In no small part thanks to his 45-year-long music career, Don Walker cuts a fine figure as frontman of his band the Suave Fucks. Dressed all in black, the stage lit by soft spotlight, audiences illuminated by the candles on their tables, he is softly spoken as he introduces his band’s first song – but even then his tone is instantly recognisable, and his incredible gift for storytelling has all those in the room hanging on his every word. But it wasn’t always this way.
“It took a while to get comfortable, but I had good people to help get me through,” Walker says of his transition from songwriter of such undeniable hits as ‘Saturday Night’, ‘Cheap Wine’, ‘Khe Sanh’, ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ and ‘Flame Trees’ to swaggering, Johnny Cash-inflected frontman.
It took me two Catfish albums to try and figure out what I should be doing, as far as what kind of songs suit the tales that I have to tell.
“The two Catfish albums [his first project after Cold Chisel initially disbanded] were produced by Peter Walker and even though I was feeling my way as a singer, he managed to get good performances onto those albums. And it also took me those two Catfish albums to try and figure out what I should be doing, as far as what kind of songs suit the tales that I have to tell.”
Now, 30 years on from those early Catfish recordings Walker has released a box set of his entire solo catalogue – six albums, five on vinyl for the first time. However, as he tells it, the timing of the release was a total coincidence. “You mentioning that [it’s been 30 years] is the first time that I’ve realised it, but I forget birthdays, so an album’s got no chance,” he laughs. “I know there are bands and singers out there who do this thing of having 30th anniversaries and stuff like that but that’s just not something that I have ever done. I’m just not really conscious of it.”
I haven’t had a turntable for a long time but people are very passionate about it and they tell me that it sounds better.
Out now, the Blacktop box set includes both Catfish releases, Unlimited Address (1988) and Ruby (1991) alongside 1994’s We’re All Gonna Die, Cutting Back (2006) and more recently 2013’s Hully Gully. “It’s not a re-issue because all of these albums are available on other formats and they’ve always been available. I just wanted to get everything out on vinyl because a lot of people listen to vinyl now. I haven’t had a turntable for a long time but people are very passionate about it and they tell me that it sounds better.”
Walker is currently on tour appearing at the Camelot Lounge in Marrickville, only a stones’ throw away from the part of the city where the Ayr-born, Grafton raised wordsmith spent more than half his life, Kings Cross. “There’s no question that some parts have been gentrified, but I lived there for nearly 40 years and it always changed from one decade to the next, that will never stop.
“There’s still an area between the station and the El Alamein Memorial Fountain that is pretty down market and economically challenged,” he says, “but there’s a lot of development going on and people say that that’s going to disappear – but there are good people there who are fighting that too. Things always change, and it’s just a matter of watching that change and being interested in it – it just is what it is.”
The former physics student is more than adept to change as he moves effortlessly between his many projects. One weekend he can be found behind the keyboards as Barnesy belts out one of Cold Chisel’s unmistakable anthems for the enthusiastic crowd at the Supercars event in Adelaide. Then by the next weekend he’s enjoying the Harbour City skyline as part of his long-standing super-trio, Tex, Don and Charlie.
However, for now all his attention is placed firmly on the Black Top tour and the audience reaction to new material he has (somehow) found time to work on. “Yes, there are a few new songs that we’re playing on this tour, but I’ll probably wait until I’ve got a couple more and also see how they develop live before I think about recording them,” he says. “One is very new – we learnt it at rehearsal at the beginning of the tour, and it’s a little bit newborn at the moment.
“The way we operate is on tour, sometime, somewhere, I’ll book a studio for a day and go in and play them,” Walker explains. “I find that as each song is introduced to a band and you start to perform them live, they go through an arc where initially you don’t know them well enough, then they get to a magic point where you know them too well – so you’ve gotta catch them in the net just at the perfect stage of development if you can.”
So if timing is everything, ten years on from the release of his memoir Shots, he’s more than ready to see his stories in print again. “I’m writing prose as well as songs at the moment, but I’ve been too busy in the last two years to go at it as hard as I would like,” he says. “Although the prose is not a follow up to Shots; it’s fiction.
“It’s wait and see for both of us,” he jokes when I ask about a possible release date. “I’m writing and writing, and I’m sort of figuring out on the run what it’s about too.”
Blacktop is out Friday, April 27. Header photo by Bleddyn Butcher.
