It was his voice that took him to Cold Chisel — a glorious wail that scored him 15 number-one albums as a solo artist and created a soundtrack that would shape many Australians’ own stories.

Storytelling is inviting extraordinary people to choose five songs that have shaped who they are and tell us why.

When I asked Barnesy about the songs that made him, it became clear to me that the fight inside of him — the voice he belted out at us — was coming from a painful place.

As a kid who experienced family violence early on, music was his saviour.

Growing up in Glasgow, Scotland and then emigrating to Australia as a five-year-old, a young James Dixon Swan, as he was known then, was pulled out of class — not for bad behaviour — but to sing around the school for others.

“It was sort of my safe place,” he said.

“If I sang, then I thought people would like me, and I’d be safe. They weren’t going to hurt me.

Barnes understood pain as a young boy and heard it in others as rock’n’roll was born, and it became a through line in the artists he was drawn to.

Little Richard became a lighthouse for Barnes as he survived his traumatic childhood.

The clarion call of Lucille was why he chose the 1950s hit among the songs that made him.

“I felt this pain inside of it. The way that he joyously escaped his own pain, I related to it,” Barnes said.

“And the fact that he came out [as gay] and he came out [as] this incredible flower … just shining for the world to see.

“And every time he stepped on the stage, he was just blossoming.”

But it was the tightrope Little Richard walked in fusing music styles that most fascinated Barnes.

“He was the guy that was just on the edge,” Barnes said.

“It was glam rock, it was rockabilly — it was everything that was tied into those performances.

Walking through life with fists up

On choosing the Jerry Lee Lewis song Whole Lotta Shakin’, Barnes explained he connected to the singer as a “larrikin” and his internal battles.

“That knife edge that he stayed on, straddling between wanting to be good and wanting to just be wild … I could relate to,” Barnes said.

“I always wanted to be decent, but I just wanted to be wild.

“Wild is where I could be free, and I could dictate the terms.”  

That wildness would come to define Barnes’s time on stage with Cold Chisel from the age of 16.

He would down multiple bottles of vodka every time they played, which, for his “nice boy” band mates, was a baptism of fire.

Barnes would enter a room with his fists up – metaphorically and literally – and gigs would often descend into violence.

Barnes has reflected on his aggressive and provocative behaviour, and we talked about those early days playing pub-rock shows across Australia.

“It’s like an animal. You get a scared cat — that’s going to be dangerous.”

‘I never dropped my guard’

The trauma of Barnes’s childhood was shared by his older brother John Swan.

“Me and my brother, we both ran on fear,” Barnes said.

And it was his brother’s delinquency that kickstarted the origin story of Barnes.

“I’m sitting in the back, and they’re giving John a lecture about how he’s got to keep on the straight and narrow: ‘Don’t go back to these crazy bands’ and all sorts of stuff’,” Barnes said.

“And these songs came on and I’m here thinking, ‘That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be in a band’.”

It was English rock band Free and lead singer Paul Rodgers singing All Right Now that flicked the switch in Barnes.

He began playing in bands and found his way to Cold Chisel at 16.

For decades following, Barnes would walk through life on the offensive, ignoring the consequences of his destructive behaviour.

“I never dropped my guard. [I] always just charged forward. I never looked back,” he said.

“I’d see the pain I was running from, and I’d see the carnage I left behind me when it nearly killed me.”

Ultimately, Barnes knew he needed to change.

“I realised at some point, to survive and to grow as a human — and even just to live — I was going to have to look back and deal with it,” he said.

“So, it wasn’t ’til really late in my life that I found the courage to slow down and not just go and crash into things.”

Through it all was Barnes’s wife Jane, who he has credited with saving his life.

“She was just patiently waiting for me to wake up,” Barnes said.

“She could see me before I could.”

At 60, after decades of burying his childhood trauma and declining mental health, Barnes started seeing a psychologist.

As a result, he wrote his award-winning and bestselling memoir Working Class Boy, which told the story of our wild man of rock’n’roll and how he came to be that way.

And it changed the way we connected with this Scottish-Australian icon.

“I remember after the book came out, I’d be walking down the street and blokes — big, burly blokes — would stop me and start crying,” Barnes said.

“[They’d] just say, ‘Thanks, now I’m going to see someone and I’m dealing with my own stuff,'” Barnes said.

“That was probably the best thing about writing the books.”

Barnes said sharing his story, and accepting he needed support, set him free.

“And I think that’s when I changed.

“[By] dropping my defences and dropping my guard, and leading with my heart instead of my head [and] my hands, I’ve become a better person and I’ve become a better singer.”

As we sat in a venue reflecting on Barnes’s Take 5 songs, I saw the scaffolding of the man he became through the soundtrack that brought him to today.

I asked Barnesy, “Do you feel safe?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I still have my moments, but I’m not running anymore.”