How I became Jimmy Barnes is a bit of a long story. In fact, it’s such a long story that I’ve had to write two books to tell the whole thing. This book is the story of what shaped my life. The good, the bad and the very, very ugly. It’s the book I had to write first if I was going to make any sense of what was to come. Everything I am is because of the things that I talk about in this first book. In the second book I will try to tell you about how all this early stuff shaped what came later – the rock’n’roll years.
It wasn’t easy to write. There’s a lot of my past that I wanted to push out of my memory and never see again. But I couldn’t. I tried to drown my past in every possible way, but as long as it was festering inside me I could never really move on. My childhood affected every step I took over the rest of my life. It twisted the way I thought and the way I interacted with normal human beings. Eventually I realised that these wounds needed to be brought out in the open and aired if I ever wanted them to heal.
So I started trying to write things down. My first attempt was actually back in the early nineties. At the time I’d almost gone broke and it had me wondering what I was going to do with my life. I seemed to be on a downhill slide. So I started to write my story, not really knowing what I was trying to achieve. I thought that maybe I could skim across the surface of my past, dealing with as little as possible, and then it would stop haunting me.
I’d written about thirty thousand words by the time we moved to France in 1994. Moving away from Australia brought me a short period of relief. My past – like everything else – seemed a long way away and my writing slowed down. My computer sat on the bookshelf collecting dust until one day we were robbed and the computer was gone. I hadn’t backed anything up or written anything down, so my first attempt at writing this book ended there.
I didn’t try to write it again until about the year 2000. Everything I wrote that time was twisted by copious amounts of drinking and all the drugs I was taking. I still have that stuff somewhere and some of it’s almost funny, but there’s nothing in that version about the real issues. I actually can’t bear to read it now. I skirted around everything and made light of the worst moments of my life. Once again I got to around thirty thousand words and came to a brick wall.
Eventually I realised that I was never going to be able to write this story until I faced up to a lot of things. It then took me many years of therapy, battling alcoholism, drug dependence and guilt, to see some light at the end of the tunnel. I’d seen that light before, by the way. In the past it always turned out to be a freight train coming to run me into the ground, but this time I think things have changed for good.
I remember the exact moment when things changed. It was about eighteen months ago. I was sitting in a hotel room somewhere in the middle of a tour. I’d watched every movie on the movie channels except one. It was a dark South Australian murder story called Snowtown.
I was suddenly dragged back to my childhood. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t serial killers – well, not that I know of anyway. But everything in this movie looked like where I grew up. It looked like our street. In fact, it looked like our house. The floodgates opened and I couldn’t hold back the past any longer. It just washed all over me. So I began to write. I really didn’t lift my head again until I had well over a hundred thousand words. Suddenly a year was gone and I’d written down most of the stuff that I’d been running away from for most of my life. I felt at peace for the first time since my earliest memories of being a little boy back in Glasgow.
One day I was talking to a mate of mine, Neil Finn, and he asked me, ‘So, what are you going to call your book?’
At that stage I had no idea, but if you’ve ever heard Neil’s songs you’ll know that he’s very good at painting a picture in just a few words. Anyway, he said, ‘You’d have to call it Working Class Boy, wouldn’t you?’
I thought, ‘Shit, I wish I’d come up with that!’
The name stuck from then on but apart from that one bit of help from Neil it’s entirely my story. It’s a story that I had to write on my own – the story of a working class lad from Glasgow who grew up in the northern suburbs of Adelaide where things definitely weren’t pretty.
This book would not have been possible without the love and understanding of my family. My wife and children have watched me work my way through this stuff long before I even knew I had stuff to work through. They were there with me when I was at my highest, and believe me I was high. And when I hit my lowest they were there to reach out and help me up. They laughed with me and at me, and cried with me.
I sat and read parts of this to my two dogs, Snoop Dog and Oliver, when I was too ashamed to read it to anyone else. Thanks boys.
Thanks to Mum, Dad, Reg and my siblings. Our lives were made bearable by having each other. Without you guys I couldn’t have made it through. Thanks for sharing my joy and my pain.
I know that life is full of lessons to be learned and my children will have to learn their own but I hope I have broken the cycle of shame and fear that plagued my childhood. I know their lessons won’t be as hard as mine. So don’t be afraid. Go out and live, laugh and love. Life is good.
I’d like to thank John Watson for being my manager, a great friend and an even better sounding board as I wrote this. You helped me make sense of my ramblings.
Thanks to Andrea McNamara for getting me started, Helen Littleton and Nicola Robinson for pointing me in the right direction, even when I didn’t want to go that way, and Scott Forbes for reminding me how to speak Glaswegian.
Now that I have made some sense of this stage of my life, I truly believe that I will be better equipped to tackle my next book: the years I spent on the road making music and building a family.
There were times throughout my life when I didn’t think I was going to make it. But I am so glad that I did. You have to be able to hold your head up high and say, ‘Fuck it, I made some big mistakes, but everybody does. I can live with mine.’