we’re not getting any fucking younger
MY BIRTHDAY, 1993
CRACK.
Suddenly I can see bright lights flashing inside my head. This is what they mean when they say you’re seeing stars. Steve Prestwich just head-butted me while I wasn’t looking.
‘Hey you!’
Crack.
There he is again. I’m not trying to ignore him, I’m just busy talking.
‘Are you listening to me, you bloody twat?’ Steve interrupts me. He’s had a few drinks, obviously, and he wants to talk shit with me. We’re standing in the front room of my house, the White House, up on Mount Gibraltar. It’s my birthday and everyone in the place is starting to get warmed up. There are at least another hundred people Steve could terrorise but he wants to get stuck into me.
‘I’m just having a word with my wife if you don’t mind, “Our Steve”.’ That’s what his brothers call him when they talk about him. ‘Our Steve’. I think it might placate him for a minute and I go back to my conversation.
Crack.
He won’t take no for an answer. He wants to talk to me and he wants to talk now. ‘Come on, Jim. Fuck. I need to talk to you, all right?’
I apologise to Jane. She laughs and walks away. Jane knows how Steve and I get after a few.
‘What do you fucking want, you stupid fucking Scouse git?’
I know that sounds harsh but I am speaking from a place of love. Steve often calls me a fucking twat because I act like one sometimes. And I, more often than not, call him a fucking Scouse git, because he comes from Liverpool and he can be a right git when he gets pissed.
‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’ He’s smiling at me now and trying to cuddle me.
‘No, I don’t. Come on, what? You tell me what I’m supposed to know.’
I look him straight in the eye. I have to, otherwise he’ll head-butt me again. Every time he does it, it gets a little harder. Like he’s trying to make a point.
‘We –’ He looks around the room to make sure no one’s listening. ‘We should get the fucking band back together. And soon,’ he tries to whisper in that way that only a drunken Liverpudlian can. The whole room can hear him. I can see his eyes are starting to water a little. He’s getting sentimental now. ‘We’re not getting any fucking younger, you know. And I want to play some music with my mates. Fuck all the bullshit. Let’s just play fucking music, man.’
I look at him and I can tell that even though he’s drunk too much and he probably won’t remember this tomorrow, he is deadly serious. I give him a cuddle. ‘Well, you talk to the others. If they are in, I’m in. I’ve been working hard since we stopped. You guys are the lazy bastards.’
THE BOYS HAD BEEN anything but lazy and I knew it. It was strange. What we thought of each other and what we said to each other were never the same thing. We would say the harshest things to one another in public, even though we thought the world of each other. Cold Chisel was a very complex beast.
So Steve knew I was kidding. Ian had made a career for himself. He had some very big records and toured relentlessly, just like me. Don had formed the band Catfish and would go on to make some great records with Tex, Don and Charlie. Phil had taken a break and spent time with his family, something that we all yearned for but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to do. He kept up his chops playing bass with Ian’s band and with me occasionally. And Steve, of course, wrote beautiful songs. He’d joined the Little River Band for a short time and even played drums with John Farnham before he’d finally made a record of his own and toured a little with his own band. So we had all been busy.
Whenever Steve put shit on me or the music I made, I reminded him how many records I had made and sold, just to shut him up a bit.
I LAUGH AND START to walk away. Steve calls me back in close. ‘Hey you!’
I turn back towards him, thinking he wants another cuddle.
Crack.
He hits me with another head butt. ‘I am gonna fucking talk to them, you bloody twat. But you’d better be ready to sing well this time. None of that shit you sing in your solo fucking band. Working Class rubbish. Real fucking rock songs mate, all right?’
Steve turns away and spots one of the many girls at the party. He starts to dance, the way he always does when he’s drunk and happy. He may be a git but I do love the guy.
BUT WE DIDN’T GET back together, not straightaway. I heard soon after my party that Steve was having troubles with bad headaches. Blinding pain behind his eyes.
‘I think he’s got that headache from head-butting me so many times,’ I joked with Jane.
Steve had a benign brain tumour removed in 1993. It was nothing to do with him head-butting me. When we found out we were all stunned. I thought we would live forever, so this news about Steve rocked me. Cold Chisel would always be there. They were my first family. When I left home and joined them, it was the first time I felt safe, the first time that I was a part of something positive and good. My family before that was never safe, was never positive. It was dark, and thinking about them made me feel some sort of pain. My family never knew what a family really was. But Chisel was different. We fought, laughed and cried together. I still looked back on my years with them as the good times. They were the family I had always wanted. Now there was a chance that we would lose Steve. Lose a brother. I couldn’t think about it.
Steve had surgery not long after. Everything went well but everything changed too. Steve had realised that life was short and he wanted to have a good time. He was no longer angry or aggressive. He was a peaceful, happy, loving father and friend. The thought of leaving his family behind, including us, had made Steve realise how lucky he was.
‘We’re not here for a long time, Jim, we’re here for a good time. We shouldn’t take each other for granted. Let’s make some music before one of us dies, for fuck sake,’ he said to me, next time I saw him. He was very serious and had tears in his eyes.
No one but Steve ever wanted to make the first move. He was always trying to get us in a room and play music. ‘Come on, guys. Just fucking give it a go. What have we got to lose?’
But it never happened. We all stood back, protecting ourselves. I for one didn’t want to get hurt again, although I would have to risk it to get over the feeling that I was no good without Cold Chisel to prop me up. And it was more than just personal. Musically we still had work to do. We all knew it. The band had imploded for a lot of reasons but the heart of it, the music, was not one of them.
BEFORE LONG I was told by my accountants that things were really bad, and getting worse by the minute.
‘How bad can it be? I can make more money,’ I laughed.
They weren’t laughing with me. ‘We are going to have to make arrangements. Settle with all your debtors, and you will probably be bankrupt in a month. You have over-capitalised, Jimmy. There is no more money.’
My world was crumbling around me. What was I going to do? That day had come. The whole world was going to see that I was a loser. I deserved this. I should never have been successful. I went into a dark place. A state of depression. That voice that I had heard in my head was screaming now. ‘You’ll end up back in the gutter where you belong. You thought you were better than us. Well, now we know you’re not.’
I could hear it going round and round. I tried not to let the family see that I was so down, but I’m not good at hiding these sorts of things. We were going to have to sell the house. My home. I had worked my whole life for this. This made me different from the family I had left behind when I joined the band. I was the first person in my family to buy a house of their own. This was the home my children were supposed to grow up in. I had buried our old dog Theo in the grounds of this house. I couldn’t sell it. They couldn’t take it from me. But they were going to, along with all the stuff I had collected over the years that made me feel like I meant something. Statues, saddles, paintings, furniture, all of it was being ripped from me.
As far as I could tell, Jane took it well. She didn’t seem to mind. ‘It’s just things, Jimmy. We don’t need things. We can make a better home. We still have each other.’
She was right. Somehow I still had my Jane.
ONE DAY, JANE MADE a suggestion. ‘Jimmy, you’ve spent the last six months in and out of Europe. Why don’t we pack up and move there for a while? You can work on building a new audience and we can have fun. The children will love it.’
This sounded good to me. We could run away and I wouldn’t have to see everything I had lost. I thought that if I stayed in Australia I would have it rubbed in my face. I had to get away.
I sort of believed what Jane had told me. I had all I needed. My children and my wife. I didn’t need all this stuff and I could make more money. I was free. But it was still weighing heavy in the back of my mind. I tried to keep a brave face, but alone I would break down and cry. I had fucked it all up.