by Tex Perkins
I never learned how to fight, but I learned how to get beat up. There was always more of them than me. That’s how they hunted. Against three or four of these droogs you just did your best. I normally just had to cop it and try to lessen the likelihood of losing teeth by protecting my face with my arms.
This is a mentality I’ve never come close to understanding. Sure I’ve been in fights and when provoked I’ve wanted to do serious damage to the provocateur. But cold-bloodily seeking other humans to do harm to is beyond even my dark, angry heart. Yet, I saw a lot of it back then.
One night I got off the train and foolishly walked past a bunch of guys instead of heading in the opposite direction. Before I knew it I was smacked in the face. Still reeling from the hit, I took off. They pursued me. It was like sport for them. They chased me up the railway tracks, over back fences, across yards, and down deserted suburban streets. Finally, I spotted a taxi and ran for it. But the driver saw me coming and by the time I got to the car he’d wound up his windows, locked the door and drove off.
I kept running, the yob pack howling behind me.
This kind of violence was in the suburbs and the outskirts of the city. Punk bashing became a very popular blood sport of the time. Groups of dudes would deliberately go out and find a punk to bash.
If a bunch of punk rockers had a party there was no way it would end well. Inevitably a bunch of cars would pull up and a whole lot of guys would pile out, storm in and start smashing things up. Then they’d drag people out of the party and start laying into them. Just to teach us a lesson. I have no idea what the lesson was meant to be – but it was probably don’t look like a punk or a poof.
To look like a punk rocker was pretty easy. Short hair, jeans that weren’t flares and a t-shirt with a band name on it. I’d write the name of some band on the shirt myself in felt pen or scrawl Iggy and The Stooges on a jacket in house paint.
It’s funny but I actually have some nostalgia for those times. There was a lot of horrible, awful, nasty, ugly, boring stuff . . . but I wouldn’t call it tragic.
One night I was arrested in the city.
I was outside a place called White Chairs, a bar where anybody a bit weird or alternative would go. It closed at 10 pm so everyone would gather outside when the bar shut. We’d stand around on the footpath considering our next move. Nothing more provocative than that. This night there was maybe 20 people milling around trying to decide what to do next. And I think, without even raising my voice, I said something like, ‘ah fuck it, let’s just go.’
The next thing I knew a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, obviously a plain-clothes cop, grabbed me and arrested me for – using obscene language in a public place. I was led to a police car and taken to the watch house. I was wearing my Iggy and The Stooges jacket at the time.
One of the cops leers at me, ‘The Stooges? Which one are you, dickhead – Larry, Curly or Moe?’
‘Shemp,’ I replied.
As we arrived at the police station, there was a bunch of cops hanging at the front desk. One of them looked at me and said, ‘Fuck he’s skinny isn’ee? And he looks like he’s got drugs – strip-search him.’ So they strip-searched me and I stood completely naked right there in the foyer of the police station in front of everybody and anybody. Then I was photographed and fingerprinted and told I’d be held in a cell until somebody turned up with fifty bucks to pay my bail. All this for saying the word ‘fuck’ in a conversation with friends.
Why were they doing it? What was their purpose? Was it really revenue raising to get fifty dollars out of me? At the time none of these questions occurred to me. This sort of senselessness seemed so regular it was almost mundane.
Did I have the choice to go to court and defend the charges? Maybe I did, but I certainly wasn’t told that by these filth. Who would bother anyway?
Thank fuck for my friend Michael Gilmore and his girlfriend who turned up a few hours later and paid my bail. Fifty bucks was a lot of money in 1981.
Michael knew the drill, he used to get arrested himself every couple of weeks. I saw him get nabbed walking back from The Clash concert at Cloudland. There was a mango tree hanging over the footpath and a mango had fallen into the street. Michael picked it up and tossed it a few feet in front of us and within seconds a siren went off and the boys in blue were there. Michael was bundled into a cop car and disappeared.
Stuff like this wasn’t devastating. It was just weird and stupid, and I’d already seen weird, stupid, horrible, mundane, injustice at school and woken up to the fact that this was a continuation in the real word. This was just Brisbane.
MUSIC IS SPORT
I’d found out fast that signwriting has absolutely nothing to do with English . . . or Art.
It was about meticulous lines and squared-off edges . . . and cleanliness! And sure enough, rather than lead me into an apprenticeship it led me into working at screen-printing places as the Broom Boy, sweeping floors and getting lunches.
Over the next 12 months I had a half-dozen different jobs. Most of them would last exactly eight weeks. For the first four weeks, I would be a model employee, turning up on time and doing a decent job. After that I’d get comfortable and started turning up a little late, five minutes at first, then 15, until I thought I deserved a day off. By the seventh week my employers realised who they were dealing with and I was out the door at the end of the eighth.
For a time, I worked at a furniture warehouse where I started as storeman, delivery boy and showroom salesman. A 15-year-old kid – me! – as a showroom salesman. No training. No info. No idea. Idiots!
I was supposed to greet customers, sometimes whole families, as they came in. Then I’d answer their questions about furniture. But I had no idea what I was talking about. A guy would come in and ask me about a mattress. What is it made of? Is it waterproof? Do you have a repayment plan?
I’d look at them and say, ‘You know what? If I was you I’d be sleeping on this foam one – it’s twenty bucks.’ Their next question was inevitable.
‘Is there anyone else I can speak to?’
I was feeling set adrift, with no connection to anything. So when my mate Gary said, ‘Let’s go sign up at the local football club,’ I thought, ‘Why not? I’m not doing much else.’ The local club was the Sandgate Hawks Australian Football Club. The attraction for Gary and I wasn’t really the football. We had heard a rumour that they let you drink.
Until then I hadn’t even watched a game of Aussie Rules on TV but I threw myself into the deep end. They were a good bunch of blokes and through gritted teeth they endured me, and I in turn endured their impatience with me trying to get the hang of the game. Usually, I started on the bench and they put me on the field for ten minutes here and there then got me off quick.
I really had no idea what I was doing. At no stage had I actually said to anyone that I didn’t know ANY of the rules of this game. On the other hand, no one sat down with me and offered to explain what you can and can’t do. This was the under 17s. I was the only beginner. But they didn’t tell me even the most basic rules – the stuff about needing to handball, or oh shit, you’ve got to bounce the thing when you run?
I bluffed my way through the entire season, with limited success.
Yes, I did a whole season of footy while slowly gaining only the slightest idea of what the hell was going on. But let’s not kid ourselves – this was not about football. It was really about a bunch of teenagers drinking a keg in the dressing room on Saturday night after the game and getting really, really throwing-up drunk.
Straight after the season was over I got into rock’n’roll and didn’t look back.
Footy season was over and music took my complete focus. Sport and rock were never comfortable bedfellows, and for the next 13 years, I denied having any knowledge of any sport of any kind. No one I knew from that point even mentioned it.
Around this age I started to go out to gigs and see bands. I’d tell my parents, ‘Might go to bed a little early tonight,’ followed by a very conv
incing yawn. Then I would carefully remove the louvred windows in my bedroom, climb through and quietly steal away through the backyards of suburban Boondall, down to the train station and off into town.
There wasn’t a real lot going on in Brisbane around this time. Or certainly it didn’t seem like there was to me. Brisbane had given birth to the ‘world’s first punk rock band’ The Saints a few years prior, for which we should all be grateful, but by the time I was out there The Saints had left for England and were considered traitors for deserting us. There was a FUCK THE SAINTS attitude. Brisbane hated people that left. The Leftovers were the punk band that never left Brisbane. They were in the Sex Pistols mould of punk bands. Safety pins, leather jackets, crime, drugs, suicide and all the trimmings. True scum. But all that was long over by the time I was venturing into the Brisbane night in 1981.
Decent gigs were scarce, so when there was one, you just had to go. Maybe if I’d been part of some scene I’d have known about more, but I wasn’t. There were only one or two places I knew about around Fortitude Valley and the city centre – the White Chairs bar and The Exchange Hotel where I saw The Go-Betweens and Laughing Clowns without knowing who they were at the time. It didn’t really matter what band was on where, I’d just go.
Of course I was under-age, but I had no problem getting in. I was tall.
It wasn’t always a trip into town either. Occasionally I went deeper into the suburbs. The Homestead Hotel was a large beer barn in Zillmere, a suburb not far from Boondall. One night in 1980 I went to see The Radiators. Flannelette and corduroy were everywhere. The place was packed with suburban kids drunk and going wild. Forget the punks and new wavers, this lot really knew how to fuck shit up!
The room for rock concerts was also used for wedding receptions so the venue had rows of long trestle tables set up around the perimeter. The dance floor was packed so the rest of us got up on these tables for a better vantage point. No one asked us to get down, so more and more punters got up. As the show intensified, we jumped harder and higher, until the inevitable happened and the tables collapsed. It was exhilarating. A dozen kids fell in a heap on the floor, the band played on, no one even noticed. No one got hurt; we all roared with laughter, then launched ourselves back into the fray, mullets and desert boots flying everywhere. It was like a giant rumpus room for drunk teenagers. Magnificent!
As I started getting away from home more, I started meeting people. There was this girl I used to see on the train. I think her name was Michelle. She would be waiting for the same train, often heading in to the same gig. She was the only one on the train that had new wave clothes on, so we made a connection.
We were never boyfriend and girlfriend or anything like that, but we used to go to gigs together. At one of these gigs we met up with these two guys, Glen and Shane. Out of the blue they asked if we wanted to be in their band. They said they already had a gig lined up. It was going to be at the Queensland Uni in the city. The name of their band? The Corpse of Christ.
We did a rudimentary rehearsal where there were a few riffs and ideas thrown around, but we never actually fired up all together. Instead we just sat around discussing music we liked. The general idea of the band was . . . well, I can’t remember if there was a general idea. Glen and Shane were into bands I didn’t know very much about at the time – Throbbing Gristle and other industrial, avant-garde things. But we shared a love for The Stooges.
So just for being wide-eyed and up for anything, Michelle and I found ourselves joining The Corpse of Christ. And yes, there was a gig. A real gig, for THIS band. A band that included ME.
On the night of the show we were all insanely nervous and when we finally got onstage, everything we had spoken about went out the window and it became this completely ridiculous shamble. Just noise. In fact not even connected enough to be deliberate noise.
Nobody realised until the ‘music’ began that Michelle couldn’t drum to save her life. She sat behind the kit limply flapping the sticks across the skins and cymbals. I was on guitar and, realising it had all gone to hell, started goosestepping across the stage while bashing away on my $50 guitar, oblivious to the other members of the band and in, I’m not sure what state of mind.
It was awful on a scale many people had never witnessed before. Let’s not try to gloss this over. It was dreadful.
After a while my good friend Michael Gilmore, who was sitting close to the stage, beckoned me over. ‘You should stop now!’ he shouted in my ear. We didn’t. People politely booed until it was over.
At the end of the gig we went our separate ways. With all of us quite aware of just how unimpressed the world had been with our debut, Glen called a ‘band meeting’ a few days later. With a few beers in their bellies, he and Shane told us they were going to change the name of the band and were considering maybe going on as a duo. There’s no way to put this any differently, but Michelle and I were ‘let go’ from The Corpse of Christ.
I knew it was coming, and fank thuck it did.
DUM DUM
Not long after my stint – can you call one gig a stint? – with The Corpse of Christ I started hanging out with people who took . . . drugs.
I didn’t know much about drugs. It was a very experimental stage, and I was being given things I really had no idea about, or what they were going to do to me. But I was open-eyed and trusting so I smoked, slurped and swallowed what I was handed.
One night a few of us were going out and somebody had a Serepax. I didn’t really know what a Serepax was. I know now it’s a sleeping pill.
I think it was a pretty low dosage I took this night but I was drunk and I fairly rapidly became this completely obnoxious buffoon as the pill came on. In fact I can say that this night I was THE MOST OBNOXIOUS PIECE OF SHIT ON THE PLANET. It was a gig at the Communist Hall and a band called Pork were playing. I was sort of watching them but mostly yelling at them, and knocking things over everywhere as I stumbled around. I wasn’t being violent but I was completely unaware of my surroundings and I was casually creating havoc.
Eventually I fell down this incredibly long staircase and just lay there awhile as no one would dare come near me, let alone check on my wellbeing. I wasn’t really hurt and if I was, I sure wasn’t feeling it. I actually tried to pick a fight with someone while I was laying on the ground at the foot of these stairs so I copped a bit of a kicking into the bargain.
Oh, what fun.
A few weeks later I was at another club and two guys came over.
‘Are you the guy from the Pork gig at the Communist Hall the other night?’ one asked me. I sheepishly admitted that, Yes it was me.
‘Do you want to be in a band with us?’
Sure, why not?
I may be paraphrasing a little there, but that’s how I remember it. The guys were Greg and Ian Wadley. Ian was 16 and Greg 18. These two sweet geeks discovered me, if ‘discovered’ is the right word. Certainly, if ‘discovery’ is watching a fucking idiot be obnoxious in a public place then they can rightly lay claim to it. Obviously they saw my potential, a potential I had no idea of. A potential for what? They figured, as a frontman. And as a result we formed The Dum Dums.
‘I’m not like that ALL the time,’ I warned them.
‘We’ll see,’ says Greg. (Yes, but which Greg?)
In The Dum Dums there were four of us – Ian Wadley, Greg Wadley, Greg Perkins and Greg Gilbert. That’s three Gregs in the band which is ridiculous. We nearly called ourselves Ian and The Gregs. Clearly though there were too many Gregs. Nothing was really said but before we even played a note of music together we all knew we could easily lose one, in name at least.
By now it’s 1981 and there’s a whole thing going on of making up identities and adopting punk rock names: Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Lux Interior, Rat Scabies and so on, and on a local level, Ed Wreckage, Johnny Burnaway and V2.
Making up punk-rock noms de plume was an occasional pastime. We came up with things like Mars Blowfly and Grit Savage.
Y
es, readers, I could easily have become known as Grit Savage. Trust me, it was close.
We started a graffiti campaign based around the name Grit Savage. We’d paint Grit Savage on the sides of buildings and on toilet walls. Slogans like Grit Savage has gone, Grit Savage is a great guy, Grit Savage has his own teeth. But my favourite was Pumpkins, Carrots, Potatoes, Cabbage – Everybody Loves . . . Grit Savage.
Amid this culture of making up silly names, ‘Tex Deadly’ came up.
It was Greg Wadley who pushed the hand of fate. I remember him saying, ‘Hmmm, that one’s not bad.’ Greg was a bit older than the rest of us and was also in another band called The Pits who were doing pretty good business in the Brisbane underground at the time. So he was the one with all the connections and was booking all our gigs. Greg saw himself as a bit of a Malcolm McLaren-type figure and liked to ‘make things happen’ so the next time Greg booked us a gig it was as Tex Deadly and The Dum Dums.
Overnight that became our new name. There was no band meeting. I wasn’t even consulted. One day I saw one of our gig posters. There it was: Tex Deadly and The Dum Dums.
Of course it very quickly became assumed and apparent that as frontman I would be known as Tex Deadly. And to be honest that seemed like fun to me. After all, I wore kinda punk rock cowboy clothes, and I was tall and bow-legged and I listened to Johnny Cash. So the name Tex fit, and it stuck.
Like many other things, I didn’t put a moment’s thought into what that would mean in the long term. I should’ve known that for the rest of my days I would be asked the question, ‘Is that your real name?’, or ‘Are you from Texas?’ I didn’t consider it then, but this nom de plume would ensure that I was never quite taken seriously, and a great many assumptions would be made of me because of it. Oh well.
What was the music of Tex Deadly and The Dum Dums like, you ask? Well people always mention words like cowpunk and psychobilly. We were that, I guess, but mainly we were very, very NOISY. Trashy is a better word for our sound. Sloppybilly – might even be better yet. How about Sillybilly? Yeah, that’s it.