Don Walker is the major songwriting force of Cold Chisel and has shaped the Australian musical voice in a way that few others can claim to. But sometimes he wonders if it would matter if songwriting ended right here and now.
“It’s a sneaking question,” he says. “Do we have enough already? If nobody ever wrote another song — there are a lot of good ones around already — would it matter that much?”
If there’s an Australian songwriter who proves the need for ongoing, engaged writing, it’s Walker. He captured the moods and ideas of particular times and places in Australia more vividly than any other writer, from the lively streets of Sydney in Saturday Night, to the haunting comfort of rural NSW in Flame Trees and a post-Vietnam War Australia in Khe Sanh. What would the 1970s and ’80s have been like without his music? And what would the next few decades be like if no songwriter responded to the world around them in a similar way.
Although they wade into political and social areas, Walker says he never sets out to write a song with a particular political or social perspective.
“I think there will always be songwriters who have that focus,” he says. “I’m a little bit wary of it myself, because it’s difficult to do that and maintain the subtlety and mystery that can come out of songs that are personal or coming from an inner life — just from the intriguing minutiae around you.
“I don’t think it was just our era with people like the Oils and John Schumann who wrote deliberately political songs. In any generation there will be people who see that as a calling. Some people do it very well, like the people I mentioned, and some people do it badly.”
Walker is heading out on the road again with his current band The Suave Fucks and a new set of songs from his latest album Hully Gully, which was released in August last year. With a bluesy, irreverent style, the album sits right in the middle of his solo work, focussing on figures slightly on the fringes of society. While his style changes depending on whether he’s writing for Cold Chisel, solo projects or his collaborative efforts with Tex Perkins and Charlie Owen, Walker says not a whole lot has changed in his approach to songwriting.
“I probably know a lot more now than I did when I was young, but there’s a lot more that I don’t know. That side of it — of exploring a vast unknown, which is what songwriting is — that’s still there.”
Walker never sets out to write an album set around a particular theme or style, as he worries that can cause the product to be rather “artificial”. All of the songs on the album, like almost all of the work from Walker’s career, were born on the road.
“It’s how I usually work. We go out live and each year have a few more songs to inject into the set. And then every year or two we go into the studio and just play all the new songs to tape and see what’s there.”
The Perfect Crime tour, which is travelling around NSW, Victoria and Queensland in October and November, will include mostly album tracks from Hully Gully. Over the course of the year, Walker is also playing several intimate, solo gigs, because he says he relishes new, challenging experiences. After more than 40 years of live gigs, the thrill remains the same, he says.
“Performing live isn’t something that I have to do, and not something I do often enough to get sick of.”
But back in the 1970s, when he was with Cold Chisel, the band was playing gig after gig, not just out of love, but out of absolute necessity.
“There was a lot more riding on it then,” Walker says. “The only income we had to feed or shelter ourselves was from last night’s gig, and often that wasn’t much. It was a very sort of subsistence level of existence and travel, whereas that’s not the case now.”
Walker famously took up residence in Sydney’s Kings Cross in 1976, before anybody had heard of Cold Chisel, and stayed there for more than three decades. He first lived in a tiny room in the Plaza Hotel for $12.50 a week, with holes in the ceiling. His experiences there would shape his lyrical output for years — everything from Plaza to Breakfast at Sweethearts, which refers to the tiny Sweethearts Cafe where he wrote many of his songs. He saw the Cross change from a cheap suburb on the CBD’s fringes to a booming nightclub and property region. And he saw Sweethearts cafe change to a McDonalds.
It’s not the only thing that’s evolved since Cold Chisel was starting out, with the music industry expanding and shifting rapidly over the last decade. Walker wonders how the band would have gone if it were starting out today.
“I think we’d go pretty well. I think we’d go a lot further actually.”
But could Chisel be Chisel now that the iconic Aussie pub rock scene has largely faded away?
“Well that scene didn’t really exist when we were starting out either. Even in the decades when we were figuring out what we were doing, what was fashionable out there was quite different. If we were starting out now, we’d probably be doing the same thing.”
Even with a similar musical output, the advent of the internet would have obviously changed how they promoted their product and communicated with fans. There’s every chance we may have even seen a crowd-funded Cold Chisel album.
“Record companies aren’t needed anymore to actually get music to listeners,” Walker says. “The foundations have melted on the whole business model of the people who stand between the creators and the listeners.”
That would have to be an attractive prospect for a band that had a few difficult encounters with music executives, including one trip to the US that triggered Jimmy Barnes to write You Got Nothing I Want. But in the brave new world, post-record companies, would Chisel have given into the pressure to connect with their fans through social media?
“I will never have a Twitter account,” Walker says. “But if there’s a piece of technology there, Ian Moss and Jimmy Barnes will be right there with whatever it is. They’re curious that way.”
The Perfect Crime tour begins October 24 at the Kidgeeridge Music Festival in Ulladulla. Tour dates are available at facebook.com/donwalkermusic