A NOTE ON FANS
I REMEMBER WHEN WE first started out, if I thought I saw a person at two shows I was over the moon.
‘Hey, guys. There’s a girl out there who was at the last show. I think she likes the band!’
After having a look out front, Don would tell me, ‘No, Jim. She works for the agency. She’s counting how many people are at the show.’
But I never listened to him. As far as I was concerned she was a fan and she was following us around. We were on our way to the top.
By the time people really did start to turn up night after night it was different. By this point we were too caught up in putting on the show to worry about it too much. Well at least until the show was over. Then we would bump into them at the bar.
In the early days a lot of girls would turn up to stand in front of Phil. He was the first one of us to have a following of young girls. Phil was always well groomed, not a hair out of place, with clean, well-pressed clothes. Whereas I was normally drug crazed and covered in sweat and pacing from side to side looking for trouble. And if I couldn’t find any I would start it.
Ian had a bit of a following too. He was a good-looking young fella with no shoes and even though he didn’t dress as well as Phil, he was always being watched by girls with big doe eyes, who were waiting for him to notice them. He didn’t notice them as much or as soon as they wanted. Ian was always head down, face covered by his thick curly hair as he concentrated on what was coming out of his amps, twisting and flicking dials on his guitar, wringing the wildest sound he could out of it.
‘Hey Ian, did you see that girl out there blowing kisses at you all night? She was very cute,’ I would announce in the dressing room after the show.
‘Er, no. I, er, was having trouble hearing any top end from my amp. It was weird, it was changing all night. I was sure I had the volume set on seven and then I would look at it and it was flat out. I never touched it.’
I would walk away, never looking back, not wanting Ian to know that I had been changing his volume all night. Not to fuck him up but to make the band sound heavier and louder. If I’d asked him, he might not have done it. If I could have found a control for Steve, he would have been hitting harder too. But I did find that if I made Ian play louder, the rest of the band followed, maybe because they couldn’t hear themselves.
Don was a bit of a dark horse. The girls who liked him didn’t stand in front of the stage. They were way too cool to be seen up the front. But sure enough, after the show we’d see Don leaving for drinks with a beautiful young girl.
There were usually a few girls trying to catch a broken drumstick from Steve, but he was always too busy keeping time and worrying about the rest of us to worry about girls.
FANS CAME IN ALL shapes and sizes. For most of our career, Cold Chisel was followed around by gangs of blokes. Blokes who I’d drunk with or fought with. Guys who came out every night to see if they could work out how Ian pulled the sound that he did or how he played so fast. Young musicians standing just away from the front, watching to see who was driving the band. Just when they thought they had it worked out, it would change. Depending on which song we were playing it would take another path. A lot of the time I would be the one dictating the pace of the songs, but Don stood his ground when he had to, keeping the band playing at a solid speed despite my efforts to drive it towards certain death. When Don or Steve did that, it was usually the right thing for the song. The band always let me do my thing, pushing and shoving each song about because they knew that I was working off the crowd. If the crowd needed it to go faster, I made the band play faster. If they were getting bored, I made the band play something else. But when it came down to the real nitty-gritty of a song, every member knew that they had to hold the song at the right speed regardless of what I was doing. So really the music was a result of a push and pull between myself and the rest of the band. And this was our secret ingredient. This was what created the tension between the band members. This was what made us exciting to watch. Our fans, I think, knew this and they watched the game we played very night, waiting to see who would win the tug-o-war. Every night something different happened. We could play the same set but it was never the same in reality. Phil and Steve were mostly oblivious to the battle between Ian and myself. They played in a world of their own, unless I was jumping on their backs. Then they either ignored me or had to go with me, depending on how much they could take.
AFTER A FEW COUNTDOWN appearances, I noticed that the cool musician types were standing further back. It was like they were pissed off with us for going on Countdown, like we had sold out or something. Their place at the front was filled by lots of young, good-looking girls. This suited me down to the ground. I always hated the cool muso types who came to our shows. They were no fun afterwards.
‘Yes, so Ian, I noticed that you used your front pickup on that new song tonight. Do you think the tone makes the difference to the mood? Oh and by the way, have you changed the valves in your amp since last night? It’s much brighter.’
This was the last thing I wanted to do after a show. Talk about equipment.
‘Can you get to fuck out of here? You are driving me crazy. Who cares what fucking pickup he used? And leave our drinks alone. Buy your own. Get out of here before I change your fucking valves.’
Then I would fill the room with girls and be ready to kick on all night.
Over the years our relationship with the fans changed. We were never a band that had groupies. There were girls who followed us around but not really groupies. After a while, the after-shows changed for us. It became more important to have time to recover and figure out what had worked and what hadn’t. We would talk about what we needed to do to take the show to the next level. When I got bored with that I would leave and look for girls. One of us had to do it. I took one for the team.