Jimmy Barnes’ struggle to overcome “nightmare” childhood: “It shocks me I managed to live through it”
Legendary rocker Jimmy Barnes has revealed in a new interview that he turned to self-harm for decades, as a way to overcome and deal with his “nightmare” childhood.
“It shocks me I managed to live through it,” the singer told The Courier Mail.
Jimmy shared his tumultuous upbringing in his 2016 best-selling memoir, Working Class Boy, where he revealed his childhood was filled with family violence, alcoholism and poverty, and in the prologue of the book, he shared that he had attempted suicide in his hotel room in Auckland in 2012.
The singer wrote that he woke up in his large hotel suite, where he was staying with his wife of 37 years, Jane, not remembering that he had tried to take his own life by drinking the contents of the hotel minibar dry.
“Tied around the clothes rail is the dressing gown cord, just where I must have left it,” Jimmy shared in the memoir.
“The rail, the cord and me with the cord around my neck waiting to die. But I didn’t. It’s not that easy to die, apparently,” he wrote.
Now a documentary film with the same title as his book has been made.
“If it all hadn’t come out in the book, at some point it would have all washed over me and dragged me down,” the Cold Chisel front man admitted to The Courier Mail.
“It probably would have a long time ago if I hadn’t been constantly trying to dodge the past having the distractions of drugs, drink and rock ‘n’ roll,” the 62-year-old added.
“I’m surprised none of that didn’t kill me sooner.”
Working on the documentary meant Jimmy had to return to his childhood home in South Australia, as well as Scotland, where he was born. His son David Campbell also makes an appearance in the film.
The revered rocker said it was emotionally overwhelming returning to his “nightmare”.
“When we were standing in the paddock across the road from the house we grew up in … it was like looking at a nightmare,” he told The Courier Mail.
“I remembered being dragged down the road, our parents fighting over us – you could feel it, taste it again,” he added.
“The director Mark Joffe was trying to talk to me and I couldn’t hear him … I looked at the street and almost every house I looked at had something about it that made me afraid,” Jimmy explained.
“After writing about it and reliving it for the shows, to go there again made it more intense, more real but in a way, it helped put a bit of closure to it.”
Along with son David Campbell, the documentary also features his wife Jane, plus Cold Chisel bandmates Don Walker and Ian Moss, who share their reflections.
“I wouldn’t tell anybody else to get to where I am by doing what I did, but I can’t regret any of it, it has made me who I am,” the rock singer says in the trailer of the film.
“And I’m starting to like who I am.”