Shots from the hip
Pub rock legend Don Walker turns his hand to prose in a barnstorming new memoir
Tall, streaky and saturnine, Don Walker's austere tomb-face seems more at home on Easter Island or in a Dardanelles trench than on the mean streets of Darlinghurst. But it's in these neon-lit shadowlands the Cold Chisel songwriter became the "larrikin laureate" of Australian music.
Until a year ago, when he moved to an apartment in Edgecliff with his wife and daughter, the Cross was Walker's home and heartland for his songs. It'd been that way since 1976 when he and the rest of Chisel moved from Adelaide into $14-a-week digs at the Plaza Hotel around the corner.
Here they wrote and recorded the pub rock canon that has since sold five million albums (80 per cent since the band split in 1984). These royalties have, demurs Walker, allowed him a quiet life with a writing muse "I don't have to wrestle too hard with."
Until now.
Walker has just wrestled a memoir onto the page - a gloriously scatterbrained collection of jagged vignettes charting his childhood on a Queensland farm, his years on the road with the band and - in wonderfully amphetamine-fuelled prose - his enduring love affair with Sydney.
"Shots is a compendium of very short snapshots of things I saw, places I went and people I met," Walker says, nursing tea and burnt vegemite toast, his shaving brush hair shot through with grey. "It comes not from any desire to write a book but from a habit I've developed to gush words onto paper in order to make a white page into a black one."
The birdcage mouth issuing this sludgy drawl only occasionally curdles into a sinner's grin. It does today when Time Out asks why most of the sentences in Shots seemingly never end. "There are actually a lot more full stops than there used to be," Walker smiles. "That's a legacy of my writing these pieces to get away from songs."
This prose purging began when Walker penned liner notes for Chisel, a greatest hits album in 1993. "For the next 15 years I'd fill these pages, then put them aside without reading them back and get back to writing songs. See, outside songs I'm not a writer with any real craft and for someone who writes for months with 12 lines, the idea of writing a book of 50,000 words is completely daunting."
Yet the results are completely intoxicating. Walker's songs with Chisel - and thereafter with Catfish, The Suave Fucks and Tex, Don & Charlie - have always lived and seethed in the sub-terrain. Shots is filled with the sharks, harlots and poets that make his Sydney fizz like Berocca in battery acid.
But that's where the comparison ends. Walker's songs burn slow and emerge ripe-to-the-point-of-rancid. "They take a week to write but have a lifetime's experience behind them," he says. But his prose bubbles over into bohemia and an almost beat poetry cadence, Time Out tells him.
Walker runs a hand through his thatch of shaving-brush hair shot through with grey and sighs. "Well, it's a break away from the tedium of normal life, I guess - a brief distraction from the fight for food and shelter." He looks lovingly out at thrumming Darlinghurst Road. "But let's face it, if someone's had his pantry emptied by the recession you can't feed him a book can you?"
Shots is out through Black Inc, RRP $27.95.
Don Walker will discuss his new book with James Bradley at Gleebooks on Wed 11 Mar at 7pm.
