Jimmy Barnes

Scottish-Australian rock singer-songwriter whose career both as a solo performer and as the lead vocalist with the rock band Cold Chisel has made him one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time. The combination of 14 Australian Top 40 albums for Cold Chisel and 13 charting solo albums, including nine No. 1s, gives Barnes the highest number of hit albums of any Australian artist.

While in Canberra in November 1979 he met Jane Mahoney (born 1958 as Jane Dejakasaya, Bangkok, Thailand), the stepdaughter of an Australian diplomat. Barnes began a relationship with her and they started living together but in March 1980 she began to feel overwhelmed by the rock lifestyle and followed her family to Tokyo where her father was posted. Barnes wrote the song "Rising Sun" about this, which would appear on the album East. The pair married in Sydney on 22 May 1981 and Jane soon gave birth to their first child Mahalia, named after Mahalia Jackson, on 12 July 1982. The couple have four children (Mahalia, Eliza-Jane, Elly-May and Jackie), who formed the group Tin Lids, and Barnes had already fathered a son, singer David Campbell (b. 6 August 1973), who, due to the young age of his parents at the time of his birth, was being raised by his grandmother, but while Barnes maintained contact with him, Campbell did not become aware that Barnes was his father and not merely a family friend until the mid-1980s. On 27 September 2010, it was revealed that Barnes has two adult daughters he had never previously met.

On 1 October 2016 Barnes released his autobiography, "Working Class Boy."