Tex

by Tex Perkins

  ‘Can you take us to the corner of Oxford Street and Penis, please driver?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The corner of Oxford Street and Bourke Street, please?’

  Or it may be blurted out in a quiet corner store. PENIS! There were other Tourette’s-like outbursts that would become standards and they were widely repeated. One night we were in someone’s car and Peter got excited and shouted:

  ‘SPASTIC WEE WEE WETTY BOTTOM!’

  Everyone in the car roared with laughter. This only encouraged Peter to go further and further.

  Peter was a nudist, and when he was nude was when he made the most sounds.

  ‘Rrrabadeee eow eow eow!!!’

  But Peter was also extremely talented. He was a natural musician who was trained in nothing but who could make any instrument speak for him in a unique way. He had a totally original musical angle.

  Peter Read, 1987.

  Peter’s flatmate Dave had an addiction to collecting and amassing electronic equipment . . . that he then never used. But we would. All the drum machines, effects and samplers we used during these years, Peter would push beyond their assumed limits. Most of this equipment was in the very top floor flat of the Riverina apartments that Peter and Dave shared on Palmer Street, Darlinghurst. When I returned to Sydney from Adelaide, that’s where we made so much of this music.

  Peter was incredibly talented but he was also an incredibly difficult individual. I always saw the potential in what he did. I was very enthusiastic and would want to bring all these ideas out of the bedroom and try to make something of them, but he was always reluctant to do that and strangely unbelieving of his own music’s worth. Peter always had to be dragged along. It drove me crazy and I lost it with him quite a few times.

  After using his gear on some initial recordings in Peter’s home studio, I wanted to take it to the stage, so around 1987 Peter and I formed Thug.

  With the help of Lachlan McLeod and others, Thug became one of Sydney’s most unconventional, confronting but ultimately ridiculous live acts. Once, we discovered a small trampoline and gym mats backstage at a hall we were playing and dragged them out to do our set, leaping through the air recklessly, somersaulting on and off stage.

  Thug’s live sets would last 20–25 minutes at the most but could feature a dancing leather man, a fire-breathing unicyclist, homemade junk robots, guerrilla acrobatics, bizarre malfunctioning electronic equipment and – at one performance – an entire audience showered in flour (it was a ‘goth’ club where everyone wore black, so we thought . . .).

  We always left the audience with a ‘what the fuck just happened?’ kind of feeling.

  Each Thug gig would end with all the members mock-brawling among themselves. Audience members also would participate from time to time and of course sometimes it would get out of hand. During one such ‘mock brawl’, I ended up with a gaping hole in my thigh requiring stitches after landing on a broken glass someone had thrown onto the stage.

  Black Eye bruisers, Sydney, 1987. Stu Spasm, Lachlan McLeod, Peter Read and Perko.

  At our BROKEN ROBOT show at the gunnery squat, we had the whole stage draped with rolls of bubble wrap. Donato, our horn-playing fire-breathing unicyclist, accidentally set the stage floor alight. I’m sure the most frightening and entertaining thing for the audience that night would have been watching us frantically running about stomping out the flames.

  Thug was all about sounds – some would call it noise. Ugly sounds, beautiful sounds, stupid sounds, all kinds of sounds. Ninety-nine per cent of Thug’s recordings were achieved by letting the tape roll and just playing. Sometimes not even playing, just allowing sound to occur.

  Thug, along with Lubricated Goat and Kim Salmon & The Surrealists spearheaded this understandably overlooked and underrated era of Australian music. As obscure as it all was the ‘Blackeye’ scene has been mythologised in the underground for many years.

  But of course Thug are best remembered for the song ‘Dad’, or ‘Fuck your Dad’ as it was better known.

  Alone at home with your father

  He’s good looking

  Do it now

  Fuck your Dad.

  People in the already established electronic/experimental scene didn’t quite know how to take us. Once again it was the age old questions, ‘Are you taking the piss?’; ‘Are you serious?’

  We were into extremities. If you listen to some of our records – Mechanical Ape or Electric Woolly Mammoth you’ll hear some frighteningly rude noise but it’s followed by some very gentle melodic music. Thug albums were like channel-surfing through a schizophrenic’s multiple-personality disorders. But it was all anchored by humour. We’d always be laughing when we created the sounds of Thug.

  Obviously we weren’t doing anything for commercial reasons but the ‘Fuck Your Dad’ single was a real statement back then. The single was just called ‘Dad’ and the B-side was ‘Thug’. Two songs on a piece of plastic. And bugger me, it made number one on the Sydney independent music charts!

  It must have sold close to 100 copies that week . . . okay, maybe 50.

  After Thug, Peter went on to make a lot of really interesting, funny, strange and exciting bedroom music. But he never released anything much again. I often visited him after he moved to Melbourne and always saw his potential but as more time went by Peter’s idiosyncrasies didn’t stay as cute and funny as they once had been. His verbal acrobatics were replaced by mumblings, rapid mood swings and crippling self-doubt followed by uncontrollable laughing that went way past the point of enjoyment. It was as if Peter was locked in a cycle of laughter he couldn’t break out of. But his music remained delightfully out there and I loved him for it.

  Lachlan McLeod would set his hair on fire quite regularly.

  Peter dying in August 2016 wasn’t a shock, I knew he was sick. As far as I know he didn’t take any treatment for his liver cancer, he let it take its course over a period of 18 months. Then, instead of grasping for a few extra months through chemotherapy, at a point of his choosing he decided he’d had enough.

  Peter owned his disease and his death.

  I salute you, Peter Read. You’ll never be replaced.

  Peter.

  MECHANICAL APE

  THUG / 1987

  A ridiculous mess of noise and beauty. This album startled and confused many that heard it, but is much loved by a small group of weirdos around the world. It was recorded in Peter Read’s bedroom on a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder over many days of marijuana and Coopers Ale. Not many songs, but a lot of sounds that – listening to it now – I can’t remember how we achieved.

  RECORD LABEL: Black Eye

  CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Peter Read, Donato Rosella (didgeridoo/saxophone).

  ELECTRIC WOOLLY MAMMOTH

  THUG 1988

  The follow up to Mechanical Ape, this album is a little more conventional as it has a few ‘songs’ with ‘words’, even if they are things like ‘penis, penis, penis bosom bosom arsehole’. Here, Peter’s unique form of Tourette’s found full voice. Squelching undanceable ‘dance’ music, slabs of brown noise and delicate ambient sample loops make for an interesting ride through this second and final Thug album.

  RECORD LABEL: Black Eye

  CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Peter Read, Donato Rosella (didgeridoo/saxophone), Lachlan McLeod (guitar).

  RED EYE BLACK EYE

  In Sydney in the mid-’80s, we used to make up bands all the time.

  If there were three people in a room together you’d be a band. We’d form a band for one night – and then you’d make a band with someone else. Just as in Adelaide, there was no thought of anyone having any sort of a career. No one thought of anything beyond having some fun, making a mess and taking the piss.

  Bands were everywhere and there were still places you could play. I was in The Bush Oysters, Thug, The Poofters, Toilet Duck, The Bumhead Orchestra, The Furry Men of the North, Hot Property and The Boilers, just
to name a few.

  But thank fuck for John Foy and Red Eye/ Black Eye Records.

  I’d first met John around 1983. I had moved into Phantom Records founder Jules Normington’s place in Queen Street, Woollahra. I was 17 and Jules was probably nearly 30 but for some reason he took a shine to me and took me under his wing. Woollahra was full of well-heeled Eastern Suburbs types, but when it came to me and Jules, I guess there were exceptions.

  My contribution to Jules’s home was that I washed the dishes. For that chore I got free board and access to the best record collection I have ever seen. Jules specialised in ’60s and ’70s garage rock. Anything you can think of from that era? He had the original pressings. Those Nuggets compilations? He had every track as a single. I spent months digesting Jules’s vinyl goldmine, washing dishes and sleeping in the shed.

  Dancing on the roof of Jules Normington's place 1983 in our pyjamas.

  John Foy was living next door designing and screen-printing posters for bands on Jules’s Phantom label when he decided to start his own label, Red Eye Records, borrowing the name from the record shop he worked in at the time. The first thing he did was release a single by James Baker under the name the James Baker Experience. This was not long after James had been fired from the Hoodoo Gurus. The A-side of this single was a song called ‘Born to Be Punched’ which everyone – including James thought was about Gurus lead singer Dave Faulkner. The other side was a ragged version of The Troggs song ‘I Can’t Control Myself’.

  I was actually part of the James Baker Experience – along with Roddie Ray’Da and Stu Spasm. I played bass . . . I think.

  After The Axeman’s Jazz, Roger Grierson and Stuart Coupe’s label, G.R.E.E.N, stopped releasing things. Their deal with Big Time Records – a label run by this guy called Fred Bestall who’d made some serious money managing Air Supply – had gone arse-up. So now, with Roger caught up managing The Johnnys and Stuart managing Paul Kelly between writing gigs, John Foy approached me about re-releasing The Axeman’s Jazz on Red Eye.

  None of the Beasts had made any money on the initial Axeman’s release. Big Time Records had declared bankruptcy before paying us any royalties. But when we eventually went to Europe to play, EVERYONE had a copy of that album so it certainly got around. Even so, no one really owned it so there was no legality around Red Eye reissuing the record and Roger and Stuart were happy for us to have it.

  After the Axeman’s re-issue, Red Eye released a Salamander Jim EP, Lorne Green Shares His Precious Fluids.

  Salamander Jim was a minimalist rockabilly swamp outfit I’d formed with Kim Salmon before he left for London. By the time we recorded Lorne, the band included Martin Bland from Zulu Rattle, Lubricated Goat’s Stu Spasm and Broken Hill boy Lachlan McLeod, with Ewan Cameron from Whore’s Manure on saxophone.

  During the period I was in London and then licking my wounds in Adelaide, John Foy had started working in the indie-pop-rock area with the various Kilbeys – Russell with the Crystal set, John with the Baghavad Guitars and Steve who was doing all this stuff outside The Church.

  One night Thug and a few other ‘acts’ played at a pub in Kings Cross and John Foy turned up for a look. The usual tornado of noise, mess, colour, and stupidity tore through the room for our customary 20-minute set, but that was enough for John. He was in love and decided on the spot that the world needed to hear Thug unleashed upon the cultural landscape.

  But by now Red Eye was an indie pop label and to release bands like Real Fucking Idiots and Purple Vulture Shit on that label just wouldn’t do, so the idea came to form another label. We wanted to call it Brown Eye but John Foy preferred Black Eye and in the next few years he made it the launchpad for a series of compilations that brought together the wildest, weirdest and funniest ‘acts’ around: Thug, Lubricated Goat, Grong Grong, Toe, Moist, No More Bandicoots and Box The Jesuit all coexisted in a stew of filthy experimental rock and absurdist toilet humour. It was like the whole scene had Tourette’s.

  During the Black Eye period we used various pubs around Sydney as our bomb sites for mixed-bill performances, but the Petersham Inn on Parramatta Road became Black Eye headquarters. Duncan Stewart, who ran the pub, loved us. And we loved him. Duncan was about 6 foot 5 and about 50 years old, but he had a boyish enthusiasm for our mischief and he basically gave us license to do anything we wanted in his hotel.

  Anything. Anytime. Dangerous words for people like me and my friends.

  On any given night we brought together the most bizarre and unusual things we could. But by way of thanks to Duncan, we also hosted frequent shows by Hot Property, a ridiculous covers band that would play (what we thought) were the most awful hits of the ’70s and ’80s. Duncan loved it.

  Our audience were the weirdos that other weirdos thought were too weird. People with names like Drip Tray and Fish Pump. On any given night Thug, or Lubricated Goat, maybe Box The Jesuit, or the Space Juniors, or No More Bandicoots or Egg n Burgers, Toilet Duck or The Poofters or Whores Manure would play. Sometimes we’d put on Stu Spasm’s one-man terror cabaret act Chicken Holder, or a performance group we knew called Butchered Babies. Whatever we felt like doing Duncan would run with, and happily. Gleefully.

  Sometimes the performances weren’t even bands. Or people.

  I had this massive stereo at my place, a home entertainment unit which contained a television, a turntable and a radio in the one unit. It was built in the late 1950s I’d guess. There was no aerial so it wouldn’t actually pick up the television signal and there’d be no pictures or anything, but when the valves in the thing heated up it would send a frequency through the radio which was like a theremin, which I could manipulate by touching different parts of the unit’s cabinet. This random, oscillating but not repetitive, sound would go all over the place and get wilder and wilder, plus there would be corresponding static on the television flashing strange patterns echoing the sounds. I’d just sit in front of it captivated.

  Now, I realise that may not sound like everybody’s cup of pee, but I loved it and thought this unique experience should be shared on the stage.

  I called it The Unit and on the night of its debut performance I put the Thug single ‘Dad’/‘Thug’ on the turntable at a slower speed with a pencil blu-tacked to the arm and the side of the deck so that the needle would stick in one spot on the record. Grinding loops of thick sludge roared from the speakers. When I tired of each loop I would briefly come on stage, kick the unit to make the needle jump and create a different loop, and then exit again stage left.

  Inspired partly by Peter Read, who was always looking for the ‘wrong’ way to do things, I developed a knack for rebirthing broken things. I found all sorts of bizarrely malfunctioning electronic equipment on hard rubbish nights in those days. I found a ‘ghetto blaster’ that completely freaked out with screaming feedback when plugged in – I would strap it to my body with gaffer tape for Thug performances and occasionally thrust a mike into it. These were items broken in a conventional sense but, in the context of Thug, they became wonderful self-generating noise machines.

  One of the greatest ideas we had was to give away free beer to anyone who was nude. Duncan LOVED it. (Of course he did.)

  The idea was simple. If you went to the Petersham Inn completely naked you’d receive a free beer. Nothing complicated about that. Sure enough, maybe 100 people turned up and many of them were nude. Totally nude. Just as everyone had a different approach to performance, everyone had a different approach to being nude. Some chose to wear their clothes into the pub and then disrobe to get their free beer and then they’d get dressed again. They would do this many times during the course of the evening. Others just stayed nude all night.

  Let me tell you, it wasn’t sexy. It was just weird and really funny. And that’s exactly the atmosphere we were after.

  In fact nudity was rife in this era. Take, for example, No More Bandicoots. Whenever they played at the Petersham Inn or anywhere else they’d have some sort of theme to that night’s show. On
ce they all dressed as pirates and made the front of the stage into a pirate ship with cardboard and paint. It was really like a punk rock school play. Other nights they’d be completely nude and covered in shaving cream.

  In conjunction with Duncan. The first Annual Sausage Meet, 1987.

  The greatest nudist of all was Peter Read. Pete might be at his home (or someone else’s) then disappear briefly. Next thing you knew he’d reappear completely nude – and just carry on as if he wasn’t.

  There were many nude adventures with Pete. One night we invented Nude Piggyback Punch Ball – two nude men piggybacking two other nude men while battling to punch a football suspended on a string from the ceiling in the middle of the room. We played it, and filmed it.

  Eventually the infamy of Stu Spasm’s nude disco led to a nude performance by Lubricated Goat on Andrew Denton’s late night ABC show Blah Blah Blah.

  Weirdly, the members of Lubricated Goat at the time refused to do the nude thing, (Australia, you don’t know how lucky you are) so Stuart was forced to beg Peter Hartley, who he had recently sacked from the band, to come back just to be nude on TV. Peter was quite a physically attractive young man so that was a good choice. And Peter Read, who wasn’t actually in Lubricated Goat, was also recruited to play because of his complete and total willingness to go nude.

  The performance drew widespread outrage of course, mainly because it was on the national broadcaster ABC. ‘Government funded filth!’ cried Alan Jones. The Goat squeezed all they could out of their time in the media storm. After that no one got nude anymore. The bubble had burst and nude went mainstream. It was time to get dressed and move on.

  This era didn’t just bring nudity. It brought the noise.