Jimmy Barnes

Jimmy Barnes biography

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.

Jimmy Barnes was born in Glasgow, Scotland and arrived in Adelaide, South Australia as a 4-year old on 7 January 1961 with his parents Jim and Dorothy Swan and siblings John, Dororthy, Linda, Lisa & Alan. They eventually settled in Elizabeth. Shortly afterward, Barnes' parents divorced. His mother Dorothy soon remarried, to a clerk named Reg Barnes. After her daughter Lisa was teased by a schoolmate about being adopted, Dorothy encouraged her children to change their surname to Barnes. All of them did except for the oldest brother John, who would go on to be much better known as Swanee, eventually recording a series of albums under that name from the 1980s. This would later cause confusion about Jimmy Barnes and Swan; many thought them to be half- or stepbrothers.

Barnes was raised a Protestant, and considers himself a Buddhist, although in September 2009 he revealed that he has Jewish ancestry, his maternal grandmother having been Jewish.

The Cold Chisel years (1973-1983)

Barnes took an apprenticeship in an iron smelter with the South Australian railways in 1973 but the love he and his brother had for music led him to join a band. Swanee was now playing drums with Fraternity, who had just parted ways with singer Bon Scott. Barnes took over the role but his tenure with the band was brief and before long he had joined a harder-edged band called Orange, featuring organist and songwriter Don Walker, guitarist Ian Moss, drummer Steve Prestwich and bass player Les Kaczmarek. Within a short time the group had changed its name to Cold Chisel and began to develop a strong presence on the local music scene. Barnes' relationship with the band was often volatile and he left several times, leaving Moss to handle vocal duties until he returned. After a temporary move to Armidale, New South Wales while Walker completed his engineering studies there, Cold Chisel moved to Melbourne in August 1976 and then three months later shifted base to Sydney. Progress was slow and Barnes announced he was leaving once again in May 1977 to join Swanee in a band called Feather. However, his farewell performance with Cold Chisel went so well he changed his mind and a month later the band was signed by WEA.

By 1980 Cold Chisel was the biggest band in Australia and Barnes had developed a notorious reputation as a hard-drinking wild man who reportedly drank more than two bottles of vodka a day, much of it onstage during performances.

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