My brother and I meet at Flinders Street Station and immediately notice we’re wearing identical clothing, as if it had been planned. Not a lot of thought had gone into my black jeans and black T-shirt ensemble, but it turns out my brother also thought it was the right uniform to see Australia’s definitive pub rock band on their 50th Anniversary tour. We burst out laughing.

As we amble up to the Myer Music Bowl, on a warm Melbourne evening, we pitch our guesses for the opening song. It is a game we play whenever we see bands together. We agree on Standing on the Outside. Yes, it’s the predictable choice, but we nod to each other as Ian Moss breaks into the spellbinding opening riff, confirming for us what this night is all about.

In my head, I start ticking off the songs I know they have to play. There is a pause between songs, and I find myself instinctively breaking into, ‘Once I smoked a Dannemann cigar…’ I feel in sync when Jimmy Barnes echoes me seconds later. What the night is all about…

By the time they’ve played Rising Sun, My Baby, and those beautiful, falling-tears opening notes of Choir Girl, I’m thinking they’ve brought the big guns out early; what are they going to have left? But the songs just keep coming: Forever Now, Flame Trees, Khe Sanh – each sung like national anthems by the crowd, and I begin to appreciate what a body of work the band has built.

Cold Chisel’s East was the first serious rock album I bought. Oh, I had a bit of the Ted Mulry Gang and Ol’55 as a kid, but they weren’t much of a step up from The Wiggles in those days. East felt grown-up and a bit rebellious, even if the music was anchored in standard blues and rock. The band was breaking out, but their music wasn’t like the mainstream pop that we were mostly getting on ‘Countdown’.

With the follow-up albums, Circus Animals and Twentieth Century, it was Chisel’s authenticity, signified by Barnes’s choice of plain rugby jumpers instead of heavy metal costumes, that strangely felt like an act of defiance against the tide of 80s New Wave, and which mustered the band’s devoted followers into a blood brother-like fanbase. This was pub rock drenched in booze and sweat, but with lyrics and a heart that struck a chord with Australian workers.

I recall a night from my short-lived career as a rock DJ at university, spinning records at the Riverside Tavern in Queanbeyan. There were five brawls that night, only one of which involved men. But at one point in the evening, as the hour and booze finally mellowed the crowd, a big bloke came over and requested – demanded with a threat of violence, really – ‘play some slow Chisel’, as if there were only two kinds of music. I put on Choir Girl and watched as he pulled his baby in close and swayed on the floor, along with a dozen other drunk couples going through some weekly Friday night ritual. With Cold Chisel you felt close to reality, the good and the bad.

Jimmy is belting out, You Got Nothing I Want. It is a song – nay a scream – about the band’s wholesale rejection of the compromises that promoters wanted in order to take their music to an American audience, even with all the trappings and convertible cars. Such principles, tied with a strain of anti-American sentiment, and the behind-the-scenes punch-ups, strengthened the conviction that Cold Chisel were the real deal.

My brother and I continue to tick off the songs that have to be played: Bow River, Saturday Night, and Breakfast at Sweethearts. What the night is all about… We think we’ve got them all. Maybe they’ll play Taipan and Shipping Steel.

One of the strengths and challenges for Cold Chisel is the depth of songwriting talent. Unlike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, with their dominant writing duos (yes, George Harrison contributed some bangers), all the band members made great contributions, so it was inevitable there were going to be creative conflicts. Don Walker and the late Steve Prestwich were the primary writers, but Barnes, Moss, and even bassist Phil Small (My Baby) added to an oeuvre that, nonetheless, somehow holds together.

As with many hard rock bands, the fast Chisel is the blood, but it’s the ballads, perhaps doubted at first, that are the spine of their longevity. Barnsey’s vocals and Moss’ electrifying guitar are the driving signatures, but it’s the sentimental ballads that have secured Cold Chisel’s place in Australian music. These aren’t Bon Jovi-style ballads of undying love and devotion, but about the restless, particularly working-class, need to escape urban frustration and despair. Australia! All this wide, brown land, and I’m trapped in a factory and a basement flat, tied up in suburban chains.

That is the heart and greatness of Cold Chisel. It’s what Australians connect with at their core, and gets them singing along to Flame Trees and Bow River. In our manic, claustrophobic cities, we live with the permanent pull to pack our bags, to get away, to drift north again… Oh, listen now to the wind, listen now to the rain… I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the last verse of Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree could well be a Cold Chisel lyric:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

And if you can’t do it today, well, at least you can go to a Cold Chisel concert and sing your lungs out about it. What the night is all about.

Towards the end of the show, Jimmy tells the story behind the band’s 50-year reunion tour. There hasn’t been a lot of talking, and I think how refreshing it is to hear a band playing their hits without all the political posturing in between. It’s about the music. Having only released a couple of albums in the 21st Century, the band tentatively got together to discuss what, if anything, they might do for their anniversary, one of the problems being that whenever they do, they tend to fight. But, on this night, they had all arrived with the same idea of a tour, and there was peace.

That night, Jimmy says, he slept better than he has in months, even years, and he has a vivid dream. He is driving the tour bus – at the end of the day, a great band needs a great frontman – and there, clear as day, sitting beside him in the passenger seat is Steve Prestwich. Surely, this is a sign that this is right. The band is back together. Ian Moss starts singing. ‘Ain’t nobody gonna steal this heart away…’

My brother and I turn to each other in shared surprise. After two hours, somehow both of us hadn’t noticed they still hadn’t played When the War is Over. How did we forget that one? It felt like they’d already played them all. We join the choir.

When the war is over, got to get away,

Pack my bags to no place, in no time, no day…

What the night is all about.

Will they finish with Goodbye (Astrid Goodbye)? We hope so, and they deliver. A raw, rockabilly riot to close, and we go as mental as 50-something-year-olds can.

Yes, this was another goodbye, 40 years after the legendary, but misnamed, ‘Last Stand’ tour, but who was going to care? This wasn’t your typical retro concert, a nostalgic step back in time trying to recapture old moments. This was just Chisel playing a Chisel concert, now. Yes, a little older, and with a layer of awareness of what they have become over half a century. But there was no milking the nostalgia, no corny cabaret reflections, no danger of becoming a parody of themselves, the line the Rolling Stones have had to tread for decades.

The concert felt like finding a treasured lost item in the garage you thought had long gone. A part of your life, in fact, you thought was history. But here it is, a little aged, but essentially unchanged. An old engine that somehow magically turns over again when you flick the switch.