I am not quite sure why, but when I was living in the UK and I wanted to revel in a bit of homesickness, nothing would do the trick quite like a couple of old Cold Chisel videos on YouTube.

If you were a teen in the late 70s or early 80s, Cold Chisel were the essential Aussie pub rock band. Their raw, sweaty, masculine power was only on the surface. Underneath was some very fine song writing from Don Walker, Steve Prestwich and Ian Moss. There was brilliant musicianship, with Moss’s nasal tenor twang guitar competing with the throaty, soul vocals of Jimmy Barnes at the front of house. Walker’s piano added an element of 50’s rock ‘n’ roll, or even boogie woogie.

Yet we remember the Chisels for something much finer than just their songs. They have become part of our folk memory and national identity, cherished by a generation of Australians as being something quintessentially from here. Their lack of international success makes them somehow even more endearingly Aussie: whereas INXS and Men At Work could boast of representing Australia to the world, Cold Chisel remain a band who represent Australians to themselves like no other, in a language only we could really ever understand. The Australian cricket team, for example, chose “Khe Sanh” as their dressing room national anthem. “I Come From a Land Down Under” is too cheesy and obvious.

So what was the Australia that Cold Chisel evoked? Why did their songs resonate so deeply with so many people? I believe that their songs tap into a kind of world-weariness, even a numbness, that is part of the Aussie soul. It’s a hard place to make a living. Even if you go to the beach, it is only to drink “rocket fuels”, with a three day growth. The jaundiced Vietnam vet of ‘Khe Sanh’ has to escape the sheer deadness of suburban life and wander the earth in search of something more. Even though he’s been back to South East Asia, and “the answer sure ain’t there”, he’s waiting for the last plane out of Sydney so he can “hit some Hong Kong mattress all night long”. “Choir Girl” is a song about a man guiltily watching his girlfriend being taken away to have an abortion, dressed in a hospital gown which makes her look somehow sadly angelic. “Breakfast at Sweethearts” in the centre of Sydney’s King’s Cross is a great place to watch the drunks and prostitutes and druggies go past. “Flame Trees” tells the story of a man returning to the boredom of his past in a small country town. It’s a song which is deeply nostalgic, yet seems to loathe its own nostalgia:

Oh the flame trees will blind the weary   driver

And there’s nothing else could set fire to this town

There’s no change, there’s no pace

Everything within its place

Just makes it harder to believe that she won’t be around

Ironically, “Flame Trees”, beautifully sung by a children’s choir, was used to evoke precisely this sense of loss and regret in the film Little Fish; the song itself is now a piece of nostalgia. “You Got Nothing I Want” is an anthem of disappointment and frustration at the record industry; “Standing on the Outside” is a hymn to alienation. “Four Walls”, which is about a prisoner’s experience of the boredom of gaol, has a gospel choir backing, as if to add to the bitterness of the scene a note of religious ecstasy. Even the anticipation of “Saturday Night”, is actually a harbinger of the hangover you experience the next morning while sipping your coffee and crunching your toast at Sweethearts:

“L’esclavage D’amour

It will be ours forevermore”

Words we both recall

Either from a lover, or the law

Saturday night, my steps have shown

I can walk away from all I’ve known

Goodnight, my friend, goodbye

Remember what they say,

When you’re alone, laugh or die

These guys were supposed to be bogan heroes, but here they slip a little French into their songs. “L’esclavage D’amour” is the “slavery of love”. The deep longing of the man walking his way around the city on the busiest night of the week is matched by his loneliness: “Goodnight, my friend, goodbye”.

A song from their reunion album in 1998 picks up the biblical story of Jesus turning water into wine as a metaphor for the transforming power of love – or at least the hope that love will save the lost soul:

Come on baby

won’t you save me

Turn this water into wine

Love, emotion, like an ocean

How can I hold back the tide

Chisel’s songs are treasured, I think, precisely because they represent the reality behind the myth of the sunny optimism of the Australian character. They give voice to the toughness of life in this often barren and featureless place with an honesty missing from much other popular culture. There is nothing sentimental about this Australia. The anarchic wildness of Chisel’s performances (put on the live recording of “Wild Thing” some time) is a counterpoint to the mood of loss, disappointment and longing in their best lyrics. With not much sense of the transcendent, the hard-partying is the only way to deal with how things actually are.

Don’t we see these extremes about us in Aussie culture? I remember hearing a survivor of the Bali bombings being interviewed on the radio. She was asked what she had learnt about life from her ordeal. She replied, “Always wear your party dress”. It was simply an updated version of the old “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” philosophy. At heart it is an attitude to life which can only deal with the pain by shutting it out.

Could these observations about the music of Cold Chisel be useful in gauging something of the contemporary spiritual temperature of a generation that has pretty much stayed away from church? As the movie Little Fish showed, lines from Chisel songs have immense leverage with the Aussie heart. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not simply the neat answer to all the questions that they raise. There is much of the gritty realism of Cold Chisel in the Bible’s version of human experience. You can’t but be impressed by the way that the Old Testament authors stare hard at the difficult questions of life and don’t avoid them. Reading the Bible, we cannot but come face to face with how hard human life mostly is: work is hard, family life is hard, loneliness is hard, facing our failures is hard.

The Christian message is not an avoidance strategy. We are, in a great measure, drawn in its pages to grieve with God’s heart for the lost and suffering, alienated world. But the redemption and transformation hoped for in many of Chisel’s songs is presented to us there, too.