Cold Chisel : Biggest Archival Release in Australian Music History

Everyone's favourite pub band are back, and in a big way, with news that 56 New and Rare Recordings and 3 Hours of Previously Unreleased Live Video Footage are set to be Unveiled to the world.

After two years of exhaustively excavating the band's archives, 22 July will see both the first - ever digital release of Cold Chisel’s classic catalogue as well as brand new deluxe reissues of all of their CDs.

All of the band's music has been remastered so the sound quality is better than ever and state of the art CD packaging has restored the original LP visuals. In addition, the releases will also include previously unseen photos and liner notes.

Most importantly, these releases will unleash a motherlode of previously unreleased sound and vision by this classic Australian band.

Cold Chisel is without peer in the history of Australian music. It’s therefore only fitting that this reissue program is equally peerless. While many major international artists have revamped their classic works for the 21st century, no Australian artist has ever prepared such a significant roll out of their catalogue as this, with its specialised focus on the digital platform and the traditional CD platform.

Cold Chisel

The digital release includes 56 Cold Chisel recordings that have either never been released or have not been available for more than 15 years.

These include:

While the digital release will offer a truckload of additional audio material, each of the band’s six studio albums will contain a different bonus “Video Bootleg” DVD. Each of those discs will contain unreleased vision from the era of each album.

In total, the six “Video Bootleg” DVDs that accompany these new CD reissues will include more than 40 performances that cannot be found anywhere else.

On top of all this, the group’s landmark live album Swingshift has been remastered for the first time and now includes four additional songs from the two shows (at Sydney's Capitol Theatre and Melbourne's Palais Theatre) that produced this album. The album is repackaged in a special expanded double digipack, accompanied by previously unseen photos and notes.

"Listening to all of this music and watching all of this footage from the past has been amazing” said Jimmy Barnes. “There are songs and performances we'd completely forgotten about; there were times we said, 'did we really play that'?

Some tracks here we only ever played once or twice and there are demos of songs that turned into something else. It's been a real trip through our past and reminded us that we were OK for a rock and roll band."

Cold Chisel's catalogue has sold more than 3 million copies since they broke-up in 1983 and songs like Khe Sanh, Cheap Wine, You Got Nothing I Want, Bow River, Flame Trees, Choir Girl, Forever Now and When The War Is Over have become anthems for generations of Australians.

The band is currently working on new music and some of that will hopefully see the light of day later this year. However, for the time being all focus is on making the group’s existing releases available digitally for the first time ever and making their CDs available in the best versions ever.

All of these releases are ready for pre-order online now...