Tex

  ROOM SERVICE

  I love hotel rooms.

  My sanctuary. My cell. My tomb.

  Just kidding.

  Hotels are one of the constants in the life of any touring musician. And I’ve spent a LOT of nights in hotel rooms. Now listen, I may have been a rock star in the classic mould, but I’ve never been a TV-out-the-window kinda guy . . . well, not that I can remember anyway. Sure, things have been broken, and messes have been made. After all, drunk people have accidents. But I’ve never been a wilful-destruction-of-property kind of guy. Really, I’m not. Believe me.

  In the late ’90s, I was staying in my favourite boutique hotel of the time, just near Kings Cross. I’d been there for a week, working late and sleeping in and hadn’t let housekeeping in for quite a while so the place was a real mess. I woke up on the last morning I was staying there and went to the Tropicana Caffe for breakfast, which was just across the road. After having my coffee and a tuna, cheese and tomato focaccia, I looked at the time and realised I was running late for the airport.

  I ran back to my room, burst in the door and started throwing things in my bag. Halfway through the pack I put my bag up on the kitchen bench-top and ran into the bedroom and bathroom to get whatever was left in there. It must have taken me no more than three minutes, but when I returned to the lounge/kitchen area I was surprised to see the room was filled with smoke! WHAT THE?! I looked around to see my bag was on fire! I had accidentally pushed my bag onto the stovetop and knocked the switch on FULL. I threw the bag into the nearby kitchen sink to extinguish the inferno, smashing plates and glasses in the process. FAARRRK. I don’t have time for this!

  Amazingly, neither the fire alarm nor the sprinkler system was activated. I grabbed my wet but still smouldering bag, now with a great gaping hole in the bottom, to my body so the contents wouldn’t fall out and ran out of the room. A big puff of smoke followed me out as the door closed behind. The lift seemed to take forever, but luckily it came empty. When I arrived on the ground floor I was met by Steve, the very enthusiastic fellow at reception.

  ‘GOOD MORNING, MR PERKINS! GOOD MORNING! LET ME TAKE YOUR BAG!’

  ‘Oh no, no thanks I’m fine,’ I said, clutching it tighter to my body as the smell of burnt sports bag surely filled the room. ‘I’m running a bit late for the airport.’

  ‘PLEASE LET ME TAKE YOUR BAG.’

  ‘No no no, please I’m fine, here’s my key, thank you.’

  ‘THEN LET ME HAIL YOU A CAB.’

  ‘Ummm . . . err.’

  Steve, bless him, stood out there for five minutes chatting with me until a taxi whisked me away from the scene of the crime. I never heard a word about it. Another clean getaway.

  Sure, as I said, things get broken, busted and burnt but believe me, I meant no harm. I never made a mess just for the fun of it . . . really, I wouldn’t, it’s not my . . . well there was that one time.

  We were staying in the motel section of some beer barn we’d played in the mid-’90s. So after the show our drinks rider gets dragged into my nearby room, and a small party breaks out with the band, crew and some of the punters.

  At some stage a girl produces a bunch of glow sticks, the kind full of fluorescent fluid. She punctures one end so the fluid leaks out. Then like a magic wand starts flicking the glow stick at the wall, splattering it in fluid. With the lights on you couldn’t really notice anything, but when the lights were turned off, ZING! A startling splash of fluorescent lime-green splatter. Everyone immediately grabbed a stick and started splattering – everything. We quickly reached the point of no return, and went way beyond it. No point in stopping now. It was a spectacular display – the entire motel room covered in a fluorescent green Jackson Pollock.

  Next morning in the daylight you couldn’t really notice the fluid on the walls. But apparently when the elderly couple that checked in two days later turned off the lights for a good night’s rest? Well, they noticed.

  TOURING WITH THE STONES

  I was a bit of a cheeky prick at the time The Cruel Sea toured with the Rolling Stones.

  It was the Voodoo Lounge tour of Australia in March 1995.

  As much as I love the Rolling Stones – so many great tunes, so much mythology, they are for me THE greatest band of all time and have given me more joy, more pleasure, more inspiration than anyone else – by this stage they had been making a lot of shit records for many years so I was a bit blasé about the whole thing.

  The whole SHOW that they put on is stadium entertainment – lots of running from one side of an enormous stage to the other. Over-the-top gestures and a ridiculous amount of lights, screens and special effects.

  But the coolest thing was seeing their sound checks, where they just played music – no show, no bullshit, just them playing their songs to themselves. They played songs at sound checks that weren’t in the show; songs that their massive audience of people who come to just one rock concert a year wouldn’t care to hear. Things like ‘I Got The Blues’ and Keith’s ‘You Got The Silver’. It was heaven.

  So yes, it was extremely cool to get to tour with the Rolling Stones but I was a little, well, loose with my respect on the tour.

  For starters, The Cruel Sea were really given the ‘support band treatment’. Some people have even suggested that we went on before the gates were open and people were let in. That’s not true, but as you’d expect we played while people were coming in and finding their seats. We weren’t surprised when it happened. We were in awe of our surroundings, but some nights I couldn’t help myself. Once after we finished I said to the crowd, ‘Don’t go home ladies and gentlemen, there’s another band on after us.’

  Then I upped it a bit the next night with, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, next on . . . The Beatles.’

  I’m not sure whether any of the Stones heard this. Probably not. But it felt like maybe Keith did. We were backstage one night in this area they called the Voodoo Lounge which was like a really extended Green Room. It had a huge food buffet with couches and TVs and the latest pub-style video games. One of which was a favourite of mine at the time – Daytona. Jim Elliot and I, having just finished a race were standing near the machine.

  Enter Mick Jagger.

  ‘Ello lads ow ya doin, aw rite?’

  ‘Yeah man, how are you? Just enjoying the facilities.’

  ‘Daytona ay? Fancy a race?’

  ‘Fuck yeah!’ I said, pushing in front of Jim and sitting back down in one of the driver’s seats. Everything was free, so away we went. Me and Mick.

  Mick fumbled with the gear stick and steering wheel, meandering all over the virtual racetrack. Realising how awful he was, I slowed down and tried not to completely destroy him, but he made it very difficult for me to do a convincing job. ‘He spent a lot of money getting that good on that machine,’ Jim said comfortingly to Mick as we stood up after the race.

  Perkins 1, Jagger 0.

  There was a full-size billiard table for Ronnie and Keith and they seemed to have a game before very show.

  On another night, I wandered over to the table to watch them play and I noticed that Ronnie was quite good and Keith was quite terrible. I felt uncomfortable and regretted coming over as Keith pushed the balls around the table with no results. No one likes onlookers when they’re playing badly.

  It was a rainy day and there was no cover on the stage. I asked the WAY too obvious question of ‘what happens when it rains’ and Keith looked at me and sneers, ‘You get wet’.

  Ronnie, attempting to lighten the mood, pipes up with a cheery, ‘Once in Rio we were playing in a raging hurricane and the rain was coming in horizontally, but we played on. Nothing stops the Stones.’

  Jagger was professionally friendly. He was like a politician in that he has a little bit of information on everyone so it seems like he remembers you and cares. He said he’d been listening to our current album and went on to describe a couple of aspects of it, trying to make us feel good, and it did, bless him. But nothing prepared me for how little
they all were – I mean they were tiny. They were like miniatures. It seemed like they couldn’t have been much more than five foot tall! Jim and I are both around six foot four; we felt weird towering over these giants of rock.

  Some people thought it was a bit of a coup for us to get that tour and I suppose it was. On the other hand, I think they just got the biggest band in the country at the time and that just happened to be The Cruel Sea. Six months later it would have been Silverchair.

  YOU’RE HIM, AREN’T YA?

  Certainly there’s been times when I’ve been rude to people.

  And I’m sorry for that. Really I am. But I give as good as I get. You give someone some time but then they want a bit more. It’s going well, so they just want to take a little bit more, and they can see that their time is really almost up so they throw in something that’s a bit much and you say to them, ‘Okay, that’s enough, I’ve got to run now, bye’, and as you walk off to catch your flight they say something like, ‘I always knew you were a wanker.’

  It’s like that scene in The King Of Comedy where Jerry Lewis is walking along the street and people are cheering and applauding him, they’re coming up to him and he’s signing autographs, and then this old Jewish woman comes up, and he signs an autograph for her and as she’s gushing with compliments she asks for something else and he says, ‘Sorry I have to go now.’ And she yells at him, ‘GET CANCER! YOU SHOULD GET CANCER!!’

  The people I encounter are not usually that extreme but that sort of reaction – to varying degrees – is a very common phenomenon. They come on to you and they get your attention and then they want to see how far they can stretch it. They’re not happy until they’ve pushed it as far as they can.

  Big Day Out, 1994. Notice the sign stuck to my back; I think it said KICK ME.

  Most people are really lovely. Australia, you should be proud of yourself, statistically speaking you’re ALL RIGHT.

  But of course there’s the – often well-meaning – clowns who walk past and go ‘BETTER GET A LAWYER BETTER GET A GOOD ONE.’ That happens a lot.

  My favourite is the guy – and it’s usually a guy – who comes up and goes, ‘You’re him, fuck me, seriously, are you him?’

  ‘Umm, I dunno mate.’ I mean does he think I’m Tim Rogers? Nick Cave? Gary Aires?

  ‘I saw you supporting the Stones in ’95 at the MCG’, and you think to yourself, Good on you mate, that was 25 years ago. You have a keen eye and a sharp memory. Thanks for telling me. I really feel like we have a connection. We should have lunch.

  There’s a common misconception that does the rounds and that I hear a lot. It pretty much goes that every guy wants to be me and every woman wants to do me. Yeah, I know, it’s creepy, isn’t it?

  In 2010 a band called ROOT! recorded a song called ‘I Wish I Was Tex Perkins’, about the atmosphere of envy that follows me. People around me thought I would be offended. But the only issue I had with the song was that it wasn’t funny enough.

  Let’s sort all that out, shall we?

  The actual equation is that guys come up to me at gigs, usually after a few drinks and they get up close in my face and sneer, ‘My girlfriend thinks you’re hot. My GIRLFRIEND LOVES YOU.’ They’re talking through gritted teeth. ‘MY GIRLFRIEND FUCKING LOVES YOU . . . AND IT’S REALLY GOOD TO MEET YOU.’

  I try to keep sweet with these guys for as long as possible but sure enough it turns weird, and occasionally nasty, especially if it’s in a pub, which it usually is.

  The guy will eventually turn sour. I can see it coming. They’re slurring by this stage and not totally sure on their footing. ‘MY GIRLFRIEND THINKS YOU’RE SEXY . . .’ They go on and on.

  I can see them looking me up and down and thinking to themselves, What the fuck does she see in YOU? Has she had a good look at YOU?

  Usually, after the fourth or fifth time they’ve told me that their girlfriend thinks I’m hot, I say, ‘Well, you can go back to her now and say it’s all been a terrible mistake.’

  THREE LEGGED DOG

  A wise man once said: ‘There’s a difference between scratching your arse and ripping it to shreds.’

  This could be applied to many things but it’s especially true of fame. Our society is geared towards having more, all the time more, more, MORE. Bigger is better and biggest is best. Even though the evidence is undeniable, I know most of you will never believe me when I say that a little bit of fame is great but a lot of it is almost always bad.

  These days a fast track to the big time is always favoured over longevity, balance and sustainability.

  I like the level of fame where the waiter at the restaurant is a little friendlier when they’re serving you, rather than the level of fame where they clear everyone else from the restaurant so you can eat alone. Minor fame is fun and easy to handle and has a few perks. Huge fame is when you need to create a world separate from everyday life and have the money and power to do that (think Michael Jackson). Then there’s the level just below that where you’re up there but also out there exposed to the onslaught (think Kurt Cobain).

  I’m not sure why I was a little predisposed for this life I’ve led, being an awkward loner of a child with an instinct for performance. But I’ve also never been far from someone who’d remind me that my physical appearance wasn’t to their liking. From, ‘Why is he so skinny? Doesn’t he eat?’ from my grandmother, to my footy coach’s mournful assessment, ‘Look at that long streak of pelican shit.’

  As a geeky kid I wondered what it would be like to be an attractive person or even just a person that didn’t feel like people were pointing and laughing at them, but when I finally was looked at for the ‘right’ reasons, it was excruciatingly uncomfortable. What some people read as arrogance, is really defensive, as deep down I assume I’m being attacked, put down or written off.

  Pretty much straight after The Honeymoon Is Over was released it dawned on The Cruel Sea that we were on to something here. At that moment of realisation some of the most significant members of the band started getting spooked by the success. Most significantly me and Danny – not together, but separately – started to question it.

  Once we had decided to make ‘commercial’ music, success had happened too quickly, too easily and so I sort of didn’t respect it. I was suspicious. It seemed too easy. The carry-on about how great we were just didn’t wash. And the pressure that came with success didn’t make me comfortable. Our climb up the ladder of success made us feel like now we just had a higher place to fall from. The back lash could arrive any minute now.

  Danny had his own issues. I think he felt his music was being compromised. Danny was never quite satisfied that the band captured the magic of his original demos. And that’s true – those demo recordings were unique. But this was something different now. Danny struggled with what was going on. He became more insular and cut himself off from the rest of the band, often choosing to travel with the support band or the crew rather than us.

  This was the unhappiest time of the band’s life.

  We went through this maelstrom for 18 months until it was of course time to make another album. Then there was an almost deliberate attempt to dismantle what we had built. That album was Three Legged Dog and even the title was an intentional turn off, designed to elicit a feeling that was a bit weird and difficult and unpleasant. The music itself was more stripped back and heavy and not as nice or appealing as Honeymoon.

  It was important for us to make this statement at the time. I realise many of you will not believe me when I say that we wanted LESS success. But it was true. Three Legged Dog was an autobiographical album – a deliberate move to reclaim ownership of the band from the radio playlists and public-image purveyors. It was our attempt to pull the band back from being this mainstream thing that could appear on Hey Hey It’s Saturday and be loved by all. We were battered and bruised – half of us were literally on crutches – and wanted to apply a handbrake to our runaway success.

  And it WORKED. We halved our sales.
But we halved the pressure too.

  THREE LEGGED DOG

  THE CRUEL SEA / 1995

  Probably this took about three weeks all up, in two different studios with Paul McKercher and Tony Cohen. The name of the album was a working title, referring to the state of the band at the time. Both James and I were on crutches when we started recording at Rocking Horse Studios in Byron. It was the first album we began preproduction on with nothing in the pot. All of Danny’s demos had been exhausted, and we started from scratch and wrote most of it as a band. A deliberate attempt to wrestle back ownership of our success, it’s a loose and dirty record, designed to not win any ARIA awards. Despite our best efforts, it got us the best band award and still sold Platinum.

  RECORD LABEL: Red Eye

  CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Danny Rumour (guitar), Jim Elliot (drums), Ken Gormley (bass), James Cruikshank (keyboards/guitar).

  RAP – MY PART IN ITS DOWNFALL

  ‘Better Get a Lawyer’, the first single from Three Legged Dog, was much more than a song; it was a deliberate step away from the sound people knew us for.

  It was also when my love for rap and hip hop found full expression. Let me explain.

  At first I would only rap when I was being silly, taking the piss at a rehearsal for The Cruel Sea or The Beasts Of Bourbon. But slowly, as rap and hip hop became more widespread, it felt more and more natural to slip it in . . . a little here, a little there.

  When I was recording the album This Is Not The Way Home with The Cruel Sea, the song ‘Don’t Sell It’ had a section that doubles up the rhythm that was perfect for me to break into a rap run tightly together. In the end I used the entire lyrics of ‘Straight Hard and Long’, a Beasts song I’d written in 1991. It worked, sort of.

  By the time Three Legged Dog came along, Beck had become a good example of how a white boy should rap and the songs ‘Better Get a Lawyer’ and ‘Too Fast For Me’ carried rapped stanzas inspired by his influence.