by Tex Perkins
I spent three days in this little white room in the detention centre at Gatwick airport being interrogated for eight hours a day by all sorts of different people who kept asking me ‘Do you take drugs?!’ I kept saying that I didn’t take drugs. They kept saying that my luggage and appearance suggested I took drugs. I kept saying I didn’t take drugs. ‘We’ve been reading some your “lyrics” and we think they sound like they’ve been written by someone on drugs.’ They had nothing on me but they just didn’t believe me. So I was just playing the no, no, no, not me game, but they weren’t giving up. They could just smell something on me. Not literally. But almost.
Then it got a little more serious. They got hold of the addresses of all the people in London that I had written in my diary and sent police around to visit those places to see if those people took drugs or could confirm that I took drugs. That made me REALLY popular with the good people on whose couches I intended to crash during my stay in London.
Luckily they didn’t find anything at those addresses or on me as there was nothing to find. But they still kept me there for three days. These customs officials really thought they were going to nail me with something. They thought ‘this freak has got to be on drugs and he will know more people who are on drugs and we will take him down and then we’ll take them ALL down’.
Obviously I was a bit of a drug taker. They knew it. I knew it. But I wasn’t going to admit it even when I lost count of how many people had interrogated me. Initially they did the whole good cop–bad cop routine on me but they soon ran out of good cops. I was scared, but without any actual drugs on my person or in my suitcase I knew they couldn’t really nail me for anything, so I just stayed as calm as I could and denied everything.
At one point they even had a doctor physically examine me for needle marks or any other telltale marks of drug use of any kind on my body. Nothing. At the end of each day of interrogation I was sent back to the white room in the detention centre, a small dormitory I shared with other detainees – some very sad-looking guys from an African country who didn’t speak English.
Refused entry.
Eventually they confirmed they weren’t going to let me into the country. They were refusing me entry to England and that was it. But they weren’t sending me back to Australia either. Oh no, the way it worked was that they sent you back to the last place you were before you came to London and in my case due to connecting flights the last place was Manila.
So there I was. I had no money. My passport bore the big stamp REFUSED ENTRY and I was being deported to Manila.
Now I was basically a captive of Philippine Airlines. They didn’t want to but they were forced by the aviation rules and regulations to take me to Manila – and for free.
I’d been through quite a bit by then. An initial flight of about 36 hours, then 80-odd hours at Gatwick being interrogated, and now a flight to Manila. I was a wreck. When the plane finally landed in Manila the first thing I heard was an announcement saying, ‘Welcome to the Philippines where the mandatory punishment for drugs is death.’
That sent a shiver through me.
That shiver became a cold sweat when another announcement asked, ‘Would Greg Perkins come to the front of the plane please?’ This was before anyone was even allowed to get off the plane, or even leave their seats.
So up I go in front of everyone like I was walking to the gallows in my polka-dot shirt and these ridiculous stovepipe pants I’ve been wearing for four days straight, my hair like dirty black straw, incredibly thin, incredibly pale and incredibly smelly.
Quite a sight.
I’m met by some serious Filipino guys in uniform who escort me off the plane, hand me over to airport ground-staff who put me in the front seat of an airport buggy next to the driver. Then they go back into the plane and reappear a few minutes later with two guys in business suits. The suits jump in the back seat and we all head off on this long ride through Manila airport towards the unknown.
As we get towards the end of one of the many extremely long concourses I see a crowd of people gathered, and as we get closer, I can see that they’re all looking at us. A lot of them are photographers and as we get to them they all start taking pictures. Then there’s this whole presentation – a welcoming ceremony. And it’s clearly not for me. Turns out the two guys in suits are German diplomats come to sign some important trade deal or something and I’m caught up in the middle of it all. I like to imagine we all made the front page of the Manila Gazette.
After the press call and welcoming ceremony, the suits went to their plush hotel and I lived in the transit lounge of Manila airport for the next 48 hours, sleeping on the floor with only a series of security guards to keep me company. I had to try to organise for someone in Australia to buy a ticket home for me. But this was in the mid-’80s. There was no email or mobile phones or instant cash transfers.
I rang James Baker, and I think Roger Grierson also might have helped stump up the funds. This was my family in Sydney and we all lived by the credo that we take care of our own. It impressed me no end that people thought enough of me to include me in that thinking. And it was also good to have people back there who had their shit together enough to get a thousand dollars together pretty fast to get me home.
Eventually I arrived back in Australia on a Thursday, having left the Thursday before . . . and without actually ever having arrived anywhere.
ADELAIDE VIA AMSTERDAM
After being refused entry to England the first time and after going through the hell I did, I’m still amazed that neither I, nor Kid Congo and the rest of the Americans in London were deterred.
We were all still determined to get me to London to begin work on our new band together.
By now the band had a name, THE FUR BIBLE, which sounded both strangely sexual and blasphemous at the same time. I think it came from an actual expensive fur catalogue . . . but maybe not.
A new plan is hatched! This time I will fly to Amsterdam, meet Kid and spend a few weeks there, deliberately destroy my passport, (by putting in a washing machine) get a fresh (temporary) one without the words REFUSED ENTRY stamped inside it, and then catch a bus that will cross the Channel in a ferry and then through to London. It’s a plan. (At least this time there is a plan.)
And this time I’ll do it differently.
When I flew I made sure I didn’t wear anything that might draw attention to me. I wore clothes totally different to what I would normally and combed my hair over and flattened it to my head as much as it could be.
I realise now that in my attempt to look ‘straight’, the effect was more like a guy that had just got out of jail or a young thug’s day-in-court clobber. Which is probably why, out of around 300 people who walked through customs, they chose me to do a full bag and body search on.
Now I’d been through this before very recently so I knew the drill, but these guys were next level. As soon as the door closed on the little white room they started shouting at me:
‘YOU’RE A DRUG ADDICT – ADMIT IT!’
Seriously, in all the interrogations I went through at Gatwick nobody had reached this level of fury and accusation so quickly! These Dutch guys were acting like they really wanted to hurt me. They were furious.
‘STAND THERE. TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF.’
After they looked into my anus, I stood there naked for the rest of the ‘interview’.
‘YOUR CLOTHES STINK,’ they sneered. ‘YOU’RE DISGUSTING.’
I kid you not, these fellas were born 50 years too late, if you know what I mean.
They looked through everything in my luggage, which this time had a lot less incriminating stuff. And they spent quite a bit of time looking through my photo album, pointing and laughing and speaking to each other in Dutch.
Then suddenly one of them said, ‘You’re free to go, get out.’
‘Okay . . . no apology?’
‘What for?’
On reflection, I feel sorry for those chaps. I mean who brings drugs INTO
Amsterdam from Australia? They must’ve been bored out of their minds. Desperate to nab someone, anyone, for anything. There’s probably not a lot going on during their shift. So when they get even a sniff they’re absolutely rabid.
Eventually I got out of there and into Amsterdam. Met up with Kid Congo and had an awesome two weeks planning our next move and getting to know each other. I’ve been fortunate to fall in with a lot of great people along my way through life. Kid is one the best. We shared our ideas and were very excited about what we were about to do together.
Eventually I successfully made my way over to London, where I started this band with Kid and Patricia Morrison who’d both recently left The Gun Club.
It was terrible.
By then we’re smack bang in 1985 and it’s all post punk, which was okay, but what was really fashionable at the time was goth. Some of those bands were okay, but when I actually saw it up close in London, as opposed to the filtered version we saw in Australia, I saw how much of a monoculture fashion thing it was.
I thought, Wow, this is... kinda boring.
Bands like The Birthday Party were really exciting back in 1981 and 1982 but by the time 1985 came along that whole Nick Cave thing was really stale and pompous to a lot of us. And that whole goth thing with lots of makeup? Sisters Of Mercy and those bands? It was just horrible.
The band Kid and Patricia were putting together was heading towards being a bit London and a bit goth and a bit shit. I didn’t dig it at all so I stuck it out for a few months and then skulked back to Australia.
By the time I returned home my girlfriend Hazel had moved back to her home city of Adelaide, so I followed suit. Yes that’s right I moved TO Adelaide. I needed somewhere out of the way to recuperate and re-think my position, and Madelaide was perfect. The people I hung out with there had a more of an art punk attitude. They were all messy and there was lots of all kinds of creativity. Most people wore freaky clothes, not so much of the typical punk rock garb. They were dirty and colourful. Hazel was living with a couple known as Jude and Justine. Jude was loud and eccentric and Justine opened my eyes to the world of lo fi home recordings
Me and Kid Congo.
For me this was a tiny but new and interesting subculture. The flagship of this scene were the very noisy and very funny Purple Vulture Shit.
Lead ‘singer’ Toe (real name Chris Cashel) had what I think were the finest lyrics around:
I’m going to get married to a Ringworm one day.’
‘And we’ll live up a celebrities arse . . .
Hole, eating toilet paper.
With songs like that and a name like theirs, Purple Vulture Shit were an important influence in terms of just how unmusical you can be and still have something interesting to put onstage.
A lot of people were totally and absolutely appalled by Purple Vulture Shit, but to me the ineptitude of the players didn’t matter at all, just so long as you weren’t shy about it.
If you laid into it and had a go, that was all that mattered. There’s nothing worse than someone who’s not very good at something being shy and coy and frightened about it.
NO APOLOGIES.
All those crazy bands I met during this two-or three-year period in Adelaide – Purple Vulture Shit, Sunday School, Manic Opera, The Plungers, The Stink Pots – were noisy, messy and funny with names guaranteed to upset someone somewhere. There was no thought of longevity or of this particular band having any sort of a career. No one thought of anything beyond doing a gig, having some fun and making a mess.
It was in Adelaide that I formed what became one of my favourite and most enduring ensembles: The Bumhead Orchestra.
The first time we stumbled across the idea there were four of us in the room. Dave Taskas (the bass player from Grong Grong), Justin and Lachlan McLeod. We were calling it a rehearsal but we had nothing – no songs, no idea. So at some stage I started conducting the band.
At its most basic, my conducting style was GO and STOP. But at its most complex I resembled a highly emotional traffic cop. There were crescendos, up and down sweeps of the hand for louder/softer and various solos. It was a controlled cacophony.
The beauty of The Bumhead Orchestra was that there were so many ways it could go. It wasn’t always noise. It could very much be an orchestrated jam. I could point to the drummer and he’d start playing a beat. Then I might build the sound fairly conventionally and point to the bass, then violin, organ, slide whistle, tuba, theremin, trumpet, and then a single ding of the triangle.
You getting a picture here?
It’s . . . flexible. Every member of the orchestra can approach it as very high brow or really low brow. And the key to it? At my signal, the orchestra must be ready to emit sound at any moment, with a split-second’s warning. For me as conductor that means being completely committed to physically embodying the music’s intent, desperately attempting to describe what I want with only my body and a small stick. Usually a chopstick.
After its Adelaide inception, The Bumhead Orchestra consisted of me getting as many people onstage as possible with as many different instruments as possible – preferably instruments they were not very familiar with but could make some sort of sound with.
A typical Bumhead performance could stretch to about 20 minutes but I believe in brevity and directness when it comes to noise (and The Bumhead Orchestra was very noisy) so usually a performance was included on a mixed-bill night. That was the ideal because then at the end of the night every band member could gather together as The Bumhead Orchestra.
The Bumhead thing probably peaked on the 2006 Big Day Out. The Beasts Of Bourbon were on the tour that year and so promoter Ken West asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing the Bumhead Orchestra as well. Ken was essentially a businessman but he loved all that silly, arty stuff and the Lily Pad, where the weird cabaret stuff and arty off-the-wall elements happened, was really where his heart was at. A dude called Duck Pond and all those goofy people had free reign over the place so the Bumheads fit right in.
Among the many interesting characters I met from Adelaide was another fella named Tex. Like me he’d been given the nickname and it had stuck. So when we started hanging around in the same group of friends it became necessary to differentiate between us. He became known as ‘Big Tex’, which suited him because he was about 6 foot 7. Luckily I didn’t become known as ‘Little Tex’ (after all I was almost 6 foot 4). His real name was Chris Tunks, and his little brother played rugby league for Australia.
Thug live at . . . I have no idea. That's me on top of ‘Big Tex’ (10 foot tall), wrapped in plastic and bound in masking tape.
Big Tex was big but he was also one of the gentlest souls I’ve ever met. He was a very wise and spiritual person. Having been to India many times, Big Tex had a bit of a guru vibe. I often looked to him if I needed advice. I felt safe around him and not many people have ever made me feel like that.
Big Tex and I played together in Toilet Duck, but he was also a kind of performance artist in Thug. Dressed as an Oxford street leather man Big Tex would randomly come on stage and push one of us over and then storm off again. We would listen to and discuss all sorts of music but importantly Tex was the only person in our scene that would openly admit to listening to not just crazy noisy weird stuff but traditional things like the early Rolling Stones.
I’d loved the Stones album Sticky Fingers earlier in my life but hadn’t bothered lending an ear for a few years at that point. It was the mid-’80s for fuck’s sake and the Stones were awful then. So I initially resisted the big fella’s influence on this. But then one day I was at his flat and he played me the soundtrack to the film Performance, starring Mick Jagger.
Released in 1970 and produced by Jack Nitzsche, Performance is a collection and a collision of blues, rock, electronic, beat poetry, orchestral and Indian folk music. Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Mick Jagger and The Last Poets all make appearances on this wild ride of an album.
Big Tex and Performance showed me a way out of the a
vant-garden and back to the desert and the swamp I’d come from. Ry Cooder was a major component in all this. On this soundtrack you hear him play Indian tabla, and on slide guitar an early version of ‘Dark Is The Night’, which he later used for the Paris, Texas soundtrack. It taught me great soundtracks complement and enhance their accompanying films but the greatest soundtracks of all make the film itself unnecessary and create a world of their own.
Fuelled by such powerful art, music and bonhomie, this very intense and creative period had nothing to do with furthering my career in music. Looking back it was actually burning bridges in terms of professionalism, progression and knowledge and developing skills in business. Those two years in London via Amsterdam and ultimately Adelaide were all about rejecting everything and making a mess. A loud, funny colourful mess.
Everything that London wasn’t.
THUG
Peter Read was one of the most unique individuals I have ever met.
I dare say a lot of people would say the same thing. He was one of those people who had their very own idiosyncrasies, aesthetic and sense of humour. He had a hilarious habit of making sounds. Verbal outbursts indicating an emotion of some kind. Let me try to explain.
Let’s start with eow. This would be blurted out in a short sharp stab: EOW!
This was a sound of approval and excitement. There may be just one, or a short series of them – eow eow eow. It could be used to express how delicious he thought his meal was, how pretty a girl was or how much he liked a band.
A very similar ‘word’ was used to express disappointment.
Eeeooow was basically an elongated eow delivered with a kind of sneer.
These were the big two, but there were many more. Rrrabadee, hoinggg, and weeeee were used often, but the word he would use the most was PENIS. He loved saying the word PENIS. And would hilariously drop it in to any conversation at any time. To a cab driver: