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About Tex
Tex Perkins embodies rock’n’roll.
He has the swagger, presence and indomitable attitude that comes from three decades fronting some of Australia’s most intense and spirited bands: The Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon, Thug, Dark Horses, Tex Don & Charlie, The Ladyboyz and… Toilet Duck?
Tex’s no-holds-barred, laugh-out-loud memoir is written with brutal truth, raw power and feral humour, and lays bare an extraordinary life played out on the road, on the stage and on the edge.
TEX
By TEX PERKINS
with STUART COUPE
Contents
Cover
About Tex
Dedication
Discography
Just Like Altamont
The Life Of Greg
Welcome To My Nightmare
School’s Out
Guitar
1980
The Idiot
A Place Called Bad
Music Is Sport
Dum Dum
My City Of Sydney
Beasts Of Bourbon
The Axeman’s Jazz
London Calling
Adelaide Via Amsterdam
Thug
Red Eye Black Eye
Legendary Stardust Cowboys
Squatting in Sydney
The Cruel Sea
You Call That A Question?
Kristyna
This Is Not The Way Home
The Low Road
Iggy
New York
The Honeymoon Is Over
Tex, Don & Charlie: Years Of The Rooster
Footy
Aria Nightmare
Flying High
One For The Road(ie)
Zone Ball
Room Service
Touring With The Stones
You’re Him, Aren’t Ya?
Three Legged Dog
Rap – My Part In Its Downfall
Chasing The Dragon
The Devil’s Music
Getting My Shit Together
Earth Mother Shield Maidens
Animal Farm
Harbingers Of The Apocalypse
Ladyboyz
The Dark Horses
Hello, I’m Johnny Cash
The Man In Black
T’N’T
The Ape – The Band
Save The Palais
Career Diversity Blues
Outro
Thank Yous And Acknowledgements
Top Ten Albums By Perko
Tex’s Playlist
Images
About the authors
Copyright page
To my beautiful children. Stop reading right now.
Seriously.
(Mum, you’ve already read too much.)
DISCOGRAPHY
THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ / The Beasts of Bourbon (1983)
LORNE GREEN SHARES HIS PRECIOUS FLUIDS / Salamander Jim (1985)
WASTE SAUSAGE and LEATHER DONUT / Black Eye Compilations (1986 and 1987)
MECHANICAL APE / Thug (1987)
ELECTRIC WOOLLY MAMMOTH / Thug (1988)
HARD FOR YOU EP / The Butcher Shop (1988)
SOUR MASH / The Beasts of Bourbon (1988)
DOWN BELOW / The Cruel Sea (1989)
PUMP ACTION / The Butcher Shop (1989)
BLACK MILK / The Beasts of Bourbon (1990)
THE LOW ROAD / The Beasts of Bourbon (1991)
THIS IS NOT THE WAY HOME / The Cruel Sea (1991)
FROM THE BELLY OF THE BEASTS / The Beasts of Bourbon (1993)
SAD BUT TRUE / Tex, Don & Charlie (1993)
THE HONEYMOON IS OVER / The Cruel Sea (1993)
MONDAY MORNING COMING DOWN . . . / Tex, Don & Charlie (1995)
THREE LEGGED DOG / The Cruel Sea (1995)
FAR BE IT FROM ME / Tex Perkins (1996)
GONE / The Beasts of Bourbon (1997)
OVER EASY / The Cruel Sea (1998)
DARK HORSES / Tex Perkins (2000)
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE / The Cruel Sea (2001)
SWEET NOTHING / Tex Perkins’ Dark Horses (2003)
ALL IS FORGIVEN / Tex, Don & Charlie (2005)
MY BETTER HALF / T’N’T (2006)
LITTLE ANIMALS / The Beasts of Bourbon (2007)
NO. 1’S & NO. 2’S / Tex Perkins & His Ladyboyz (2008)
BEAUTIFUL KATE FILM SOUNDTRACK / Tex Perkins and Murray Paterson (2008)
TEX PERKINS & THE BAND OF GOLD / Tex Perkins & the Band of Gold (2010)
TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES / Tex Perkins & the Dark Horses (2010)
EVERYONE’S ALONE / Tex Perkins & the Dark Horses (2012)
THE APE / The Ape (2013)
TUNNEL AT THE END OF THE LIGHT / Tex Perkins & the Dark Horses (2015)
YOU DON’T KNOW LONELY / Tex, Don & Charlie (2017)
OTHER STUFF
JUST LIKE ALTAMONT
‘STOP THROWING BOTTLES AT THE BAND – THROW THEM AT MEEEE.’
Yes, here I was onstage at the Lava Lounge in Melbourne telling our audience to stop hurling bottles at the rest of the guys in the band. If they wanted a target, then aim for the frontman. And they did. And they hit me. Hard.
How had the Beasts of Bourbon disintegrated – or ascended – to this level of full-on confrontation with the audience? I asked for it.
This was probably the darkest, meanest, most in-your-face Beasts line-up. It was 1997. Rowland S. Howard, who supported us that night, wrote later that we were ‘a lazy, insolent, cocksure, sneering, lascivious, threatening bunch of men.’ He was right. Rowland also wrote that this gig was ‘truly one of the greatest nights of my life’ and that he later overheard a young girl breathlessly saying, ‘It was just like Altamont!’
How had it come to this?
We had sound-checked and then gone to Chinatown to eat at a Japanese restaurant where we got on the saké – a special kind of drunk where anything can happen. By the time we got back to the venue we were pretty activated – me most of all. I’m bouncing off the walls before the first bands even start.
Rowland goes on first and it seems to me the audience aren’t paying enough attention to him. He’s playing solo and people are talking and ignoring him. This is Rowland Howard, you stupid fucks, ex-Boys Next Door and Birthday Party, one of the greats! I’m embarrassed and incredibly annoyed, pacing around watching from the side of the stage muttering to myself like an ice freak.
I decide there needs to be some more noise onstage to get the crowd to shut up. A drum kit is already set up for The Blackeyed Susans on next. I walk onstage and sit down behind it. Rowland says, ‘And on the drums, ladies and gentleman, Tex Perkins.’
I start playing. I’m thinking I’m doing well. Not that I’m a drummer, but it’s sounding all right. But nothing changes. The crowd are still looking uninterested. I storm off.
Next on, The Blackeyed Susans, now the crowd are into it? Dickheads. Shit-eating pricks! Fuck these shit stains! I’m furious. About to explode.
By the time the Beasts come on it’s ugly. I’m sneering and taunting the audience. The crew are copping it, from the band AND the crowd. Microphones are getting bashed. Amps kicked over. We’re all drunk, as usual, and we’re playing . . . pretty well . . . but it’s angry playing. Fuck you playing.
Pretty soon things start getting thrown. Rubbish and bottles are lobbing onto the stage. They’re sort of aiming at the stage, and kinda at us. A few are lobbing dangerously close to Brian Henry Hooper, our bass player.
Brian is over it. He steps up to the mic. ‘Throw whatever you like at him, but not at us.’
I grab the mic again. ‘Yeah, they can’t take it. DON’T THROW BOTTLES AT THE BAND – THROW THEM AT MEEEE.’
And then you could count it down. Three. Two. One. And from the back of the room this perfectly lobbed
Crown Lager bottle sails maybe 30 or 40 feet, arcing through the air and cracking me in the middle of the forehead.
I’ve seen a photo of this moment and you’ve never witnessed so much childlike glee on the faces of the audience as I’m hit. Just at the moment of contact they look so happy – totally entertained, like preschoolers watching a Punch and Judy puppet show.
Anyway, the hit is a beauty. My legs go wobbly. I buckle.
There’s blood streaming down my face. I sink to my knees.
But then I decide that I want – I need – to keep playing. Partly it’s blind rage, but mostly it’s defiance. I can’t let it end here. No, this has just begun.
I can literally taste blood on my lips now – the best kind, my own! We play more songs (after all I’m a professional). Blood is streaming down my chest – I’m that worked up and the room is so hot the claret pours out of me like a tap. I’m completely rabid! I start grabbing whatever I can find onstage and hurling it at the crowd. Plastic bottles, microphone stands, milk crates. Then monitors from the front of the stage. People scream, and run! It’s complete madness – not so much of a meltdown as an eruption with more and more blood.
Security run onstage, tackle me to the ground and drag me off. The crowd are still baying like a pack of wolves chained to a lynch mob.
I give in to security pretty easily. I’m barely aware of what is happening. But I remember the curtains slowly closing. Bottles are still being thrown, a few getting through the ever smaller gap as the curtain closes.
I’m off to hospital for stitches. As I’m waiting at emergency, photographer Marty Williams turns up also needing medical attention. He’d been in the photo pit at the front of the stage and copped a few meant for me.
What had just happened left me totally exhilarated. I’m in a good mood, a very good mood, like I’ve just won a grand final or something. Instead of being consumed with anger or remorse I felt elated, and mischievous. Marty starts taking photos of me covered in blood, sneaking around inside one of the hospitals supply rooms. Another of me, limbs askew, posing on the hospital’s waiting-room floor. A few years later it’s the cover of the Beasts’ live album Low Life.
When I look back on it today, I guess I did ask for it. I told the crowd to throw shit at me. And they did as I asked. Thank you. Now this wasn’t the first time I’d had things thrown at me or the first gig where the audience were my adversary. But the one thing that sticks with me from that night, as I was staggering around the stage covered in blood, is I had this really strong sense that this – to be bleeding profusely, defiantly singing in front of a ferocious, ugly rock’n’roll band to an angry mob – was what I’d always wanted.
That this was what it was all about.
THE LIFE OF GREG
You probably know me as Tex, but I was born Gregory Stephen Perkins in Darwin on 28 December 1964.
But I will answer to Greg, Gregory, Perko, Mr Perkins, The Ape, Dad or Darling.
My dad’s name was Robert Adolphous Perkins (aka Bob Adolph). Mum was Auriel Joan Anderson. All my brothers and sisters are a lot older than me and were born in different places. I was the only child born in Darwin. Before I came along there were two older sisters, then two brothers, then me. We were white, lower middle-class, Labor-voting Catholics.
The Perkins mob are Queenslanders. The family lineage comes from Thomas Perkins who settled near Toowoomba in 1864. He left England at the age of forty-two and came out here as a free settler, married an ex-convict Irish girl and there’s been six generations since.
Me and Mum, 1965.
There was a period from the early to mid 1960s – maybe four or five years – when we all lived in Darwin. That’s where the Perkins family first solidified. I don’t remember it at all but the rest of the family look back at this time in Darwin fondly. This was Darwin between the times it was completely destroyed by the Japanese in World War 2 and then by Cyclone Tracey in 1974. I was about two when we moved to Brisbane in 1966.
Dad had been in the air force during the war serving in New Guinea, coming back to a public service job as an air flight officer. He started in air traffic control and worked his way into an administrative position. But he was always working at airports and that’s why in the family’s early life they moved around a fair bit. Longreach. Charleville. Cloncurry. All over Central Queensland.
In many ways, Dad was typical of fathers of that time. He left for work at 7.30 every morning and came home at six. He was the guy at the end of the table who got angry with me occasionally. He didn’t cook or clean. He was as domestically uninvolved as most men of that generation were but he loved his lawn and kept it neat and mowed it regularly. Mum was the boss and ruled with skilful use of the Catholic mother guilt trip routine.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ was the code we lived by. We love our mum.
There was always music in our house. Nothing excessive, but it was there. A radio, a stereo, a piano or an uber-kitsch home family keyboard that Mum played a bit and that us kids could muck around on. So while there wasn’t a great musicality in my family everyone listened to music and, probably more importantly, everyone had an opinion about music.
I always associate Dad with Marty Robbins, but Mum was into Perry Como, Val Doonican and those kinds of light crooners. My oldest sister Lyn was a bit of a hippie so she dug people like Bob Dylan, Donovan and Ravi Shankar. My other sister Beth was fairly mainstream in her tastes and listened to Marcia Hines and the like. My brother, John, was also kind of mainstream in his tastes and listened to things like Elton John. My tolerance for all that West Coast stuff like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac comes from hearing him play his albums.
Looking back, I think my brothers had the most to do with my musical taste, especially my oldest brother Rob, who was into . . . well, rock’n’roll. He listened to the Modern Lovers, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols and all that ‘difficult’ stuff, but also loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and a very little known rockabilly cat called Ronnie Self.
Countdown was on every Sunday of course, and left a deep impression on me, but it was the radio that got to me first. The subdued tones of late ’60s Brisbane ABC breakfast radio transported my young mind to places like Richard Harris’s ‘MacArthur Park’ and Glen Campbell’s ‘Galveston’. Donovan’s ‘Atlantis’ told me of the destruction of an entire civilisation. Zager and Evans’ ‘In the Year 2525’ forced me to consider the distant future of mankind. And Peter, Paul and Mary planted the seeds for a love of cannabis with ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.
It was Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’ that really got my attention. Apart from the vividly descriptive story of a bitter, violent man hell-bent on tracking down and killing his father for giving him a girl’s name, more intriguingly it had words bleeped out! Words we weren’t allowed to hear. Forbidden words. Words even worse than mud and blood and beer.
I can’t remember having a genuine opinion about anything until the age of five. Of course I liked certain things and favoured certain flavours but I don’t think it was until kindergarten that I thought of anything as good or bad. It was all just, there.
That’s when I had my first win of any consequence – Best Dressed at the end of year (1969) fancy dress ball. Dressed as Zorro – a hero of mine and easier to dress up as than my other hero at the time, Flipper – I wore an outfit made by Mum and beat other strong contenders such as the kid dressed as Fleegle from The Banana Splits. I definitely looked better on the arm of my co-winner, a little girl dressed as Cinderella than he would’ve. It was my inaugural triumph and an early example of my comfort wearing black.
A golden age of television was unfolding before me. Gerry Anderson kept me enthralled with Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds. Saturday afternoon classics such as The Ghost and Mr Chicken and The Reluctant Astronaut starring Don Knotts were often replayed on TV along with the comic stylings of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and Abbot and Costello. And every afternoon at five o’clock we would drop whatever we wer
e doing and come inside to watch Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island.
My very favourite television show was Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, a 1960s show where all the characters were played by actual chimpanzees dressed up as people.
Lancelot Link was a chimpanzee secret agent – his boss was Commander Darwin at A.P.E. aka the Agency for the Prevention of Evil. It was a James Bond-style spoof show developed by the people behind Get Smart. I loved that show and I loved the album Lance made with his band, The Evolution Revolution. Someone recently told me that the chimp who played Lancelot is still alive and well, currently in his fifties and living the high life on the Wildlife Waystation in Southern California. SHIT! He’s my age!
After my triumph as Zorro, the second significant accolade I remember getting was when I was in grade one or two. I’d drawn a picture of a monkey in a space suit and the teacher was so impressed I was taken to the principal’s office where it was shown to him. It was one of the few times – the only one in fact – when I was taken to the principal’s office for doing something right.
My next memorable accolade was for a school play where I played a monkey – a circus ape in fact. I was given a special award as ‘the monkey who played the boy’.
Then, one Sunday night in the early ’70s, my family gathered in the lounge room to watch the movie of the week: Planet of the Apes. I cannot overstate the effect this movie had on me. It blew my tiny mind. Apes with guns on horseback – it was the scariest, coolest thing I had ever seen. I loved the whole action fantasy thing of it, but like all great science fiction, it made me think, and introduced me to two huge concepts that resonate with me to this day.
Firstly, evolution. As a Catholic I had run into this theory early, but only in its debunking. ‘I’d like to see the look on the face of the monkey that gave birth to a human!’ said one of my first primary schoolteachers. But the idea that humans shared ancestry with not only apes but all creatures wasn’t frightening for me. It was comforting.
And it didn’t kill God for me, it explained God to me. It wasn’t evolution OR intelligent design. If there was a ‘creator’ why couldn’t they create evolution? I mean if you’re a supreme being and you want to build a universe and all the things within it, surely you’d make systems that take care of themselves. You don’t want to have to be there all the time puppeteering the whole thing, making sure everything’s working and making adjustments when required. You’re a supreme being, you’ve got better things to do. The main idea in Planet of the Apes is that evolution hasn’t just stopped now that man rules the planet; it’s ongoing. And in the absence of man’s dominance, another species will rise as his most fitting successor. Apes are the most likely candidate (but really it could be dolphins or pigs).