Stations of the X - 177 breakfast at sweethearts

Don Walker has lived in Kings Cross for over 30 years. He is the undisputed poet minstrel of the X.

"In 1976 Cold Chisel came running up the Hume Highway from a dire winter in Melbourne. We lived for three weeks in a motel in Tamarama, then I went looking for the cheapest accommodation in Sydney, which was the Plaza Hotel in Darlinghurst Road - $12.50 for a double room for a week. I moved the band to Kings Cross purely for economics. They all moved out to other places fairly quickly and partly through inertia I stayed at the Plaza for five years or so.

"Apart from those three weeks in Tamarama, I've never lived anywhere else in Sydney, and I've never bothered to try other places. When I was much younger I spent a couple of weeks here, staying with my aunt in Caringbah and spending most of my time with my girlfriend in Dee Why. Going between Caringbah and Dee Why each day probably put me off suburban living.

"Everything I needed to sustain life in 1976 - apart from more money - was in Kings Cross. And Kings Cross was the only place in Sydney in those days that provided 24-hour meals, reading matter, etc. I never had much use for the strip clubs or that end of things. I had a look at that when I first arrived here and, not through any puritanism, I never really got motivated to go back.
"These days, of course, you could do just as well in Newtown, Bondi, any number of other places. But in those days it was Kings Cross. Kings Cross was the yolk of the egg.

"The second Cold Chisel album, Breakfast at Sweethearts, was written, like all second albums, in a short space of time and it smells a lot of the place where it was written. It was also the last Cold Chisel album I wrote pretty much all of. So that album, probably more than anything, reflects my life in this place. Even though I've lived here ever since, by and large I think I'm writing about other places.

"The original Sweethearts Cafe is where McDonald's is now. That got demolished and Sweethearts moved over the road to where Krave Espresso Bar is now. That lasted for quite a few years, until the late 1980s, early '90s.

"Khe Sanh was written on some scraps of paper at the old Sweethearts. I used to do a fair bit of eating there and at the Crest. I spent as little time as possible in the Plaza because there was nothing there. You could sit in the Plaza for an afternoon and read, which I used to do often, but you couldn't spend a whole day. It was just a room and a bed.

"I think the songs were influenced not by wherever I was sitting and writing them, but by the kind of places I was going and the kind of life I was leading. I used to spend a lot of time in Oxford Street, around Taylor Square, because a couple of the other guys moved there. There was a strong connection to Bondi Junction, because Jim [Barnes] moved out there with some people that his older brother, Swanee [John Swan], knew, and we used to spend a lot of time at the Bondi Lifesaver. In Kings Cross, past the fountain, there was the Rex Hotel. And in the Rex was the Bottoms Up Bar. That was a big gay and transvestite scene. Paul Hewson from Dragon used to spend a lot of time in there, so I knew that place through my friendship with him. In the middle of Kings Cross was the Manzil Room, which was just across the road from the Plaza. I could walk out of there after the sun had come up and know I didn't have too far to go.

"The connection between what's around me and what finishes up in lyrics is unconscious. It's probably different for most other people, but I don't look around and say, 'Well, now I'm going to write a song about this street, where I'm sitting right now.' I don't really write that way."

See also #34.

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