by Tex Perkins
So in the donkey world we’ve had Mr and Mrs Brown, who we got about seven years ago. And then Frieda came along not long after that. She was already pregnant so she had Misty. That left three females for Mr Brown. None of them are technically his offspring so he can have his way with all three – and he has. Mrs Brown has been pregnant again, and so has Frieda, and Misty as well.
So we’ve had three baby donkeys over the past 18 months. One was born the day Bowie died so we called him Ziggy, and the very latest was born very near to Leonard Cohen’s death so he’s Lenny. Then there’s Eddie . . . I don’t know why he’s called Eddie. Did Eddie Fisher die last year? Eddie Munster? Eddie McGuire? They’re amazing to see immediately after they’re born. Minutes after they come out they’re up on their feet. After they’re all dry and fluffy they are cutest bloody thing you’ve ever seen.
When it comes to courtship Mr Brown singles out the object of his affection and basically chases her around with this enormous penis, then tries to get into the position. She’s just hammering him in the face BANG, BANG, BANG with her back legs that – Jesus Christ – would certainly put me off – but it doesn’t deter Mr Brown. It goes on and on until she tires for a few seconds and then IT’S IN. I’ve never actually seen THE moment but I’ve certainly seen the long, arduous courtship.
We’ve also had two dogs over the past 15 years – a border collie and a Jack Russell. Spock and Chella. They were idiot pains in the arse but I loved them, especially the border collie, Spock (Spocky, Spocky Boy, Sporty or anything starting with ‘Sp’). But NEEDY. Talk about NEEDY. HEY HEY HEY, HOW ARE YA? HEY HEY HEY? DO YOU LIKE ME? DO YA? HEY HEY HEY, PAT ME, PAT ME. PAT ME. Constantly, desperately in need of affirmation. Needy and annoying and filthy. If there was any cow or horse shit nearby or anything dead or rotting, Spock would find it and roll in it.
Spock was another beautiful soul. I loved that dog with a part of my heart I didn’t know existed until he came to us but I must say that now that the dog years are over my life’s a lot easier.
Spocky Boy.
Then there was a period when we had no domestic animals around the house. This was when we spent some more time in Melbourne when Roy was born. While we were away there seemed to be a rat plague generally in the area. Everyone had way more rats around their houses, sheds and properties than they usually did.
So we got back from Melbourne and the place was basically like the Chelsea Hotel for rats. Every possible nook and cranny and space had been inhabited by a rat. Anything that could be chewed, anything that could be destroyed – they were onto it. WHY THE FUCK DO THEY CHEW THROUGH POWER CORDS?
So we had a year-long war with the rats, thinking of ever cleverer ways of killing and catching them. The best one was actually the simplest. We’d done everything – traps, baits, you name it. But the garbage bin half-filled with water, with a bit of PVC pipe fastened to it and stretched across the top of the bin with a bit of bread also fastened to the middle of the pipe, and then you grease the pipe – gets ’em every time. They think THIS LOOKS GOOD – and in they go. We caught half-a-dozen in each bin the first night we did it, but that really didn’t make a dent.
They just kept coming until we got BILL THE CAT who is my favourite animal in the world because within two weeks he SORTED THAT SHIT OUT. He’d kill them, chew their heads off and leave their corpses displayed for us for inspection. Strange, but lately he’s been eating the rest of the body and leaving the head. Anyway, our life has never been better. Thank you Bill. I love you.
From time to time we have interactions with wild animals as well. Louie is six now but when he was about three months old I woke up in the middle of the night to the immortal words, ‘THERE’S A SNAKE IN THE BED’.
True shit. There was a snake in Louie’s bed. It had crawled across our bedhead, past Kristyna’s bedside table and down into the crib, which was where half its body was. It was at least five-and-a-half foot long.
Within seconds Kristyna grabbed the baby, handed him to me and told me she was getting something to deal with it. She came back into the room with a broom stick, scooped up the snake, tossed it out into the garden and we were all back asleep again within 10 minutes. Life goes on . . . luckily.
That snake wasn’t actually big enough to eat him, but we’ve seen many dead chickens over the years. The snake kills the chicken and then tries to eat it, realises at some point that it’s too big, and coughs it back up . . . whoops.
Occasionally we might see a little baby snake crawling across the deck – they’re very docile and easy to pick up and handle. Cutest thing you ever did see. But I leave the big boys alone.
We once watched two large male pythons fighting each other while hanging from the rafters of our shed. And then observed the incredible harmonious entwining later that night of the victor and his new mating female. Or maybe they were females fighting over a male, I dunno. As I said, I leave the big boys and girls alone.
There is one we see on the driveway occasionally. Snakes like lying on roads at night because they hold the heat for a while. This one, from head-to-tail, stretches all the way across. It’s longer than the width of the driveway, which is three metres – that’s a 10-foot long snake! And believe me, you can’t just drive over it. Apart from being a really shitty thing to do, you’d have trouble getting over! It’s THICK. So you have to, very gently, encourage it to move along . . . without pissing it off.
We have a fair number of snakes around the property and traditionally that’s always good. But when we had the plague of rats the pythons only picked off one or two. They were no good at truly keeping the numbers down. Not like Bill is. They were just exploiting the situation. They never wanted it to end. Come to think of it now we have cats and therefore less rats we see less snakes . . . so there is a downside to it.
The episode with Louie in the crib was the creepiest thing that’s happened but generally we don’t mind pythons being around. They’re not dangerous snakes – unless they think they can eat you.
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
THE CRUEL SEA / 2001
Just about my favourite Cruel Sea album recorded with Magoo at Rocking Horse studios in the hills of the shire of Byron. All the things we’d been trying to do on the last record happened a lot easier and more convincingly with a reunited, relatively clean band and just one focused producer. It had a good heart; loose but tight enough to be funky, and a mischievous approach to the production made our use of samples a lot more fun than on the last record. This time we used them because we wanted to; last time we used them because we HAD to.
RECORD LABEL: Universal
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), Danny Rumour (guitar), Jim Elliot (drums), Ken Gormley (bass), James Cruikshank (keyboards/guitar).
HARBINGERS OF THE APOCALYPSE
The launch for The Cruel Sea’s Where There’s Smoke was on 11 September 2001 at a venue called The Laundry in Melbourne.
After the gig we were back at our hotel and Kenny rings my room and says, ‘Just turn on the TV.’ Live coverage on every channel, the World Trade Center in New York. I saw the second plane hit. I saw the frickin’ things collapse right there in front of me, neat and quick, like the fucking Dean brothers used to demolish buildings in the middle of the night in Queensland in the ’70s and ’80s. Then another building falls that wasn’t even hit. What the fuck? Then they say another has hit the Pentagon. Wow, these terror dudes are good, it’s almost as if they had help. But apparently that’s crazy talk.
The next day we played Geelong as the start of this massive national tour and there was hardly anyone there. I wasn’t surprised. Everyone was still in shock.
After this all our songs took on a different context. ‘Jet planes fly tooo high’ suddenly seemed loaded with new meaning and Where There’s Smoke – the name of the tour and album for fuck’s sake – bordered on sacrilegious. Every time you saw a newspaper or TV you saw plumes of smoke. Mountains of smoke. Smoke smoke SMOKE. Was the fact The Cruel Sea travelled u
nder this banner simply incredibly bad timing or could it be seen as incredibly insensitive? Maybe no one even noticed.
I mean it was way too soon for any attitude but shock and fear at this point. Or was it providence? Had we inadvertently become the harbingers of Armageddon. Armageddon outta here! And believe me, people WERE very sensitive to all this at the time. The rock band Shihad announced that they were changing their name to Pacifier because Shihad sounded too much like jihad. And then the rock band Frenzal Rhomb announced they were changing their name to Shihad. Hilarious.
After that first dud gig in Geelong, the tour went well and we had huge crowds. Huge crowds full of people who seemed to have the attitude that this might be their last chance. Last chance to dance, last chance to get wasted, last chance for love. There was an abandon that translated into, WE MIGHT BE DEAD IN A WEEK, LET’S GET IT ON.
No one really knew how America was going to respond and there was a real feeling that now that this had happened, anything was possible! If they can do that, they can get you anywhere. All the world’s a potential battlefield now.
Was there going to be a war? You bet! That would involve nuclear weapons? Maybe. I felt it too. Now everything I saw, I saw in that context. Every gig was like a farewell show. Being on tour can get kinda otherworldly, with all the travelling and drinking, and so with this atmosphere, one’s behaviour takes on a rarefied air.
‘Nothing matters anymore’ became the unofficial theme for the tour, even though suddenly flying turned into a very serious business. Stringent airport security became the new norm. ID checks, bag checks, body checks, shoe checks and arse checks. It felt like the world had changed and no one knew what was going to happen. Paranoia was everywhere, but I floated through it, either drunk, stoned or hungover.
Numb, untouched.
I just needed to get home before the whole thing blew.
Looking back, things didn’t explode or implode with The Cruel Sea. They just slowly wound down. As time went by between gigs, the fact that we hadn’t played for long periods wasn’t really as big an issue to us as other people seemed to assume it was. Sometimes we would just give it a rest – I would go work with someone else for a while and there was never a specific time period determined about when we’d get back together. As far as I was concerned it could be months – or years – but I’d always come back to The Cruel Sea.
That’s been a thing with a lot of my bands: there’s no real need to break up or make some formal announcement and all that bullshit. You just walk away from it and maybe you walk back and maybe you don’t. There’s no THIS IS THE END press release.
I was often asked why The Cruel Sea ended – but the thing is that as far as I was concerned we hadn’t ended. We always planned to do another Cruel Sea record – we just didn’t know when. There was never a time when it was ‘WE WILL NEVER EVER PLAY AGAIN.’
But then James died.
We will never play again now that Cruickers is gone. It’s still hard for me to get my head around the idea that I’ll never see him again. James had been a constant in my life for so long, and we’d had so many adventures, sometimes I forget he’s gone and briefly think about discussing a movie or a book with him, and then I remember.
Of course The Cruel Sea existed before James but there was such a long period of time when it was the five of us. James was an important part of it and if in the very unlikely circumstances that the rest of us did play together again it would be something very, very different.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
LADYBOYZ
When Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music in 1975 it was widely considered to be a begrudging contractual fulfilment.
A ‘fuck you I’m outta here’ to RCA, his record company. ‘Music’ SO extreme it was deemed unlistenable, and therefore unsaleable. Rock critics hated it. ‘The spin cycle of a washing machine has more melodic variation than Metal Machine Music,’ said one unamused pants wetter. Lou lost fans and credibility within the straight rock world. I gotta admit, I’ve never got all the way through it, and I’m a noise lover.
When the Rolling Stones, at the end of their contract with DECCA Records, were told they were contracted for one more single, they gave them ‘Cocksucker Blues’.
My favourite Monty Python record is the Contractual Obligation Album. A supposed grab bag of throwaway songs and skits.
So I was very familiar with this concept by the time the dweeb at Universal suggested I record an album of covers.
After the sneer dropped from my face, I said, ‘Sure, as long as it counts as my final contracted album.’
I’ll give them a fucking covers album, I thought.
And not only did they suggest a covers album but that – and this is a great example of record company creativity – it should feature . . . CELEBRITY GUESTS.
From this came the Ladyboyz – or to give the band its full and correct title – Tex Perkins & His Ladyboyz. Doing covers was already a well-established tradition with lots of bands I was involved with, in that when we did cover versions we’d do ironic versions of songs that we really didn’t like. But to record an album of that crap, on a major record label? It was like our very own Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.
I’d done this sort of thing before with a band called Hot Property, which was basically a forerunner of the Ladyboyz. Both bands did versions of shit songs from the ’70s and ’80s (and this was IN the ’80s). Hot Property was a very dangerous band to be in. Seriously. In Sydney we would play our regular haunts, mostly to people who were in on the joke. But when we played Melbourne supporting The Johnnys, we played to people who had no idea what we were doing. We collided with people that did not get it. They hated us! To an hilarious degree. We played Chasers Nightclub (yes it’s been there that long) and this guy walks up onto the stage and spits in my face in disgust. Then, wearing platform shoes and a red flared pants suit (known as ‘The Red Gear’), I launched myself onto his back as he re-entered the crowd, crashing to the floor.
We played the Village Green hotel way out in the suburbs and had to have security escort us off the premises. People wanted to hurt us. People were asking for their money back, and we were just the support band!
So I was familiar with pissing people off in that way.
Anyway I made sure the album we did would count as a contractual tick in the contractual box as usually covers albums aren’t considered ‘proper’ albums when you’re contracted to give a record company a certain number of albums. But I made sure they agreed that this would be considered a real album and would count as the album I needed to deliver to conclude my obligations to them. Then I would be FREE!
I decided that this project should be best described as ‘experimental cabaret music’. It was my version of what Lou Reed did with Metal Machine Music, except that his record company hadn’t asked for that as the final album in his contract. My record company had asked for this. Oh yes, they said they wanted a covers album. I gave them a covers album.
I needed some accomplices in this pop crime. A project like this deserved the best players in the world. Slash, Steve Stevens and Skunk Baxter were among the many I couldn’t afford. So instead I enlisted James Cruickshank, Charlie Owen, Joel Silbersher, Pat Bourke and Gus Agars. Meet the Ladyboyz.
Let’s not forget, the label had requested celebrity guests. So I gave them celebrity guests. I gave them damn good celebrity guests too. Jimmy Barnes was up for it so he sang on our version of The Stylistics’ song ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’. Nic Chester from Jet is on ‘Hold The Line’ by Toto. Suze DeMarchi does her bit on Bob Seger’s ‘We’ve Got Tonight’ and Adalita Srsen was totally in to singing Alice Cooper’s ‘You And Me’.
Are you getting the picture here? We did songs like Dr Hook’s creepy classic ‘Love You A Little Bit More’, Mondo Rock’s even creepier classic, ‘Come Said The Boy’, Hall & Oates’ ‘Rich Girl’ and Nik Kershaw’s ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’ and so on.
If I suggested a song to the band a
nd they said, ‘Oh no, not that!’ it was in! Some people – not many, mind you – totally love the record, but more people than that have never forgiven me for it. We called the album No. 1’S & No. 2’S.
The tour to promote the Ladyboyz album involved us playing casinos. The idea there was to play the tackiest places we could find to play – and those places were usually casinos.
In keeping with current merchandising trends, we also developed our own fragrance, Scent of a Lady Boy. We did the Palms at the Crown Casino in Melbourne and that was actually spectacular. Everyone there got the joke and were working with us on it.
But at other places it wasn’t quite the same and people were baffled. We played the Country Club Casino in Launceston in Tasmania. After the show the backstage door bursts open and this woman stands in the doorway and screams at us – ‘YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES! YOU CALL YOURSELVES THE FIFTH BEST COVERS BAND IN THE COUNTRY. YOU’RE NOT!’
That came about because the press release, obviously written as a bit of a joke, described us as ‘arguably the fifth best covers band in Australia’. This was repeated around the country in stories by cut-and-paste journalists writing newspaper articles, pretty much as we expected it to be and without any sense of irony. But hey, it says ‘arguably’.
This woman thought it would be good to see the fifth best covers band in the country and she was very disappointed. In fact, she was furious. One of our crew, Henry, tried to close the door to keep her out but she’s pushing back. Screaming and beating on the door as it closes. ‘YOU’RE A DISGRACE.’ All the band aghast at the onslaught of passionate abuse.