Australian rock veteran and national treasure Jimmy Barnes may have narrowly avoided death after he made a split-second decision that kept him away from Bangkok’s popular Erawan Shrine right as a bomb that killed at least 21 people and injured more than 120 went off.

As Sky News reports, Barnes was with friends and family, pushing his young grandson in a stroller when he decided it would be too hard to manoeuvre the pram along the bumpy and densely populated road that runs alongside the Erawan Shrine.

The Cold Chisel frontman instead led his family to an overhead walkway. As they pushed through, high above the road way, a bomb exploded outside the shrine. Neither Barnes nor anyone in his party were injured.

Speaking to the AAP from his Bangkok hotel, Barnes recounted the last-second decision that potentially saved his life and that of of his Thai-Australian wife Jane, daughter Elly-May, son-in-law Liam Conboy, and grandson Dylan.

“I had the pram with the grandson… walking past the shrine would have been very difficult because it’s a bumpy road. So I said to the kids, ‘Follow me, I’ll take you this other way.’ We were literally walking between two buildings on the walkway when the bomb went off. It was just frightening,” he said.

“I knew it was a bomb straight away. All the windows sort of went whoosh and bent from the blast.” Alan Parkhouse, a friend of the Barnes family and cousin of Cold Chisel keyboardist Don Walker, recounted the experience for Fairfax.

“As we made our way across the overhead walkway from the shopping centre to the hotel, there was a very loud explosion and the glass lining the closed-in walkway shook and almost buckled from the shockwave of the blast,” Parkhouse writes.

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“We had just walked right above the spot where the bomb had gone off and were about 50 metres away when the blast shook the walkway and the glass almost shattered. It was a really loud explosion and Jimmy, Jane and I knew it wasn’t thunder, a car backfiring or fireworks.”

According to Sky News, there have so far been no reports of Australians injured or killed in the blast, but the Department of Foreign Affairs is consulting with Thai officials.

If you have family or loved ones in Bangkok and are concerned about their safety, call the DFAT hotline within Australia on 1300 555 135 or outside of Australia on (61) 2 6261 3305.

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