Australian Anthems: Cold Chisel – Khe Sanh | Music | The Guardian

I'm still waiting for the novel that has all of the themes that great literature riffs off. You know – love, loss, war, addiction, longing, sex, the road and, of course, existential angst (of the omissions here, I feel confident, you'll remind me).

But Cold Chisel's songwriter, Don Walker, ticks them all off in 40 lean lines in Khe Sanh – a paean to a returned Vietnam veteran that became a controversial signature song from the band's remarkable 1978 self-titled debut album.

Named after a 1968 battle in Vietnam's Hướng Hóa district, Khe Sanh intensely evokes the social isolation, restlessness and disenchantment of the veteran in beautiful lyrical shorthand ("There were no V-day heroes in 1973"; "The growing need for speed and novocaine"; "It's only other vets could understand") and wraps it all up in a disarming country rhythm.

Chisel were ensconced as the kings of Australian late-70s pub rock by the time Walker penned Khe Sanh in a King's Cross cafe. And this song lacks none of the band's characteristic (let's face it, Jimmy) machismo and energy.

But subtle emotional complexities also underscore Khe Sanh's raw power as an all-time Australian rock anthem, deemed by the Australian Performing Rights Association in 2001 to be the eighth best Australian song of all time.

Walker wrote the song. But it was Jimmy Barnes – a vodka-swilling, swaggering, sweating, Scottish bad boy, his voice concocted of honey and gravel, a frontman beloved equally of crims and suburban schoolgirls – who really pulled it off.

In concert during Khe Sanh, Barnes would pounce about the stage wailing, roaring his lyrics into the mic, then pound on the frame of Walker's piano during the instrumental segues featuring Ian Moss's slide guitar and Dave Blight's harmonica rhapsody.

Despite all that, there was a brittleness to his delivery; here was the character singer inhabiting the vet who is still jumpy in car parks, who's endlessly travelling the country end to end, working on the rigs  and flying choppers when he could – the PTSD sufferer desperate for the last plane out of Sydney so he might whore away his haunting dreams on a Hong Kong mattress.

But Cold Chisel achieved something even more  remarkable with Khe Sanh. Forget the suffering veteran for a moment. Dig beneath the blue-sky country rhythm and you'll find a dark commentary of Australia – a wry observation of dissatisfaction in the "lucky land", of housewives' hearts held in fast suburban chains and of the acute wanderlust of the young, who yearned for more than their parents' quiet streets and Holdens in the driveway.

For Chisel many great songs followed Khe Sanh, just as their debut preceded more great albums (my favourite is still the third, East, which carries a remix of Khe Sanh for the international market). But there can be little doubt Khe Sanh set an inordinately high bar for the rest of Chisel's life as a band – not least for Walker and Barnes.

That the song was effectively banned for airplay upon release by the commonwealth censor because of its sex and drug references only enhanced its gritty pub rock cred. By the late 80s it was bigger than itself – a signature for the very epoch of pub rock from which it evolved.

And here's another box this song ticks for me. It's a most unusual anthem that has no chorus. But that's Khe Sanh, which just repeats the most memorable line – "the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone" from the verse instead.

Clever, that.