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“From the hard, parched saltpan of the album’s front cover to the bloodcurdling crescendo at the end of the last track (‘Letter To Alan’), Circus Animals screams of its birthplace. Even without the place names, ‘Bow River’, ‘Houndog’ ‘Taipan’ and ‘Numbers Fall’ all tell of the Australian experience – from the hot, barren coastal highways to the sloping indifference of Kings Cross, these are the Australian blues.”
 
Coming on the back of the band’s breakthrough album East, which established Cold Chisel as the biggest band in the country, Circus Animals was the band’s first album to hit # 1 on the Australian Charts – spawning the huge, perennial songs ‘You Got Nothing I Want’, ‘Forever Now’, ‘When The War Is Over’ ‘Bow River’ and more… It marked the further development of all of the band as songwriters, with drummer Steve Prestwich writing the beautiful ‘When The War Is Over’ and ‘Forever Now’, Jimmy penning the fierce first single ‘You Got Nothing I Want’ and Ian Moss delivering the live favourite ‘Bow River’ and ‘No Good For You’.  Don Walker, the band’s chief songwriter, was responsible for the remaining songs.
 
March 8, 2022 marks the 40^th anniversary of the release of this legendary album and Cold Chisel is preparing a bunch of items to celebrate
 
The Signed and Framed Print is of the great back cover image and is a unique offering. All prints are personally signed by all Jimmy, Ian, Phil and Don. It is strictly limited to 400 copies and it will sell out quickly. The dimensions of the framed print are: 426mm x 600mm.  It is mounted horizontally.
 
The CD/DVD marries the album on one disc with a brilliant DVD disc, featuring:

1. Taipan  – filmed at the ‘An Evening With The Circus Animals’, the famous shows that launched the album
2. No Good For You – an early version of this song, captured on rough film stock prior to recording the album, live at the legendary Playroom on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
3. Wild Colonial Boy – from the same Playroom show as above.
4. Letter To Alan – Captured live on the German TV show Rockpalast
5. Houndog (with Tim Rogers from You Am I) – recorded and filmed at Sydney Acer Arena on the band’s triumphant 2011 Light The Nitro tour. This blistering performance is released for the first time.
6. When The War Is Over – again, this is the first release of this emotional tribute version of Steve’s classic song done in acoustic mode by the band on their 2011 tour, featuring rare and special photos of Steve throughout his life with the band.
7. Forever Now – the original concept video
8. You Got Nothing I Want – the original concept video
9. Bow River – the original concept video

This CD/DVD is limited to 1,000 copies
 
The original Vinyl album is made available again for the first time in 3 years. It is currently being pressed and shipped from Europe and we have our fingers crossed it will make the July 8 release date.
 
We also have a White T-shirt, a Black T-shirt and a one-off ‘Bow River’ Tea Towel. All Unlimited!

We start taking orders from now until the release of these items on July 8*
Release Date:  July 8*
*Release date is reliant upon vinyl delivery

‘CIRCUS ANIMALS’ 40^TH ANNIVERSARY ITEMS

The intimate live album reissued on Vinyl for first time ever.

Also released as a new Deluxe 2CD/DVD pack.

Release date: Friday, 26 November.

Cold Chisel have announced that on Friday, 26 November they are releasing their acclaimed live album Ringside on vinyl for the first time ever. The band is also releasing a new, Deluxe 2CD/DVD edition of this unique release.

Partly inspired by Elvis Presley’s legendary 1968 ‘comeback’ special and more simply by a desire to perform in a smaller, more intimate environment, Ringside captures the iconic Cold Chisel up close and personal, like they’re performing in your lounge room. Recorded across 4 shows in June 2003 (and originally released in November 2003), Ringside turns the normal Cold Chisel concert experience on its head. With a rotating stage set in the middle of Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, no member of the audience was more than 30 metres from the band and everyone got to see the five piece outfit from every imaginable angle. The Hordern is much smaller than the band’s normal arena or outdoor shows and with the stage placed in the middle of the room it reduced capacity and further accentuated just how intimate Ringside was. 

In addition, Cold Chisel upended their setlist, playing rarely heard gems like Plaza, Rosaline, Pretty Little Thing and F-111, as well as unveiling three totally new songs – two Steve Prestwich penned and sung tracks, Lovelight and All I Wanna Do (which features on Ringside twice, once sung by Prestwich, and from another night sung by Barnes), and Fallen Angel, written and sung by Don Walker, which ultimately ended up on Walker’s solo album, Cutting Back. The album is also unique for its covers – Johnny Cash’s Big River, Arthur Hamilton’s torch song Cry Me A River (made famous by Julie London) and Sunshine, written by Don Walker’s friend Paul Hewson and originally recorded by Dragon – all of which only ever appeared on Ringside.

The band recorded these shows in June and released Ringside as a double CD in November 2003 and then undertook a national Ringside tour across the nation in November/December 2003 and January 2004. “We loved playing those shows,” recalls frontman Jimmy Barnes. “I remember the band had a real swing about it. And it was great mixing up the set list, playing some obscure tracks and covers like ‘Big River’ and ‘Sunshine’.”

In addition to the vinyl release, the band is also releasing a limited edition Deluxe set, combining the double CD with the normally separate DVD. The Deluxe package features new cover art. “When our management started digging into the archive for ‘Ringside’, they lucked upon a design that we did for these shows,” says Don Walker. “It was an image created by Carl Bellesini from Love Police and it captured the romance of the travelling tent boxing shows, back at the start of last century. It’s a different take on the original artwork, which is still represented on the vinyl release and was designed by the brilliant pop artist, Martin Sharp. This new and ‘lost’ artwork also caught the spirit of what we were attempting to do with the shows – and we all thought it would be good to switch it up.” 

The Ringside DVD was directed by Robert Hambling, Cold Chisel’s long time film documentarian, and for all those who didn’t get to see one of these unique shows, the DVD is the next best thing to being there.

VINYL TRACKLISTING

Side One
1. Home And Broken Hearted
2. The Things I Love In You
3. Rosaline
4. Breakfast At Sweethearts
5. Plaza

Side Two
6. My Baby
7. Houndog
8. Shipping Steel
9. The Last Wave Of Summer

Side Three
10. Pretty Little Thing
11. Forever Now
12. Khe Sanh
13. When The War Is Over

Side Four
14. Cry Me A River
15. Lovelight
16. All I Wanna Do (Steve Vocal)
17. F-111
18. Big River
19. Painted Doll

Side Five
20. You Got Nothing I Want
21. Rising Sun
22. Flame Trees
23. Bow River

Side Six
24. Water Into Wine
25. Sunshine
26. Goodbye (Astrid, Goodbye)
27. All I Wanna Do (Jimmy Vocal)

Pre-order links are available here.

The Live Tapes – Vol 5 – Live At The Bondi Lifesaver

Captured on Friday, 29 February 1980 just 3 days before they began recording their breakthrough album, East

The legendary Cold Chisel have unearthed a fierce live recording from deep in their archives. Captured on two multitrack tapes on a Friday night at the arse end of February 1980, after a blinding 43 shows over 56 days, it showcases the five-piece band at a pivotal moment – just 3 days before they entered Paradise Studio in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo to record their breakthrough album East.

The 2 inch tapes had sat completely untouched in the band’s archive for just over 40 years. Nobody had listened to them because everybody forgot they existed. When they were unearthed earlier this year it started a long chain of events that will come to fruition on 11 December 2020 when The Live Tapes Vol 5 – Live at the Bondi Lifesaver is released on vinyl, CD, as a digital download, and across all streaming services.

The two tapes were sent to sound engineer Phil Punch to transfer to digital so the band could hear what was captured 40 years ago, but on examining the tapes Punch said that before they could be played, they needed to be baked in an ‘audio oven’. They were sent away to a Turtle Rock mastering, baked twice, and sent back to Punch. Punch said that too much oxide had built up around the tapes and that they would need to be baked again. The tapes went into the oven again and then sent back to Punch but he was still not happy so he cut each of the bulky masters in two and had the four ‘half-tapes’ baked again. He then finally set about transferring them to digital, stopping after each song to wipe the tapes and machines clean of all the primordial ooze (which seemed particularly appropriate for recordings made at the notoriously grimy Bondi Lifesaver). This painstaking, labour of love took 6 weeks.

The files were then sent to Cold Chisel’s longtime producer, Kevin Shirley, who did a quick comp mix of the set to see if the show was any good. What came back gobsmacked the normally hard-to-impress band. The Bondi Lifesaver was the band’s de facto home and the band clearly loved the venue, playing there with kinetic speed and verve, tearing blistering holes through the legendary bar.

Kevin Shirley was given the green light to bring his trusted ears to properly mix the live recording, which frontman Jimmy Barnes says, “might be our live best recording ever.”

Of particular interest to Cold Chisel fans is hearing the 7 East songs in their pre-studio form (Choirgirl had been released as a single in late 1979). Some songs were still coming together, only 3 days prior to the album recordings; parts were still being written and a couple of sections were ad-libbed. Others (Standing On The Outside and Tomorrow) reveal substantially different arrangements to what the band subsequently crafted with East producer Mark Opitz. “It’s great to hear this earlier arrangement of Tomorrow. We re-worked it with Mark Opitz – and he brought a great pop discipline to the album recording sessions. But I do like this version,” smiles songwriter and piano player, Don Walker.

Another then-new song is Jimmy Barnes‘ My Turn To Cry, the first single fromLive at The Bondi Lifesaver, and it’s delivered here with raw, unhinged power and emotion. “In 1980, we were fighting fit and hungry, playing every show like it was our last – and often it almost was,” laughed Barnes recently, when recounting the times. “We were still playing pubs, with the audience spilling onto the stage and the band spilling into the audience. I was living just around the corner from the Lifesaver – and probably half the audience ended-up back at mine.“

The whole band is captured in killer form on Live at the Bondi Lifesaver. “I can’t believe Steve and Phil’s playing” says guitarist Ian Moss referencing the band’s bass player Phil Small and their late drummer Steve Prestwich. “They set the whole tone here – we’re just trying to keep up. Jimmy is also in incredible form, wailing and nailing everything.“

In addition to the East songs, Cold Chisel tear through songs that were already becoming classics: Khe Sanh, One Long Day, Merry-Go-Round and a steamrolling take on Shipping Steel; some rarely heard gems: Rosaline, the never-before-physically-released The Dummy; and five cover songs including Johnny Kidd‘s Shakin’ All Over and a never-before-released take on The Yardbirds‘ The Nazz Are Blue.

From this incredible live recording in February 1980 to their phenomenal sold-out national “Blood Moon” Tour dates in early 2020, Cold Chisel’s longevity is a testament to the special connection between the band, their songs and their legion of die-hard fans. Earlier this week Cold Chisel revealed that ongoing connection, scoring two ARIA Award Nominations for Best Rock Album(Blood Moon) and Best Australian Live Act (Blood Moon Tour 2020), withKevin Shirley also getting a nomination for Producer of the Year for Blood Moon.

The singles My Turn to Cry and Tomorrow are now available on all streaming services, and The Live Tapes – Vol 5 – Live at the Bondi Lifesaver is also available for pre-order NOW.

The album will be released on all formats on Friday, 11 December, 2020.   Pre-order links are available here.

TRACKLISTING

1. Juliet
2. Tomorrow
3. The Dummy
4. Shakin’ All Over
5. Breakfast At Sweethearts
6. My Turn To Cry
7. Best Kept Lies
8. Standing On The Outside
9. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
10. Star Hotel
11. Merry-Go-Round
12. Four Walls
13. One Long Day
14. Shipping Steel
15. Khe Sanh
16. The Door
17. Goodbye (Astrid, Goodbye)
18. Georgia
19. Choirgirl
20. Ita
21. I’m Gonna Roll Ya
22. Rosaline
23. The Nazz Are Blue
24. Wild Thing

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East is 40 years old… it’s now something like 9 x platinum (it’s hard to tell, it sold across two different record companies; 6 or 7 different formats; before they starting keeping proper records of sales)… it spawned the most incredible songs: ‘cheap wine’, ‘rising sun’, ‘choirgirl’, ‘my baby’, ‘four walls’, ‘never before’, ‘star hotel’, ‘ita’, ‘standing on the outside’… it featured songwriting contributions from each band member… cold chisel won almost every single ‘countdown’ music award – and received none of them :)… it’s the stuff of hard won legend… on may 29, the vinyl album is being re-released to commemorate this 40 year milestone, along with the 7″ inch vinyl single featuring a great live cover of bob dylan’s ‘knockin’ on heaven’s door’ with rare gem, ‘the party’s over’, one of don’s earliest songs…there’s 1,000 copies only.

EAST – 40th Anniversary Vinyl Edition

1. Standing On The Outside
2. Never Before
3. Choirgirl
4. Rising Sun
5. My Baby
6. Tomorrow
7. Cheap Wine
8. Best Kept Lies
9. Ita
10. Star Hotel
11. Four Walls
12. My Turn To Cry

Includes the Rare Bonus Single ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ / ‘The Party’s Over’

BUY ‘EAST’ – EAST – 40th ANNIVERSARY VINYL EDITION HERE

David Fricke’s 2011 liner notes (abridged)

East is legend. And that is fact. Released on June 2, 1980, Cold Chisel’s third album was immediate startime: gold in a week, double platinum in three months, resident in the Top Ten for half a year. It was the kind of overnight success best appreciated by a band that had formed seven years earlier in Adelaide and taken the hard road to rock justice, via low bread, cramped-van rides and wartime pub gigs.

There were also the cloth ears and cold shoulders they had known, at radio and in the record-label executive suites, and the early records that came close, but not close enough, to the group’s proven rage on stage. Cold Chisel, the 1978 debut, and Breakfast at Sweethearts, the gold ’79 followup, had the right stuff in parts, at times in spades: pianist Don Walker’s literate cutting stories, set in true lives and local geography; Jimmy Barnes’ lacerated Scot’s-wolf howl; Ian Moss’ slashing Fender jangle and stilleto-note breaks; the R&B-railroad charge of bassist Phil Small and drummer Steve Prestwich.

But East – mostly recorded in March and April of 1980, co-produced by the band with engineer Mark Opitz – was Cold Chisel in full boom: all of the above, delivered with indivisible force by a band at the first true peak of its powers. The have-not’s outrage of the opening salvo, “Standing on the Outside”; the terror laced with tenderness in ‘Choirgirl”; the rough-soul portrait of a young girl forced to grow up too fast; the power- chord mayhem and rolling Who-ish thunder of “Star Hotel,” the high-speed shotgun serving of sexual despair and imperialist economics in Barnes’ rockabilly gem “Rising Sun.” This was rock & roll classicism – the lessons and challenges of Jerry Lee Lewis, Stax/Volt singles, the early Rolling Stones and the electric Bob Dylan – imprinted with Australian verve and nerve, as taut and tough as AC/DC’s pirate swagger.

There were axes to grind too. Midnight Oil, then blowing up Sydney’s North Beaches, were working on a fusion of rock might and the evening news. Cold Chisel went right to the people inside the headlines, folks hammered by current events and the upper crust. “They hold the power, I hold the blame,” Walker wrote – and Barnes sang, with vivid ire – in “Tomorrow”; also a song about how love can conquer all, at least for a night. “Star Hotel” was a riot in fact and impact, composed by Walker after the September ’79 street battle between kids and cops at the Newcastle pub. “An uncontrolled Youth in Asia/Gonna make those fools understand,” Barnes wailed, heightening the danger and revolt in Walker’s pun against Moss’ slicing chords and Small and Prestwich’s precise brawling.

The clampdown, of course, followed. Walker’s jailhouse letter “Four Walls” was based on another fracas, a 1974 prisoner uprising at Bathurst Gaol, written from the perspective of an inmate living with the payback: “I love to march while some Nazi calls the time/Who’d wanna go home?” Barnes, Glasgow-born and the son of a boxer, bit into those lines like a guy who knew, someday, he’d get that turnkey on open, even ground.

East was made by a great live pub band in meticulous studio fashion. The polish was impressive. So were the neatly etched details in the gleam and reverb, like the way Barnes’ vocal and Moss’ guitar hit and hold the same high note in”Standing on the Outside” (“And I know!”) and the dark allure of Moss’s own cracked-glass croon in his song “Never Before,” over the engine room’s Jamaica-via-Adelaide bounce. In Prestwich’s “Best Kept Lies,” Walker punctuated the loping gait with organ jabs, like the Doors’ Ray Manzarek keeping time at a Bob Marley session. Small’s “My Baby”; was pure pop pleasure, sung by Moss with husky swinging affection…

East never sounded merely skillful, or compromised, only right – an articulated fury that caught the national psyche… For Australians, East is a cornerstone of rock history and the national identity.

BUY ‘EAST’ – EAST – 40th ANNIVERSARY VINYL EDITION HERE

There’s nothing more Australian than hot sun, warm waves and COLD CHISEL – especially on the eve of this holiday weekend.

The bands classic songs like Khe Sanh, Flame Trees, Bow River, My Baby, Cheap Wine, Saturday Night and You Got Nothing I Want have become the soundtrack to our summers.

Now, for the first time ever, this legendary Australian band will be playing a series of very special outdoors shows this summer on their Blood Moon Tour 2020.

As part of this very rare occurrence, COLD CHISEL will do one of their biggest gigs ever in the very first concert played at Bankwest Stadium on Friday 24 January.

From now until the concert this Friday, Bankwest Stadium will donate $50 from every ticket purchased to Cold Chisel’s Blood Moon Tour directly to the NSW Rural Fire Service.

This is your chance to be part of an unbelievable night of Aussie music with Cold Chisel, Hoodoo Gurus, Birds of Tokyo, Busby Marou AND help support the ongoing bushfire relief effort.

Limited tickets remain, don’t wait book now!

For those attending on Friday, don’t forget to check out the FAQ’s before the concert. It includes transport information and helpful information on what you can and can’t bring.