AUSTRALIA, 1996–98
I RETURNED FROM FRANCE determined to get everything back on track and before long it all was – I was back on the same track I had tried to jump off. Only now it was worse. I was drinking more than ever and taking more drugs than ever before. In 1996 I released Hits, a greatest hits anthology that came in at number one. I had a single at number one on the radio charts as well, so I should have been on top of the world, but I was falling apart again. Jane and I were fighting more and more, mainly because I was fucking up in every way possible. To make things worse, Jane was starting to party too. I was tearing down everything we had tried to rebuild. It was one step forward and ten steps back. Cocaine was easy to find in Australia by now and I found it all the time. I would be on tour and come home smelling of booze and women. Smashed and not even capable of making excuses for myself anymore. Instead, I would just storm out of the house and find more of everything.
WHILE WE WERE IN Europe, I had recorded a song that Jane and I wrote. I remember reading the lyrics and squirming in my chair. Was Jane trying to let me know something? I had to stop myself from thinking about it. The song was called ‘Lover Lover’. It was poppy and catchy. I felt it was something that people might get to like.
When Jane decided she wanted to write songs I was surprised. She started walking around the house with a clipboard, counting to herself, deep in thought.
‘What are you doing, baby?’ I asked her after a few days of this.
‘I’m writing a song. I think I’ve worked out how to do it.’
Great. I hoped she would tell me once she’d figured it all out. ‘That’s good. But what are you counting?’ I was curious. It was like she was doing a maths problem.
‘I’m counting out the number of syllables I need for this verse. I’m doing research. This is like an assignment at school and I want to get an A+.’
I laughed quietly to myself. ‘That’s not how you write songs. You don’t have to count like that.’ She had obviously got the whole thing wrong.
‘You do it your way and leave me to do it my way.’ She walked away. I thought I’d let her do it her way, then I’d help her at the end. But she didn’t need my help. When she had finished she played it to me.
‘It’s really good. How did you do that?’ I asked her.
‘I have my own way of doing things. Music is like maths to me. It’s a language of its own. When I was little and living in a lot of different countries, the only common language was maths. So I saw maths as a language. Music is the same.’
I had no idea what she was talking about but she was obviously right because the song was a cracker. I played it to Mushroom, who had their song specialist look at it. He rang us up and said, ‘Listen. I’m not sure it will work. You should write something else.’
I was gobsmacked. ‘What don’t you get? It’s hooky and it has a great melody. This is a good love song.’
The songsmith thought for a second and then replied, ‘Love songs don’t sell anymore.’
I hung up. He had no idea what he was talking about. I told the record company to put it out as it was. They did and the song hit the top of the charts late in 1996. Apparently people did still like love songs. Who knew? Not the songsmith from Mushroom anyway. ‘Lover Lover’ was my first number one airplay hit as a solo artist. If I had to write a report for Jane it would have gone like this: ‘Jane Barnes has been very attentive in class and has done all her homework. For songwriting I have given her an A+.’
But having a number one just made things harder for us. The song was everywhere, so I was away more often and I was suddenly back in the public eye. I didn’t cope well. I was falling apart. I was crumbling. Cold Chisel was looming on the horizon and I wasn’t ready for it.
ENOUGH TIME HAD PASSED for us all to forget why Cold Chisel had broken up. Besides, when we looked back, it wasn’t that important anyway. We just needed some space to grow up a bit. I wasn’t sure how much I had grown up but I knew that I wanted to play with the band again. I missed the feeling of belonging to something bigger than just my own band. I needed to reconnect with my brothers. I think I needed them more than ever.
I was happy that I had a big album with Hits, so I wasn’t walking back with my tail between my legs. I was rejoining my mates, with a full head of steam. My bad habits had become worse and my sanity was on the line. I needed to belong.
We started writing and rehearsing for the making of an album and, if all went well, a big tour. I started singing with the band but most of what I could see was through the bottom of a bottle. I knew they were worried, but we ploughed on through. Some days I was bad, and others I was worse.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE CAME INTO Sydney looking tired and flustered. I remember seeing him on TV and thinking he needed to rest. I thought I knew how he was feeling. I needed a rest too, and Hutch’s life was a million times more hectic than mine.
I spoke to him on the phone. ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s catch up. I’m busy and I know you’re busy. You’re here for a while, we can catch up soon,’ I said. I was living around the corner from where he was staying. I might have walked by his hotel a few times. But you never expect to run out of time, do you? There is always later.
Everyone in Australia wanted a piece of Michael from the minute he stepped off the plane. I didn’t want to be one of those people. Jane and I could wait. We’d find a moment when the madness died down to connect and say, ‘So how are you holding up?’
Hutch was rehearsing. He was flat out. I was busy trying to keep my head above water. Then I heard the news. No. It wasn’t true. Fucking press. They’d write anything for a headline. Of course Michael wasn’t dead. They were always writing shit about him. But the reports kept coming in. Phone calls from hysterical mutual friends. It was true. He was gone. It was 22 November 1997. He had been found hanging in his room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Everybody wanted a piece of him but he died alone. I felt a shiver run down my spine.
This was a sad day, not just for his friends, or his millions of adoring fans. I could only think about his baby, Tiger Lily. She would not get to grow up with her dear, loving father. How could he have done this to her? How desperate had he been? I didn’t notice how bad things were when I talked to him. He seemed fine, but he wasn’t. What sort of friend was I?
I don’t know what pushed him over the edge that day. I have stood on that same edge looking down but something always stopped me stepping off. I wish someone or something had stopped him. That moment of bad judgement was all it took. We can all be sad, and we can all be angry. We can all have an opinion, but we were not in his shoes that night. We were not lost in the dark like he was. If there was a way out I’m sure he would have taken it. But he just couldn’t see any other way. Oh Michael.
Jane and I went to say goodbye at a funeral home in Bondi Junction. There was a body lying in the room but Michael wasn’t there. I would not remember him like that. Michael was alive and vibrant. He loved life and he loved people. Michael could walk into a room and light it up. Jane wrote a poem for him and I slipped it into his pocket. He would never get to read it.
The funeral was a massive event. I’m not sure Michael would have wanted an event. I’m not sure Michael wanted any of this. The fame, the hurt, the loneliness. But the world wanted to say goodbye. There were fans scrambling to find a spot where they could pay their respects. Friends in dark sunglasses that couldn’t cover the tears. And family, lost and confused. ‘Into My Arms’ floated across the church and out the doors, fading as it was blown by the wind down the streets of Sydney.
WHEN THE LAST WAVE OF SUMMER album was released in October 1998, it debuted at number one on the charts. But it didn’t happen easily. Chisel started rehearsing new songs and I would roll up still drunk from the night before and the night before that. I was barely capable of standing up, but for some reason I could still sing. I was an animal. I would snort and drink my way through rehearsals and then go straight out to clubs, without going home, then turn up at rehearsals wearing the same clothes the next day.
Finally, we went into Festival Studios to make the record. Don had written a lot of great songs as usual, but for some reason they seemed to resonate even more than normal with me. It was as if Don had been reading my mail. Every song felt like it was telling the story of some part of my life falling apart. I would sing each one and feel the emotion overwhelm me as soon as I opened my mouth. So I drank more to calm the nerves. I never hid anything from the boys by this time. Cocaine and weed and bottles of vodka sat on the bench next to the mixing desk, and I would shovel them into myself throughout the day and night while we worked. Sometimes it seemed like the band wanted to test me, waiting to catch me falling apart. It would be three in the morning and we’d have been recording for twelve hours straight. My eyes would be almost crossing as I sat slumped in a chair in the corner of the control room, and Don would say, ‘Hey, why don’t we do Jimmy’s guitar take now?’
The rest of the boys would look at me in disbelief, waiting for me to admit that I was too out of it. Don would look straight at me, ‘What do you think, Jim? You up for it?’ His eyes probing, testing my ability to cope.
I’d be having trouble focusing my eyes on him at all but I didn’t let him know that. ‘Fuck, yeah. I’m ready. Are you guys all too tired to work? Pussies. I’m fine. Let’s do it.’ And I’d stagger into the booth to try to tune my guitar.
‘Hey Tony,’ I would call through the talkback microphone, ‘could you send Mossy in here to tune this fucking thing? I can play it but I can’t tune it.’ I was talking to Tony Cohen, the engineer. Tony disappeared a few years after this, and eventually turned up living in the country. Tony was a wild boy in his day too and his health was damaged. He died recently. Another great member of the music community gone.
I don’t know how much of my playing they used on the record. I can hear it in a few places. Maybe Don just liked sloppy guitar playing? I got it done quickly and walked back into the control room. They were all staring at me.
‘How the fuck did you do that?’ Tony asked. He’d seen everything I had consumed.
‘It’s too easy,’ I lied, trying to make it to a chair before I fell over. ‘Anything else you want me to do?’ And I sat down and poured out another gram of coke.
Many nights the sessions would end in fights, but not directly because of me. Don and Ian seemed to be fighting a lot. Maybe Don needed to take out his frustrations with me on someone who cared. I felt nothing. It would have done him no good to talk to me.
I remember singing ‘The Things I Love in You’. That night we were overdubbing vocals and bits and pieces at Trafalgar Studios. This song was like a raw nerve for me. It’s the story of a relationship breakdown. Whenever I sang it at rehearsals, it hurt. But the night I did the final vocal it nearly tore me apart. I was destroying my relationship with Jane, the girl I loved, and I knew it. She was the most important person in my life and I was hurting her. But I couldn’t stop myself.
I sang the song with such fury and venom that when I finished it, my blood was boiling. I smashed up the studio booth. I took off my headphones and walked into the control room with tears in my eyes. ‘There’s your fucking vocal.’
I stormed off into the night alone. Every time I hear that vocal I get a knot in my stomach. I was a different person when I sang it. I don’t know who I was or where I wanted to be, but I know that I was in pain and I wanted it to end.
When the album was finished we sent it to New York to be mixed by an engineer called Kevin Shirley. Kevin would play a huge role in the lives of Cold Chisel and myself for many years to follow, but it didn’t start well. We all arrived in New York separately. I turned up to the studio once and spent the rest of the time in a drug-crazed haze, holed up in the Mercer Hotel in Soho. Why Kevin chose to work with us after that I’m not sure. Perhaps he could see something that I couldn’t. Maybe it was because we’d made a hit record. Despite all the pain we felt while making it. Despite the wild way we recorded it and despite the state I was in as I sang it. We had made a great record and it entered the Australian charts at number one. Cold Chisel was back with a vengeance.