“He’s been wondering lately, where did all the good times go?” While this line in the opening song on Jimmy Barnes’ new album is ostensibly about a couple struggling to make ends meet, it’s hard not to think of Barnes lying in a hospital bed, a recurring sight in recent years: recovering from infection, then hip surgery, then bacterial pneumonia, then open heart surgery, then hip surgery again … but eventually “it’s a new day”, as Barnes sings on the second track, a sentiment delivered without a question mark.
If you’re wondering where all the good times are, it seems Barnes’ answer is: wherever the hell I want them to be and, until it all ends, I’m going to be a rock star. Specifically a rock star of the late 80s and early 90s, when he didn’t have to dress down, à la grunge, or gloss up, à la ozone-depleting poodle metal, and instead slipped on a leather jacket and leaned into the camera as a freight train pulled out behind him.
Defiant lands smack bang in the middle of that Peak Barnes Moment and it is no coincidence that while Barnes shared the songwriting with some old hands and near-family, the production is given over to that master of Australiana rock, Kevin Shirley. You’d know his work from early Silverchair, the Screaming Jets, the Angels, Baby Animals, Cold Chisel … and Tina Arena. You’d know his work by the ringing clarity in your ears.
It’s in the in-your-face drum sound (that snare snap is sharpened to a point) and forward-facing guitars (you could do your hair in the reflection from the shine on them), and it’s in the careful middle ground of keyboards and a smattering of modern country to show range. You can recognise it in the prominence given to every corrugation of that lived-through voice and the softening agent of rich backing vocals and, in the powered-up ballad Beyond The Riverbend, even in the bagpipes. If this album were any more 1990s, it would come with a Hawkeian cigar and a Rachel haircut.
A song like Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t has the skinny-arse shaking beat of the Rolling Stones or the Faces, but those drums won’t let you do anything other than stomp. Things are a little lighter in opener That’s What You Do For Love, its “woah-ohs” softening the ground, but the backing vocals of an escalating chorus and a hero-cast guitar solo don’t resist the temptation to go full back-of-the-beerbarn anthemic.
If the muscular rock of Nothing Comes For Nothing and the brassy southern soul Sea Of Love, possibly the most satisfying song on the album, gives Barnes a moment to ease back on the throat – but there’s little evidence he was looking for respite. He rips it up in the title track and pushes it to the edges in the husky Never Stop Loving You; even at half-force in Dig Deep he feels powerful, controlled rather than raw against the saloon piano. What heart operation?
That operation and its aftermath, however, does play through Barnes’ lyrical focus. Not just in the obvious I-get-knocked-down-I-get-up-again rugged roar of the title track’s “I don’t get tired, I just higher/I stand defiant”, but in the reflections of a man given yet another chance.
There are throwbacks to the stories he’s told us in his series of hugely successful memoirs. Of mistakes and repair, like The Long Road’s declaration that “I’m on the long road to perdition”, and of coming through a childhood where “if you showed any weakness, the streets will make you bleed”, as he sings in Dig Deep. And there is Never Stop Loving You’s clear view of the complications and satisfactions of a long love affair that was not only life-saving but life-affirming.
It’s true that this makes for an album that could hardly be said to break new ground or reach stellar heights. But it’s also true that it nails the essentials of Jimmy Barnes – and even more so, the Jimmy Barnes that people wanted to hear in the good and the bad times almost half a century ago.
Defiant is out now (Mushroom)
