Number 2 – Cold Chisel – Flame Trees

Don Walker, along with Nick Cave, are the two best lyricists this country has produced. Whilst Cave has long proclaimed his Australianness to be central to his identity, he’s not lived here for more than thirty years. Walker, however, never left. His is a more distinctly Australian voice than Cave’s. This isn’t to say Walker’s is better, but there’s a reason one of his songs is in this Top 10 of mine but none of Cave’s.

The song I’ve chosen to include is the well-known, bona fide Australian classic, ‘Flame Trees’. It’s a classic for a reason. Everything about the song is first class, but nothing equals the lyric. It’s an exquisite example of how to build a world and a layered, near-intuitively-felt narrative within it in a matter of minutes. It spans multiple lives and several decades in just 216 words.

The song is one of going back and ambivalently absorbing the fact that as Bob Dylan once noted, ‘You can always come back, you just can’t come back all the way.’ As places change, memories become strangely disembodied, all the while desperate to hook themselves into the places from which they emerged. “We share some history, this town and I” is superb phrasing; the acknowledgment on a simple level that the song’s narrator once lived in this place but nuanced enough to treat the town and the individual like the two overlapping circles of a Venn Diagram. We all live in each other’s worlds, but not in ways of our own design.

And yet, the pull of connection endures. The need for friendship – for the validation of being told “you’re looking well” is paramount, and yet, it is twinned with “you boys look just the same”. Are we meant to change or stay the same? The song leaves this necessarily unresolved. Younger adults don’t realise that once you reach something resembling adulthood – around twenty, twenty-five, tops – the preceding generation overtakes you. Your entire being is now time-stamped to the ‘you’ of that time. Times blur now on previously unimaginable scales. You still feel like you did thirty years ago, whilst regarding that same ‘you’ as a mere child. It’s hard to explain, but if you’re of the right age, it’s as real as gravity. Settling in to play “do you remember so and so?” is a crucial fusion of celebration, affirmation and commemoration. It’s also a kind of memorial for the self; the notion that memories now define one’s existence more than the hope for experiences yet to come.

That might seem pessimistic, but it’s a core element of this lyric. There are three items on the narrator’s list, and the third is “never say her name”. Whomever she is, she’s gone. The great love is in the past. As of right now, the future doesn’t really exist. Crucially, for the song’s power, the ‘she’ isn’t named, nor is her fate revealed. Did she leave the town? Did she die? The song aches with this uncertainty and juxtaposes it against the partly redeeming pull of friendship and pub banter. To “see which one of us can tell the biggest lies” is partly an affirmation of the shared joy friends make for themselves when they embellish memories to apocryphal heights, but also suggestive of the need for people to somehow make more of their lived lives. It’s just mates being mates, but on some psychological level, it’s a plea, made to oneself; please believe me, I really haven’t wasted my life. It’s a primal yet existential fear as one ages. Holy shit, this is my life. What the fuck have I done with it?

The central image of the song is the flame trees. It’s not actually clear if, as the narrator drives, whether they are presently in full bloom or not, but their floral fireworks are visible regardless. Bursting into bloom in late spring or early summer, they are, in the context’s the song narrator and narrative, the full burn of both young love and young manhood; the two things that unite to bring the town to life for the song’s narrator. The song’s story exists in the context of this great riot of redness, and what fascinates most is the ‘will blind’ detail. This is future tense, but the love felt by the narrator has come and gone, so what gives? The answer is in the other, younger characters in the song. “And there's a girl falling in love near where the pianola stands/With a young local factory auto worker just holding hands.’ Their flame trees are aflame, and the narrator wonders, in the context of his own memories, ‘if he'll go or if he'll stay’. The narrator is both disillusioned with the experience of love, but greatly aware of the extent to which it will shape the course of a life. He watches and wonders.

Like many of Don Walker’s compositions, the music matches the lyrical flow with extraordinary poise. The first lines of the verses are little more than a single, repeating note, and when the note does change, it lifts just enough to be suggestive of a sigh. It moves along at a steady pace, redolent of just getting on with things. The chorus somehow ascends in pitch without ever losing the tonal regret so crucial to the song. It only burst into life when the middle eight lifts off with ‘do you remember?’ The memory of being unstoppable reigns supreme, but only for a moment. Reality soon returns, and the song moves on steadily, a languid walk on a road to nowhere. For a song with such a saturnine lyric, it’s somewhat surprising then that most of the chords in the song are major ones. Therein lies the genius of the song, I think; the tension between the pull of happy memories and the pain of losing the love that formed them. Shakespeare called it ‘sweet sorrow’. He wasn’t wrong.

Jimmy Barnes’ vocal is a crucial part of it the song’s success and appeal, in that his voice conveys a kind of wounded sensitivity that’s note-perfect for the lyric. When he rejects the ‘sentimental bullshit’, you feel the pain of a man feeling a bit too much. Jimmy Barnes is well known for drinking, stopping drinking, and screaming his lungs out. The latter is a shame, because he’s an extraordinary singer. His style is unique, but it’s not just screaming. For a start, you can’t get controlled vibrato if all you’re doing is screaming. And second, his voice has real soul. For all his rock and roll credentials, he’s a soul man at heart. Listen to the version of ‘Stone Cold’ – another Don Walker beauty – that he recorded with Joe Bonamassa a few years ago and you’ll see what I mean.

‘Flame Trees’ is a masterpiece of mature songwriting. It is  life and its lessons wrought into sublimely beautiful balladry. If you’ve followed the career of Don Walker, you’ll see that he’s maintained this astonishing song-writing faculty his whole life. His most recent album, ‘Lighting in a Clear Blue Sky’ is one the best albums released this decade by anyone. You might not hear it on first listen but give it time. ‘Flame Trees’ is similar in a lot of ways. It’s a song you don’t just hear, though it starts out that way. Hear it enough times, and you’ll realise that Walker’s created the liminal world in which you live. How he managed it is a mystery to me, but I’m incredibly grateful that he did.