How did you meet those guys?

Um, I, I met Ian first at a, uh, just at a, a sort of a suburban jam at Norwood town hall, uh, you know, come down on the weekend and jam all musicians.

Um, I met, uh, I met the, the, uh, uh, original bass player, Les Kaczmarek, who got the band together.

Um, I answered an ad in a music shop, turned up at his place and Ian was there.

Yep.

And for the others, I already knew Swanee.

I met Swanee quite early when I went to Adelaide.

So how do you decide, no, this is a Don Walker song, or no, this is a Normie Rose song, or no, this is a Cold Chisel song? Is there a mechanism that you've got that says, ah, that's who should be playing it? Have you got that going in your head as well?

Mm-hmm.

You know, I used to watch these salsa bands in Sydney, and they're based around a huge horn section.

A lot of power for punctuation coming from the horns, and I just wanted to write a song like that.

And I demoed it with the help of Mark Punch, who was helping me with all my demos at the time, and I really loved that demo and the fun we had making it.

He just pulled all the percussion off the internet, and while we're looking for percussion on the internet, he come across all this other stuff like girls screaming in horror movies.

So th- there was this fun demo sitting there in the vaults that I really liked, and that's where the song came from.

And then various people heard that demo and did their version of.

Do you recall how that particular song came to life, and were you thinking about places that you'd left?

You

know, I used to watch these salsa bands in Sydney, and they're based around a huge horn section.

A lot of power for punctuation coming from the horns.

And I just wanted to write a song like that.

And I demoed it with the help of Mark Punch, who was helping me with all my demos at the time.

And I really loved that demo.

And the fun we had making it, he just pulled all the percussion off the internet.

So did he come to you and say, I'm going to think about writing a song the way you do, Don, or do you not see any link between the way how you both approach a song in terms of writing?

Is there a line for you in songwriting where you stop, where you go, no, I'm not sharing that? Have you had those moments?

In saying to myself, that's too personal? Well, clearly, you know, the whole area of pornography, we try and stay away from that.

Yeah.

Well, if there was such a line, clearly putting a song like Fly Away on an album means that, you know, it doesn't get more personal than that.

If I had the wings of an albatross I'd fly away so far across the sea Waiting on that foreign shore for me And in your open arms I'd find my home again And you'd hold me the way you used to do And I would never wake in alone again To face another morning without you Fly away my heart and I will follow Fly away and find that empty shore The truth is The truth is you don't want me anymore.

What do you look for when you listen to a song, not necessarily one you've written, but when you hear songs?

Um...

Well, I listen to a range of stuff.

Developing your style as an organ player, what was sort of the process of that for you, which is obviously very different to piano?

Yeah, well...

In that era, playing in bands in a regional town, which for years and years, viable onstage rock and roll piano just wasn't available.

And everybody played organs.

In the coastal bands I was in, the keyboard players used to play farfeasors, which is a...

That's a whole different instrument.

Extremely powerful if you've got somebody who knows what they're doing with it.

Yeah.

This is one of the men responsible for so many of the classics we grew up with.

[singing] Looking like a crying girl.

She's crying like a refugee.

Well, the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone.

Another seven flying hours and I'll be landing in Hong Kong.

There ain't nothing like the kisses from a cheated Chinese princess.

I'm gonna hit some Hong Kong matches all night long.

Don Walker.

It was co-written with Busby Marou's Tom Busby, and it's called Luck.

Like the breeze I've been coasting for many years now.

Drifting in and out of work I'm gonna leave.

But I don't owe a thing, I've got nothing.

So I'm even with the planet at the end of the day.

And if I wake up in the sunlight where it's playing on the floor.

Through the window of another room I've never seen before.

Don Walker, thank you very much for being our guest on The Music Show.

Do you have an idea of the sort of tone you want to go when you're putting a whole album out together?

Well, I work with a certain set of musicians and I have done with the same guys broadly for a long time.

Yep.

And they tend to be from the blues or jazz or country areas of our music establishment here.

And they tend to be among the best of the people in those.

Yeah.

That leaks in where they're from and where they're used to playing.

Was it hard to always keep it together when you got the likes of Jimmy out front?