Don Walker

Donald Hugh Walker (born 29 November 1951) is an Australian musician and songwriter who wrote many of the hits for Australian pub rock band Cold Chisel.

Walker is considered to be one of Australia's best songwriters.

Having completed a degree in physics in the 1970s at the University of New England residing at Robb College.

He played piano and keyboard with the Cold Chisel from 1973 to 1983, when they disbanded.

He has since continued to record and tour, both solo, initially under the name Catfish and as Tex, Don and Charlie, and worked as a songwriter for others.

Walker was working for the Weapons Research Establishment, when he helped form Cold Chisel in 1973.

Cold Chisel are an Australian pub rock band, formed in 1973.

From the earliest days, Walker was a creative songwriting force for the band.

He became known for his passionate and raw lyrical observations on the Australian society and culture of the time.

After Cold Chisel disbanded in 1983, Walker had a five-year hiatus before resuming recording and performing.

Initially, he had considered hiring an actor to mime the songs before deciding to front Catfish himself Ostensibly a band, Catfish was in effect a solo project, featuring Walker on vocals, keyboards and penning all the songs.

Catfish featured various backing musicians, such as Charlie Owen, Ian Moss, Ricky Fataar and harmonica player David Blight.

The first album, Unlimited Address, released in 1989, showed a jazzier, Eastern European side to Walker's songwriting, reflecting his travels during the previous years.

Despite being critically lauded, sales were moderate, the album reaching number 49 in the national charts.

The second album, Ruby was a return to Australia in sound and lyrical subject matter.

Again, it was well received by critics but sold relatively poorly.

The track "Charleville" was later to receive country music awards when covered by Slim Dusty.

In early 1992, Walker featured in an acoustic live performance for alternative radio station JJJ with Charlie Owen, James Cruickshank and Tex Perkins.

Six months later, Perkins proposed to Walker that they record an album together.

Walker described the recording as a number of informal afternoons spent jamming in the studio.

"It wasn't an album approached with any sort of seriousness. It wasn't until we had it all done that we started to realise we might have something special."

In 1993 Tex, Don and Charlie released their first album, Sad but True on Red Eye Records.

The record, an acoustic country-tinged affair, returned Walker to some level of popular awareness and received rave reviews in magazines like Australian Rolling Stone.

About half the songs were written by Walker, including "Sitting in a Bar".

His songwriting credits include the hit singles "Flame Trees," "Saturday Night," "Choirgirl,""Goodbye (Astrid Goodbye)", "Cheap Wine," and the Australian Vietnam war song "Khe Sanh" (voted the 8th greatest Australian song of all time by the Australasian Performing Right Association in 2001).

During his time with Cold Chisel, Walker produced his first work outside the band, the soundtrack of the Australian movie "Freedom", directed by Scott Hicks.

The soundtrack was released as an album and featured members of Cold Chisel and Michael Hutchence.

The Age described it as, "the best rock music written for an Australian movie."

In 2009, he released his first book.

Richard Clapton describes Walker as, "the most Australian writer there has ever been. Don just digs being a sort of Beat poet, who goes around observing, especially around the streets of Kings Cross. He soaks it up like a sponge and articulates it so well. Quite frankly, I think he's better than the rest of us."

Walker was born in Ayr, Queensland to a farmer father and schoolteacher mother.

His grandfather had served at Gallipoli in World War I, and then at the Battle of Pozières, where he was shot in the face.

Returning to Australia, he married the sister of his best friend, who had died in the same battle.

Walker's father was a harmonica player and fan of Larry Adler.

Walker said, "He was always very keen on gospel and blues music, and 30s swing. I was familiar with that before I could talk."

He said his father was in, "the AIF in Palestine and Syria in WW2 and in what was then Ceylon and three tours of New Guinea."

He owned a cane farm on Rita Island on the Burdekin River, where Walker lived until the age of 4.

His family later moved to Grafton, where a local piano teacher, Dot Morris, taught him, "a little bit of Chopin.....a lot of Fats Waller repertoire, and also Winifred Atwell."

Later, he, "got into organ and the main influences were Stevie Winwood's 60s stuff and Ray Manzarek."

In 2012 he was inducted into the Australian Songwriter's Hall of Fame.