Gig review: The Barking Spiders (Cold Chisel) at Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul

Live review: The Barking Spiders aka Cold Chisel at at Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul, Wollongong, Tuesday, October 2 2024

By STEVE MASCORD

“WE nearly didn’t get here – I’m taped up like a tennis ball.”

We’re two-thirds of the way through a set by the Barking Spiders – AKA Cold Chisel – in an idyllic setting that only Australians would call suburban. The Illawarra Escarpment towers over Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul on one side and the Pacific laps against the beach 500 metres away.

The speaker, of course, is Jimmy Barnes. He’s been in and out of hospital the last two years, most recently as a result of “unbearable” hip pain. Before that it was bacterial pneumonia.

Yet when he ambles to the edge of the stage at around 8.30pm, opens up the larynx and growls the words “Mr Crown Prosecutor”, it’s hard not to gasp. The throat may be technically Glaswegian but in the Antipodes it’s a national treasure.

This is a warm-up show for a national tour of arenas, large theatres and outdoor venues that has completely sold out. The Barking Spiders is so well known a pseudonym for this 1973-formed Oz Rock behemoth that this gig sold out in five minutes, too.

There’s little in the way of production – just a couple of strips of light, some backing singers and ancillary musicians who come and go and hit after hit after hit. With some hits as well. They’re delivered impeccably, of not always with the abandon and aggressiveness of days gone by.

Only three songs – the aforementioned masterpiece from Last Wave Of Summer, new single “You’ve Gotta Move” and “All For You” – are from the last 13 years.

The rest is just like you remember your Radio Songs tape, jammed into the deck on a creme Cortina on the road trip to Byron. The median age here is maybe 56, weathered couples and mates-for-decades jumping, gently swaying, those-who-are-able jumping … and filming on their phones.

Jane Barnes seems to be doing this for Chisel’s social media and the crowd parts for her like she’s Lady Diana.

Guitarist Ian Moss shreds, waxes and croons, performing “Rosaline” for the first time since 2004.  Phil Small gets on with business, Don Walker is hidden (from me) behind a perspex screen and Charley Drayton holds his gigantic drum sticks halfway down, like using chopsticks to pick up a single grain of rice.

We’re not here because of anything Cold Chisel have done recently. We’re here because of our own interest in seeing and hearing them. Their legend grows as we get older and we deal with mortality just as they did with the death of drummer Steven Prestwich in 2011 and with members’ various health issues.

We’re here to look back fondly at the past and express gratitude we’re still around to do it.

There are an amazing 25 songs, belted out relentlessly by a man pictured repeatedly in a hospital bed of late. These are songs of so much more than boy-girl love, about desperation and hope and injustice and driving a semi-trailer laden with steel.

And you get the impression these people love Cold Chisel for not treating them like mugs all these years, for rendering their lives in poetry and giving them credit for intellectual and emotional complexity others assumed they lacked.

It’s largely forgotten now but the symbol of this part of NSW is the flame tree; it used to adorn the badges of the local representative sporting teams.

To look back at row upon row of sometimes teary middle aged Australians reciting and immersing themselves in the heartbreaking tale of a roadie who lost his fiancee in a car accident is to experience a time, a mood, a taste, a smell and a place frozen in amber.

Not forever. Just forever now.