Jimmy Barnes

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Jimmy Barnes bigraphy, stories - Scottish, Australian songwriter, rock singer

Jimmy Barnes : biography

28 April 1956 –

James Dixon Swan (born 28 April 1956), better known as Jimmy Barnes, is a Scottish-born Australian rock singer-songwriter. His father Jim Swan was a prizefighter and his older brother John Swan is also a rock singer. It was actually John who had encouraged and taught Jim how to sing as he wasn’t really interested at the time. His career as both a solo performer and as the lead vocalist with the rock band Cold Chisel has made him one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time. The combination of 14 Australian Top 40 albums for Cold Chisel and 13 charting solo albums, including nine No. 1s, gives Barnes the highest number of hit albums of any Australian artist.

Solo career

1980s

Barnes launched his own career less than a month after Cold Chisel’s Last Stand tour came to an end. He assembled a band that included Arnott, former Fraternity bass player Bruce Howe and guitarists Mal Eastick (ex-Stars) and Chris Stockley (ex-The Dingoes) and began touring and writing for a solo album. Signing to Mushroom Records, Barnes released his first solo album Bodyswerve. He was now billing himself as Jimmy Barnes, instead of merely ‘Jim Barnes’ as he had been credited during his Cold Chisel days. The album was immediately successful, entering the Australian charts at Number One on 8 October. This was the first of a remarkable run of top charting albums for Barnes, as each of his first six solo albums all debuted in the Number One position, a feat that no other Australian musical artist is likely to match. His list of Number One albums now totals eleven, including three Cold Chisel albums. His total of nine No. 1 albums as a solo performer is matched by no other Australian recording artist. The final Cold Chisel studio album 20th Century and the live album Barking Spiders Live were also released in 1984. 20th Century peaked at No. 1 on 23 April.

On 22 December 1984, days after Barnes had begun that year’s Barnestorming tour, his second daughter Eliza-Jane was born.

Early in his solo career, Barnes was determined to break into the US market and signed to Geffen Records for release there. His second album For the Working Class Man was tailored in this direction, featuring remixed songs from Bodyswerve plus five new tracks including "Working Class Man" that was written by Journey musician Jonathan Cain and would become Barnes’ signature tune. Several US musicians worked on the album including Cain, Charlie Sexton, singer Kim Carnes and British drummer Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. The album was released as a double vinyl set and shifted 250,000 copies in twelve months in Australia. Like its predecessor, For the Working Class Man debuted on the national chart at No. 1 on 16 December 1985. It remained at No. 1 for seven weeks. Titled simply Jimmy Barnes in the US, the album was issued in February to tie in with the release of the Ron Howard film Gung Ho which featured "Working Class Man". Because of this, Gung Ho was released as Working Class Man in Australia.

The Jimmy Barnes band that toured Australia in support of the album featured Howe and Arnott, plus keyboardist Peter Kekell, former Rose Tattoo guitarist Robin Riley and American guitarist Dave Amato. With the release of the album in America, Barnes headed off with a band of Canadian musicians hand-picked by his North American management team and toured with ZZ Top. It was the first time since 1981 that he had toured without his family as part of his entourage as Jane was pregnant. Shortly after their son Jackie (named after Jackie Wilson) was born on 4 February 1986 she and the children joined him in the US for the rest of the tour.

In 1986, Jimmy Barnes recorded two songs with INXS, an Easybeats cover "Good Times" and "Laying Down The Law", which he co-wrote with INXS members Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence. "Good Times" was used as the theme song for the Australian Made series of concerts that toured the country in the summer of 1986–87. Australian Made was the largest touring festival of Australian music talent that had ever been attempted to that point. Barnes and INXS headlined and the rest of the line-up featured Mental as Anything, Divinyls, Models, The Saints, I’m Talking and The Triffids. The shows began in Hobart, Tasmania on 26 December and concluded in Sydney on Australia Day, 26 January 1987. A concert film of this event was made by Richard Lowenstein and released later that year.. IMDb.com "Good Times" peaked at No. 2 on the Australian chart and several months later was featured in the Joel Schumacher film The Lost Boys, allowing it to chart Top 40 in the US.