Christmas, like everything else in Jimmy Barnes’ childhood, was a bit of a mixed bag. Growing up, first in Glasgow, then in working-class Elizabeth, South Australia, he watched his parents struggle just with the everyday demands of life. “Then Christmas came along,” he says in that lovable Aussie-Scottish brogue, “and brought a whole pile of new pressures to the family.”
Jimmy remembers one year when kids he knew in the neighbourhood were getting fancy new bikes.
“So, they got me a bike,” he says. “It was this old bike – just a rusty piece of rubbish. And on Christmas Eve, I went outside and looked back in through the lounge room window, and I saw them trying to make it look like it was something decent. They painted it and then they got candles and smoked the paint to make it look jazzy.
“The next day, I had to look surprised, and I rode around the block and got wet paint and ash from the candles on me. It was really shitty, but I rode back and pretended it was the best bike I’d ever seen. I think it fell apart within a few months. But for me, seeing the
