by Tex Perkins
As I was to learn, Kristyna is a can-do girl. And like me, she likes to make things happen. At this point her options were few. She could try to leave East Germany through a checkpoint and risk being prosecuted for overstaying her day visa. Or she could escape through NO MAN’S LAND.
Kristyna was staying in the East in an apartment that overlooked a cemetery near the wall. She noticed that people had started to chip away at the wall, making perfect foot holes up the face. Change was in the air. The Cold War was ending and the shoot-to-kill order had been revoked. So the choice was clear: climb over the Berlin Wall.
Kristyna pretending to light a cigarette at a photo shoot.
The plan was to play the lost tourist. So Kristyna took her camera, got a friend to give her a foot-up and started climbing up, then over, the wall.
Turns out there are really TWO walls – the East wall and the West wall. Kristyna is now in the barren ‘death strip’ between them. It’s eerie – just her and lots of rabbits. She took a few snaps then suddenly along came two angry guards rushing towards her yelling in German.
‘What are you doing?!!’
‘I’m just taking pictures,’ said she.
They looked completely dumbfounded and confused. In English they said, ‘Where did you come from?!’
‘The West,’ she replied.
So they marched her down the death zone and escorted her to the checkpoint and ejected her out into the West. Perfect!
The Berlin Wall would officially fall on 19 November 1989, a few months after Kristyna made her climb. This remarkable tale is typical of Kristyna, who’s prepared to take risks if it becomes necessary. But only CALCULATED risks. She’s not crazy, but man is she brave.
So, getting back to this gig. I’m backstage. This magnificent blonde girl walks through the door.
I immediately thought, ‘Woah!’
I managed to stay fairly chilled around her because I remember thinking there was no way she’d be even remotely interested in me. That relaxed me and I didn’t try to be charming (not that I wasn’t).
In truth, Kristyna was unlike any girl that I had ever had anything to do with, yet she was very real and ‘down to earth’.
Of course we were both from Brisbane so we talked a bit about that. Anyway, she did the interview and I didn’t think all that much about it.
It wasn’t until a few years later when I was playing in Brisbane that I saw Kristyna again. She went out with friends from work to see a band and I happened to be in that band. After the show we got talking and made the connection to Berlin. I was 26 and she was 21.
Kristyna was now doing some sort of production role at a commercial radio station, running and overseeing the place during the graveyard shift. Essentially her job was babysitting a radio station though the night. There was no one on air but somebody had to load up the CDs and so forth.
The next night I’m playing at The Orient in Brisbane. It’s actually across from the building where Kristyna’s radio station operates from.
The band room is above the pub so after the gig I climb out the window and stand on the awning to get a better look at the radio station. As fate would have it – this is really a true story – she sees me looking up and gets the idea that maybe I’m looking for her and that I’m interested, which is of course completely the situation.
Kids, this was old school. Back in those days you had to make an effort to contact people – you couldn’t just text or email them, send them a Facebook message or, God help me, look them up on Tinder! No, you had to stand on an awning on the top of a Brisbane hotel in the middle of the night and look at the building you think they’re working in AND hope they’re looking out the window at exactly the time you’re looking up.
She was.
THIS IS NOT THE WAY HOME
The thing about The Cruel Sea was that on the right night, be it at a gig or in a specific moment in the studio, there could be, and often was, magic.
Metamorphosis.
In these moments we became greater than the sum of our parts. That’s the place all bands try to get to. Out of the mystery of the music comes an alchemy created by the band but it’s more than the band and it lifts you and makes everything flow. All we had to do was get on and ride that feeling.
We could also be fucking terrible. Sure there were no musical slouches in The Cruel Sea but there were times – lots of times – when it did not blend. On those occasions it felt like we were pushing shit up a hill with a teaspoon.
But the majority of the time it worked. And when The Cruel Sea clicked it was absolutely breathtaking and everything I ever wanted music to be. I’m not saying this as an objective observer of course, I’m just saying how it felt on the inside. And plenty of the time it was totally exhilarating.
From 1991 to 1995, The Cruel Sea received nothing but GLOWING reviews, especially live reviews. I mean, it got ridiculous. It got to the point where I didn’t believe them. No one is THAT good. As musicians we’d all read overly positive live reviews to gigs we knew damn well were crap. But that didn’t matter now. We had entered a critical vacuum; we could do no wrong. And that’s a cancer for a band. Well it was for us.
Looking back it wasn’t that we became conceited, more that we became cynical. Instead of enjoying the ride we asked, ‘When’s the backlash gonna come?’ Cos believe me, we all knew in our bones it was gonna come.
In those days, we’d play anywhere we could and usually we’d go back three or four months later and there’d be a crowd twice as big.
Combined with all the work we did, Polydor did a good job as our record company. Our second album together, This Is Not The Way Home,was starting to take off, with songs all over the radio and videos screening on Rage. We had built the foundations of our fan base playing live, and the record company had built on that and sent record and show sales through the roof.
That made us very weary.
‘We can’t shove this down people’s throats,’ we’d tell them while trying to limit their use of television advertising and other promotional tools. It frustrated them no end. We’d worked very hard getting the band to this point, but having all come from the underground we were suspicious of success. Or a certain kind of success.
We wanted it but we wanted to shape it our way and not let it get more than we could handle. Of course it very quickly was more than we could handle. We wanted to sell records yes, but we didn’t have that do-or-die ambition some of our contemporaries did who were happy to have success on any terms. We came along when we were just starting to peak as a band. We put out a record and the music industry actually gave a shit.
The Cruel Sea wouldn’t have worked if it had happened two years earlier or two years later. We were the right band at the right time. We arrived in the post-Nirvana shake-up, smack in the middle of a whole bunch of changes in music, and we worked because we were playing good, true, honest music that people reacted to on a grassroots level. To have a hit record, a lot elements have to converge at the same time, and the stars aligned for us.
Tony Cohen during The Three Legged Dog album mix. All notes and drawings are Tony’s.
Some of that can be attributed to producer Tony Cohen.
Tony really pulled out all stops for The Cruel Sea. Tony had become even more of a ratbag since the early Beasts days. Now, he would be more and more crazed. He would mix louder and louder and with more and more reverb – everything was at full volume. Tony would mix it that way so the only way to listen to those records was at top volume. Play Tony’s records of this era quietly and they seem a bit indistinct and washy but listen to them at full power and you get the full effect. Awesome.
Sometimes we used to try to trick Tony into doing a quick mix early because he’d always get very good initial sounds and recordings in the set-up. That was another thing that made Tony great to work with. He would get a good sound coming back at the band quickly and that would inspire everyone. Everyone would sit around listening to playbacks in the studio and go ‘
that sounds fucking GREAT’, whereas some of the other producers and engineers we worked with would expect you just to put it down in the studio and say they’d make it sound better later, they’d fix it up further down the track. Tony was never like that. On a few albums Tony nailed it straightaway . . . then fucked it up down the track.
And as we went on we realised that the less Tony fiddled with a recording after he got it down initially, the better it was. We would sometimes use very rough, early mixes before all the later mad mixing went on. But having said that, as a good example of Tony’s genius, The Axeman’s Jazz is a live mix to tape but The Cruel Sea’s The Honeymoon Is Over album is tweaked and fiddled to within an inch of its life and probably worth every twist of the knob.
The Cruel Sea, 1994. Older, cooler and grumpier.
THIS IS NOT THE WAY HOME
THE CRUEL SEA / 1991
Probably a five-day session with Tony Cohen. A record full of good songs that don’t sound their best. This was ’91, Tony’s year of reverb. And I hadn’t worked out how to sing these songs as yet. Bad vocals and too much gated reverb spoil this one for me. Despite these obstacles this won us an ARIA award for best independent release (even though it was through a major label) and sold enough to get us our first Gold record. Yes, I’m sorry, I won’t mention Gold records and ARIA awards too much. I promise. (It didn’t happen that much).
RECORD LABEL: Red Eye
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Danny Rumour (guitar), Jim Elliot (drums), Ken Gormley (bass), James Cruikshank (keyboards/guitar).
THE LOW ROAD
THE BEASTS OF BOURBON / 1991
This took a week of excess and debauchery with Tony Cohen at the controls. Luckily we had played and demoed most of these songs before this recording session, so we knew what we were doing. Again too much reverb and odd production elements spoil this for me (I’d love to remix this) but at least it was only 10 songs. After the ultra-eclectic Black Milk, this was to be our straight-ahead hard-rock album. I don’t dig my performance on most of these songs – a bit too forced. There was a time during this period when I rightfully could’ve been accused of ‘trying too hard’. Still, we had a tremendous amount of fun recording it. Tony mixed this so loud, few people could stand being in the room with him. (I think he preferred it that way.)
RECORD LABEL: Red Eye
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Spencer P. Jones (guitar), Kim Salmon (guitar), Brian Hooper (bass), Tony Pola (drums).
THE LOW ROAD
The Beasts Of Bourbon flew to the States and did a bunch of showcase shows, in June 1991, before The Low Road came out.
Lately I’ve found myself saying to people, ‘I used to be in this horrible band called The Beasts Of Bourbon.’ It’s said for effect, I admit. But we were horrible. That was our stock and trade. We dealt in horrible. Although things would get much worse in a few years, the Beasts that went to the US in ’91 were delightfully horrible. Our songs were no longer playful tributes to American blues; now they were calling cards for sleazebags.
Instead of Cajun Queens, it was Junky Girlfriends.
Beasts, from left to right: Brian Hooper, Spencer P. Jones, Tony Pola, Kim Salmon and me.
Boris and James had been too nice for this terrain. This was a job for Brian Hooper and Tony Pola. As soon as they joined the band everything changed. They brought an urgency to all things in and around the band. The music was harder and funkier and the revelry louder and wilder.
Tony was outrageous. He was thickset and animalistic but strangely bookish at the same time. A magnificent, intelligent, charismatic human being, but when he ‘had that itch’ he would do anything to score. Things tend to disappear around funky junkies, and Tony was no exception. Then he would disappear for six months, sometimes at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Brian was wiry and good-looking and dressed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. Brian was another one of these guys who couldn’t just have a bit, couldn’t get just a little stoned. Like Tony, Brian would think it a good idea to get hammered on smack JUST BEFORE WE WENT ONSTAGE. Tony could handle it and I can’t remember him ever playing badly. Ol’ Brian on the other hand would be close to passing out onstage and playing like shit.
You can do it all: you can take drugs and play in a rock’n’roll band, but you just have to work out how to do it properly. It’s all about the balance.
That’s when the line is crossed with me – when you can’t do your gig. That’s it, I don’t care who it is. If there’s a gig, you have to be able to function enough to be able to do it – simple as that. After that you can do whatever the fuck you want to do.
As a drummer and a bass player, Tony and Brian played like gangsters. Brian had style and Tony was heavy and clever, with that John Bonham skill for being a hard hitter but with swing. Brian would’ve much rather been a guitar player than a bass player and he played like it. They’d known each other a long time and in a lot of ways were like brothers. They certainly fought like brothers. I’d never seen anyone push each other’s buttons so skilfully. They would fight verbally pretty regularly, and occasionally it would lead to fisticuffs and stranglings.
But they loved each other like brothers as well, always ending up closer after the fight. ‘I love you, you cunt.’
‘Fuck you, you prick.’
And on it would go.
These days both of them are model citizens and clean as whistles, and have been for a decade. Back in 2003 Brian fell off a balcony and broke his back. Despite being told that he would never walk again, Brian determinedly rehabilitated himself to a point way past expectations. His recovery was a true Phoenix rising from the ashes episode, and was an inspiration to the rest of us Beasts. No one felt like they had the right to complain about their own discomfort after what Brian had been through. Brian’s accident really showed what he was made of: true grit.
By the time the 1991 Beasts tour had finished, I needed time off.
My brother Robert hadn’t been able to bear the fact that I’d got to America BEFORE HIM so at tour’s end he insisted on meeting me in Los Angeles, with the plan being to buy a Cadillac and drive to New Orleans. I love Rob but I’ll always be his annoying little brother and he’ll always be my endearingly crazy big brother. This was gonna be HIS trip and he was gonna do the driving. Well, most of it anyway.
James Cruickshank was on that Beasts run of dates too as he’d played keyboards on two tracks on The Low Road so he tagged along with Robert and I.
We bought a 1973 Cadillac which I think is the largest car ever made. At 6 foot 4 I could lie fully stretched out on the back seat. We dubbed it The Shiny Beast, paid about a grand for it and set off for New Orleans. Driving south from LA is spectacular. When you get down to Arizona it starts to look like you’re driving through a Road Runner cartoon, with all these strange monolithic rock formations.
We got as far as Yuma in Arizona before The Shiny Beast shat itself.
It was the transmission, and it needed AN ENTIRE NEW FUCKING TRANSMISSION. But shit, we were lucky we made it to civilisation and weren’t stuck on the side of the road totally stranded in the desert with the coyote waiting for a delivery from the ACME company.
So we spent a couple of days in Yuma, drinking Budweiser by the pool. Nobody gets around without a car in Arizona, so we were questioned by police every time we went anywhere.
‘What you boys doin’?’
‘Just walkin’ back to our motel officer.’
‘Where you boys from?’
‘Australia.’
‘What the hell you boys doin’ here?’
‘Good question officer.’
As soon as we got the car back from the mechanics, James locked the keys in the boot of the car. Thankfully Yuma’s best locksmith wasn’t busy. And finally we were on our way again. We continued on south, driving through Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana, barely stopping along the way. Robert wanted to make up for lost time and was gonna drive hard all day and well into the night to get us t
o New Orleans as soon as possible.
We drove past the turn off to El Paso and I suggested stopping for something to eat and a quick look around. I mean, I’d always heard about these places in songs and movies.
‘FUCK EL PASO,’ said the king of the road.
When we finally got to New Orleans we looked for a hotel that was as close to the French Quarter as we could find. It had just rained so the streets had that beautiful wet sheen. We found a classic old place, not too far away from the action, with a bar and grill across the road where we drank beer, ate burgers and shot pool at all hours of the day.
We of course knocked over a few of the must-dos. Like seeing a band at the famous music club Tipitina’s and eating a bowl of gumbo while listening to a crusty old dude singing in Creole with a zydeco band. A bartender we spoke to gave us the usual rundown: ‘Whatever you do don’t go to THAT part of town.’
So we immediately went to THAT part of town.
On that side of town were funky little homemade, probably unlicensed, bars, like Benny’s, a gutted house with no walls, a dirt floor and band that wailed. Everywhere we went, we were constantly hassled and hustled by street drug dealers, which may or may not have had something to do with the way we looked. One actually tried to sell us lettuce wrapped in plastic saying it was pot. Did we look stupid too? Probably. This wasn’t the Big Easy, this was the Big Hustle, and they weren’t even very good at it. My favourite was this guy who suddenly appeared crab-walking alongside of me.
‘I bet you twenty dollars I know where you got dem shoes you’re wearing, man!’
I give him a quick look and then keep walking.