Ian Moss - “Bow River” Live Video
IAN MOSS BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Ian Moss. Founding member of Cold Chisel. Solo artist and friend of many – the musos’ muso and an Australian music icon.
“Salt of the earth,” is how manager Michael Long describes him. “Mossy is reserved, even shy, but he’s a straight-shooter. He’s a great bloke.”
Spend a minute with “Mossy”, as he is endearingly referred to by one and all, and you quickly realize he means what he says, says what he means. He also has a good sense of humour and is deadly passionate about his music, particularly his weapon of choice, the six string, and his endless pursuit of fusing cross sections of blues, jazz and soul - “really, I just like to keep an element of blues in everything I do”.
Though he is known for his laidback, non-intrusive style as a person, he certainly didn’t start out that way. “I discovered music pretty much as a little kid, I was doing concerts for my parents when I was about 4, stepping from behind the chair and singing songs about Christmas, bowing and lots of silly stuff,’’ he says laughing. “Little Fur Tree was the song, ‘Little fur tree, straight and tall”, he sings quietly.
So, was Mossy a showman from the word go? “Something like that, but I was also smitten fairly early on. I was about five when I heard Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans. The whole vocal approach to that was fairly full-on rock’n’roll. I can just remember thinking at that age, “What’s this?” It was great.”
The son of Geoff Moss, a Scottish migrant from Broome who in 1940 met his mother, Lorna, a girl from Adelaide, Ian Moss was born and raised in the outback town of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, a place he still holds close to his heart.
“Growing up in the Alice was really easy going. Lots of open space and those days when you had a lot more faith in people doing the right thing. In those days you could drive your car down the main street and you wouldn’t even have to take your key out of the ignition. You could leave it there for the whole week and no-one would touch it, you know? That beautiful freedom of life and trust and all those open spaces,” he says.
The renowned guitar slinger pursued music at a tender age, but it was the ivories and not the nylon strings that first introduced him to something that would become such a prominent aspect of his life.
“I didn’t start playing the guitar until late primary school, actually,” he says. “But when I was five we had a next-door neighbour, this woman who played guitar, and I can remember having one go on that. I was excited about it. Then she moved away and I didn’t really think of it any more.
“My older sister was learning classical piano and my older brother was a good rhythm strummer and right into Bob Dylan. I started off with classical piano aged about 7 or 8, but unfortunately wasn’t into it enough, regrettably now,” he ponders, looking out the window. “I pursued that for two or three years, with my parents having to whip me to sort of practice. But then luckily someone was persisting and pushing somewhere and saying, ‘Look, he’s definitely got some musical talent’. Then I discovered guitar. I was 11 by that stage … needed no encouragement at all from there.”
And what type of music made his pulse race?
“I guess for the first couple of years you just learnt what your teacher taught you,” he says with a chuckle. “Back then, my teacher was a big lady called Sylvia Davenport who was kind of more at the country end, if you like, The Shadows - Walk Don’t Run, Apache and Pipeline sort of stuff. Basic riffs and complete songs. And then, you know, I was 12, 13 when Hendrix and that whole thing exploded. Hendrix, Led Zepelin and Cream came on.
“Before that it was all Itsy Bitsy, Teeny, Weeny, Yellow Poker Dot Bikini and James Hold The Ladder Steady stuff. Oh yeah, the Beatles were there, but more for beautiful harmonies and not so much guitar stuff. Hendrix was the one, though, first hero and then there was Alvin Lee, strictly for guitar playing 10 years after, I’m Going Home and Woodstock sort of stuff.”
Moss left for Adelaide as a teenager to pursue bigger and better opportunities, none the least arriving when he hooked up with some lads by the names of Don Walker, Phil Small, Steve Prestwich and Jimmy Barnes.
“We (the family) went to Adelaide when I was in late high school. It was a case of being ‘play time over, boys’ and it got to the stage where we had to work out what we were going to do with our lives. There wasn’t much doing in Alice and I had an older brother and sister who had both moved out and forged ahead. So the obvious place was Adelaide. Sydney just seemed too big and massive - too far away.”
And it was then, in 1973, that Cold Chisel was born. The band began as a little rockin’ blues outfit but word didn’t exactly spread quickly and it took until its third album, East, before the Chisel phenomenon filtered into the Oz rock consciousness. Cold Chisel blitzed in coming years but almost as soon as it peaked, the band had imploded in 1984. One thing is certain, however - all those magical tunes have left an indelible mark in music history and remain favourites of so many people to this day.
Moss is obviously proud of what the band has achieved and remembers the good times. “Lots of fond memories and I suppose it was about the journey. That was the best part of it. I suppose the ‘making it’ thing and then officially, you know, the whole ‘you-are-now-rock stars-and-you’ve-finished-the-course’ thing was a bit of an anti-climax,” he reflects.
“Going through all those hard times together and sharing it together was the best part. Where we had to get to Sydney from Brisbane and we all had to hitch to get there. We did that for a year, to get from one city to another. That kind of thing. Running out of petrol in a country town, you know, in the middle of nowhere and you had to go and grab a can and steal some from somewhere. And nearly getting caught and all the fun that goes with it.”
While the band was coming to an end in the early 1980s, Mossy knew he had more to offer and was aware of the restrictions of playing in such a band. A solo career beckoned, but it wasn’t an easy transformation.
“Yeah, there was always that trade off, being in charge of the controls and what you did as a solo artist, but at the same time you kind of had to do it all on your own, you sort of needed other ears and ideas to bounce off other people. Kind of a case of being six of one and half a dozen the other,” he says.
Did he enjoy being the driver of his own bus after the band split in 1983?
“That was probably the problem,” he says, laughing. “I guess because you’d been with one band for 10 years and you sit there and think, ‘…yeah, I could do a whole lot better than this on my own’, but all of a sudden you’re on your own and you’ve got no other guys to lean on. Those opinions and support are important … as the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, I guess.”
But solo dreams became a reality and Australia embraced Mossy’s debut solo album Matchbook in 1989 after touring for three years after splitting from Chisel. In particular, first single Tucker’s Daughter blasted off and peaked at No.1 on the singles charts. Later, other memorables followed including Mr Rain, Such A Beautiful Thing, Out Of the Fire and Telephone Booth.
“I guess you always want it (that first album) to do well. Tucker’s Daughter was top 10 for about six weeks and it went to No.1 and it was almost six months later when the album came out. I don’t think that (the album) actually made No.1 - there was something else pretty big just kept it out of the No.1 spot (thinking), but it went in straight away at No.2. But, hey, who’s complaining? I guess you quietly … that’s what you like to see,” the ever modest rocker reflects.
And was it hard to follow up with a second album? “Yeah it was, you’ve always got that problem where you’ve got all your life to get your first album together and you can preen through lots and lots of material and then hone it and then when you get a hit album you go, ‘Yeah, that’s great, I’ll go out and tour it for a year’, and then all of a sudden, ‘Shit, I’d better do another album now’. And the pressure’s on to come up with those songs, write those songs in a lot shorter time. And to this day, I’m not such a prolific writer.”
With second album World’s Away in 1991, Mossy personally rates it as a 7 out of 10 (“the material was not quite as strong”), then came the hard-edged Petrol Head (“8/10”) in 1996.
Between drinks, Cold Chisel reunited to give the punters one last blast of those now legendary songs that were the epitome of working class, grassroots pub rock. Mossy admits the reunion had its “moments”, but was a great experience.
“Yeah, yeah, they were good,” and then paused for deep thought. “Once again they were … ahhhh, they were a little bit … I suppose there was a couple of incidents between personalities in the band that marred those reunions overall. But, that didn’t matter, because whenever we got on stage, no matter what had gone down between us, we’d hit the stage and it would just disappear. It was game on, you know? Thank God it did. And everyone was standing around, grinning like school kids and absolutely just loving it. I know that for everyone all those issues that we had, had just gone. And you know, it’s certainly nice to know you can do five Entertainment Centres in Sydney. Pretty lucky … lucky position to be in. When you look back on your life and wonder how many times you think how you could have decided to do this on this day and do that on that day and then fate has its way.”
Come 2005, his live acoustic album Six Strings heralded the arrival of Mossy’s contribution to the ever-so-popular Liberation Blue Acoustic Series. Was it a shock to pull the plug and go acoustic?
“Quite a shock,” he said with a laugh. “If it was five years ago and somebody said, ‘You’re going to spend quite a bit of time doing acoustic’, I would have said, ‘I don’t think so’. Twenty years ago I would have said ‘no way, f… off’.
“Yeah, it’s been good, it’s been a real learning curve. Up to doing that very first solo gig and that very first song you think that the band’s going to kick in at some point and then you think, ‘Bloody hell, I’m on my own’. And I actually started my solo acoustic thing using electric guitar through a small amp. But then I got hold of a couple of Matons and started to learn that whole thing where the entire room becomes a PA and an instrument itself. And I really started loving that natural warm sound and timbre as opposed to a pick-up picking up those vibrations on the strings and turning it into electricity.”
He agrees the acoustic concept is a brand of music that sorts real players out from the rest.
“Yeah I guess it does. It’s a great exercise in stripping back and picking up what essentially the song is and playing it with those raw elements, but overall it’s an ongoing learning curve. You know you can’t actually disappear on that long note with that solo kind of stuff, you’ve got to back yourself up the whole time. Such things as implying the whole rythym section if you’ve got a stomp box and that kind of thing.”
With Six Strings, Moss moved effortlessly from rock to blues to jazz and spread his wings to take a new direction in the intimate world of acoustic music. One reviewer at the time said: “All the time his voice growls, cajoles, sustains the higher register and lands sweetly and expressively for the gentler tunes”. Another said “The Cold Chisel/solo Moss classics are here in all their glory along with a few surprises, delivered as live recordings with his six string of choice, a Maton, and those distinctive, smooth vocals”.
A couple of years on and it’s happening again, albeit with a slight change in direction – he’s incorporating more of a percussive feel and a set of songs destined for the intimacy of small theatre stages for what will be some amazing shows. He says he is looking forward to touring the album.
“At the moment, I guess we’re just concentrating on building it up. Release is July 7, so in the meantime I think the plan is to travel around a bit and do interviews and perform live on radio and that sort of thing. It should be great.”
And will we see Mossy one day return to writing new material?
“Definitely, yeah. I kind of feel I have a lot of unfinished business,’’ he says. “I’ve got a ton of stuff and in that area, I believe I guess I have a lot to offer. I’ve got heaps there, just the wrong side of the finish line. I’ll get there. I’ve been concentrating on the acoustic stuff for a while now and I want to eventually build back into the electric stuff again too. But for now, it’s all about getting this one up.”
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