walker's Saturday night ennui like a brother, and sings the whole band of wasted travellers back home to Janelle . OK, maybe there's some filler on this one, between 13 songs and a big fold-out poster – hey, is that Donald Trump being pleasured by a minion's wife on the cover? But you'd be hard pressed to find it anywhere else in these five albums. Ragged tyres and blown fuses and all, it's a string of hard-bitten road movies with just about every scene essential to the big story. It's a trip well worth retracing one side at a time. (Universal)

cover? The writing hangs over her head: "This is the neon strip/ Where baracudas (sic) cruise/ Drivers, midnight looters/ Zipped in sharkskin jackets…" She looks like she can handle herself. Sweethearts is strictly a forwarding address. East ? Well, that’s one great- sounding record. The fateful 'commercial' turning point of 1980 that Walker would resent all too soon, spewing radio songs like a choirgirl on cheap wine. His cast of outsider characters has a more overtly violent and/or criminal streak: all sawn-off-shotguns and pub riots and penitentiary walls. Barnes, Moss, drummer Steve Prestwich and even bassist Phil Small are snapping at his heels as writers now, each going for the Countdown gold ring. There's a bonus seven-inch 45 of Knocking On Heaven's Door, between Mossy's 4am moan through The Party's Over .

I t didn't sound all that hi-fi back in '78, that first Cold Chisel record. It still doesn't, and it still doesn’t matter. The gist was always more a sinewy, shimmering promise than the full stadium-detonating charge. Some enigmatic Asian romance wraps around the cover. "Jet- lag" is the first word on a lyric sheet laid out in big type, like words are important, inside the gatefold. Juliet, Sandy, Rosaline, Daskarzine and the rest are all past tense – legs often open, minds always closed, lit beneath café fans and Roman steeples by some bruised narrator feverish from long-haul travel. The words are Don Walker's, the voice is mostly Jim Barnes, with Ian Moss a dream second stringer. They blend into one restless, world-weary seeker, always leaving or arriving to some disappointment or other, dragging seedy blues and jazz twists in

all their unsettled colours into a distinctly Australian panorama previously foreign to rock'n'roll. It is one hell of start. Breakfast At Sweethearts didn't sound much better in '79. Still doesn't matter. The landscape is more localised around the bars and foyers and dingy hotel rooms of King's Cross, with the call of the road nagging through gnashing teeth and Astrid and other nameless vixens selling all kinds of trouble behind stage curtains and locked doors. Which one is that, staring like a waxwork from the back

Cold Chisel 1978

East 1980

Twentieth Century 1984

Breakfast At Sweethearts 1979

Circus Animals 1982

DECEMBER 2016

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