Jimmy, you realise you are an Icon, right?
It depends how you look at it.
You arrived in Australia from Scotland as a wee bairn. What are your memories of Glasgow?
I just remember it being a very tough community; the area was not particularly pretty. There’s a great quote from Billy Connolly about where he came from in Glasgow; ‘If you sawa cat with a tail, it was a tourist’. That’s my recollection of Scotland, lots of street gangs, lots of violence. I’d look out the window at night and see people falling out of pubs, and there’d be fights and stabbings and yelling. We lived in tenement buildings, old stone apartment buildings. They didn’t have hot and cold running water, only one shared bathroom per floor.
And then you find yourself in Elizabeth, South Australia.
It was a really great set-up, Elizabeth. There were a lot of parks and schools and infrastructure we didn’t have in Scotland. And jobs! They had Holden and Ford, they had British Tube Mills. But they stuck all of the immigrants into this town and it was the same old, same old. Over the years the jobs started disappearing and all the old problems of alcoholism and violence were still rife within that Elizabethan community. Things got tough very quickly.
Enter Cold Chisel…
I joined the band when I was 16, it was November 1973, so I was pretty young. I’d been in local garage bands and playing community halls in Elizabeth. I remember walking in and seeing them; Ian [Moss], as young as he was and straight out of Alice Springs, had this beautiful fluidity in his guitar playing, Don [Walker] had all these ideas for songs. I’d never been in a band that was writing songs before, so I really felt that it was a band that had a future. After about six months we moved to NSW and never looked back.
The band were infamous for your fights.
We were like brothers, five of us staying in the back of a station wagon or the one hotel room when we were traveling around. We didn’t have much food. So we’d fight and we’d laugh and we’d cry. It was pretty volatile because we were all pushing for the band to be successful and to the outside it looked as though we were going to implode at any minute. People would come and see us and there’d be fights on stage and off stage and arguments, but what they didn’t see is that the arguments would be over in a minute. Consequently they didn’t think Cold Chisel was going to stick together that long, so it took us about four years before we were signed, which was a good thing in a lot of ways because it gave us time to find our feet as a band.
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