JIMMY BARNES – DEFIANT: REVIEW

JIMMY BARNES

Defiant (Mushroom)

“HE'S BEEN WONDERING LATELY, where did all the good times go?”

While this line in the opening song here is ostensibly about a couple who can’t make ends meet but cling on to each other, it’s not a big leap to hear it coming from Jimmy Barnes lying in a hospital bed in recent years: recovering from heart and infection issues, relapsing, recovering again, waiting for the next smack.

Does this ever end? Is this who I want to be? are a couple of questions which might have followed for him as outside the hospital people were doing that pre-emptive eulogy stuff, which is nice I guess, and better than “post-emptive”, but hardly encouraging if you’re not quite ready to go. After all, “It’s a new day,” Barnes says, in the album’s second track, and that sentiment comes without a question mark.

So if those were the questions, it seems his answers are: the good times are wherever the hell I want them to be; and until it ends I’m going to be a rock’n’roller. Specifically, the rock’n’roller of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s when he didn’t have to dress down, ala grunge, or gloss up, ala ozone-depleting poodle metal, but 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 the songwriting is shared by Barnes with some old hands and some near-family, the production is given over to that master of pre-millennial Australiana rock, Kevin Shirley. You’d know his work from early Silverchair, Screaming Jets, 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 (principally organ but occasionally piano) and a smattering of modern country (in claps, stomps and acoustic) 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 even – in the powered-up ballad Beyond The Riverbend – bagpipes.

If this were any more 1990s, it would come with a Hawkian cigar and a Rachel haircut.

A song like Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t has the skinny-arse shake of the third generation Stones/Faces fans like the Black Crowes but those drums won’t let you forget you’re stomping, not wiggling in this bar. Things are a little lighter in that racing the train 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. It’s what the kids – ok, the granddads telling those kids about that ripped Chisel t-shirt in the bottom drawer – want.

If the muscular soul/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 – albeit in the final minutes of the record – there’s been little evidence he was looking for respite. He rips it up in the title track, pushes to the edges in the husky Never Stop Loving You, and 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 where once he thought he wasn’t getting any of that. As he says in New Day, “you’re not talking to that guy I was back then”, though back then might be as recently as years not decades ago.

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 life-saving as much as life-affirming.

If it’s true that all this makes for an album that could hardly be said to break new ground, or reach stellar heights, it’s also true that it nails the essentials of Jimmy Barnes, and even more so, the Jimmy Barnes those fans were listening to when their good and bad times arrived.

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A version of this review was originally published in The Guardian.