Tex
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Well done, gentlemen!
We played Star City in Sydney, Wrest Point in Hobart and Twin Towns on the Gold Coast. We stayed within the conceptual framework of playing horrible music in horrible places. The critics were divided in their response to the album. Some happy to run with the gag, others vowing never to listen to another Tex Perkins record as long as they live. Hilarious.
But even though the album and tour was delivered to the record company as a kind of middle-finger thing we enjoyed the hell out of it, and it’s a lot more fun to listen to than Metal Machine Music.
NO. 1’S & NO. 2’S
TEX PERKINS & HIS LADYBOYZ / 2008
Tim Spicer was the one responsible for helping us commit this crime against my career. This could’ve been called Career Suicide Attempt. Covers of classic soft rock hits of the ’70s and ’80s polarised the critics and the public alike. But really, it’s all about the infomercial. Instead of using the video budget to make music videos we made an infomercial. We even bought some time on late-night telly and ran it like it was real, which it was – sort of. The album’s okay but the infomercial is really where the project peaked. But you gotta have an album if you wanna have an infomercial, I suppose.
RECORD LIBEL: Universal
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals), James Cruikshank (piano), Charlie Owen (guitar), Joe Silbersher (guitar), Patrick Bourke (bass), Gus Agars (drums).
THE DARK HORSES
I met Murray Paterson sometime in 1998.
Our good friend Justine Clarke was visiting the area and was bringing with her her new boyfriend, Murray.
I liked Murray straightaway. He was good-humoured, worldly, open-hearted and as it turned out, a great guitar player. He’s a Doctor of Philosophy, which meant he was giving lectures on Art at Southern Cross University. Murray, with his flaming red hair, is also a great surfer, possessing an uncanny ability to read the surf and pick the right wave, not wasting any energy on duds.
The first ‘recognition of a kindred spirit’ we had was when he spotted the Van Morrison album Veedon Fleece in my CD collection. Both of us have a deep connection to this incredible record and we still treat the playing of this record as an almost sacred moment.
We started writing songs soon after we met. Murray had an openness that made writing easy and enjoyable. A lot of people I’d tried to write with over the years had been too cautious and guarded. Frightened of exposing themselves. Writing in that atmosphere can be like pulling teeth. Murray wasn’t like that at all, and it was easy to get swept along with his enthusiasm. It also helped that the things he had to offer were really good and unlike anybody else I’d worked with. A beautiful finger-picking style that made standard chords sound unique. No one plays a B minor like Murray Paterson. We wrote two songs, ‘Ice In The Sun’ and ‘Fine Mess’ very early on in our partnership. Around the same time, I had written a few by myself, and was amassing a bunch of songs to record for my, by now overdue, second solo album.
Charlie and me at the Hopetoun hotel, 2003.
I had decided to go back to my old team of Charlie Owen and Tony Cohen to help me bring the album together. Charlie and I hadn’t written anything together for a while but he seemed like the right person for me to work with. When we started recording the album, it was just the three of us. I would sing and play guitar, Charlie would do whatever else was necessary and Tony would record it. Charlie can and did play drums, bass, piano, banjo and of course guitars.
A fourth important individual that came into the mix at this stage was Joel.
Joel Silbersher is another unique specimen. A very funny and talented fellow, he was in a band called GOD when he was 15. They had a kind of a hit with a song called ‘My Pal’. I had met Joel because he and Charlie had formed a group they called Tendrils. Joel was and still is a great player and he and I wrote a couple of songs together for the album. Joel brought a dark sense of humour and a deep cynicism about . . . everything. It was hard to get a positive word out of Joel so when he said he liked something we did, I knew we’d really got somewhere.
I guess Joel’s suspicion and reluctance was a good counterbalance to Murray’s enthusiasm.
We used drum loops for a lot of the songs but for one or two our old friend Jim White was kind enough to share his extraordinary skinsmanship with us.
These recordings became the album Dark Horses. So when the time came to promote the record and play live, I called the band The Dark Horses. Murray fit in very well with his Horse colleagues and they’ve all become lifelong friends. The core of the band has stayed the same since then.
Murray and Justine stopped seeing each other, but I kept seeing Murray. It took a long time for Murray to get over his breakup with Justine – so many heartbroken, melancholic melodies sprang from his hands and inhabit a lot of our collaborations.
Over the years I’ve started doing a lot of shows with just Murray and me. I’ve also done shows with just Charlie. But these days it’s usually me and Murray.
Doing those duo shows is an economical thing as much as anything. With The Dark Horses there’s six people plus a front-of-house guy and a stage guy. You’re dragging around at least eight people, so over the years there’s been more and more of these stripped-back gigs.
Murray and I just have this easy relationship doing the shows together. We don’t actually hang out that much up north. It’s hard to get him out of the house these days. But if one of us has something, we’ll find the time.
In the early days we’d record ideas onto a cassette into a ghetto blaster and swap tapes, and then CDs. Now it’s MP3s so the relationship has spanned a few different technologies.
When it comes to songwriting I still don’t have a formula of any kind. The whole thing is still a mystery to me. I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible.
I recently wrote a song called ‘A Man In Conflict With Nature’. Murray had given me a rough recording of him playing and sort of mumbling a few words here and there. For some reason the word DOGS stuck out as I listened through this shadowy folk tune. I had my first line.
‘WENT DOWN TO THE DOGS ... ON SATURDAY NIGHT.’ As soon as I had that, the rest of it rolled out very easily. Mind you I didn’t actually write anything down. I had the song on recording function on my computer, so whenever I thought of a line I sang it straight into the song. No paper.
Murray Paterson yelling the chords in my ear during a show in 2015.
Some of the songs we write together find homes in other projects that I do, especially things like Tex, Don & Charlie. ‘Whenever It Snows’, ‘Paycheques’ and ‘Someday I’ll Forget’ are all Paterson–Perkins co-writes. On the new Tex, Don & Charlie album I have five songs – three written with Murray.
Murray has a very certain style of writing that leads me down Melancholy Street a lot of the time. The words I hear within his music are world weary, sometimes lost, sometimes broken. But always with a strength and beauty. When Rachel Ward asked me to provide the music for her film Beautiful Kate, Murray was the first and only person I thought of to work with.
I have never been, and never will be a great guitar player, but I will persist. Trouble is, to be really good, you’ve got to love the thing. And Mo LOVES his guitar, a 1961 baby Martin. He cares for it like the special instrument it is. I’ve stopped out and out abuse of my instruments, but I’ll never get to that stage. As I sit here writing this, I don’t even know where my guitars are. All three of them. Murray would never NOT know where his guitar is, not for a second. But maybe that’s part of our schtick – we’re the Odd Couple of guitar interplay.
Usually it’s me bashing out chords and him putting something nice and pretty over the top of it. Or it might be him doing some nice chords and me playing very basic lead. Murray brings a quality that I can’t achieve by myself. For starters he can actually play.
Charlie Owen, Joel Silbersher and Murray Paterson: I hope I am able to make music in some form with all of these frisky little ponies for many years to co
me.
The Dark Horses may continue as a band, and it may not. Maybe we’ll just change names.
Just to keep things confusing.
DARK HORSES
TEX PERKINS / 2000
This album I demoed at home on 4-track and then presented the songs to Charlie Owen and Tony Cohen. We started the album with just the three of us. I sang and played guitar and Charlie played whatever else was necessary. It took about a week using drum loops and guest musicians, and includes two co-writes with Murray Paterson, two with Joel Silbersher and one with Rowland S. Howard, I think this one sits somewhere in my top 10 albums by me. ‘She Speaks A Different Language’ and ‘Ice In The Sun’ are two of my favourite songs that I’ve written, but we learned out on the road how much songs like ‘Please Break Me Gently’ and ‘To Us’ meant to people.
RECORD LABEL: Grudge
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Charlie Owen (guitar/piano/keyboards), Jim White (drums), Murray Paterson (guitar), Joel Silbersher (bass/guitar).
SWEET NOTHING
TEX PERKINS’ DARK HORSES / 2003
Recorded at my old place with Jeff Lovejoy and a mobile recording studio, which is basically the desk and all the outboard gear that you’d normally have in a recording studio except it’s in road cases so they could be transported to wherever you liked. Wherever we liked was my old house in the country.
Once again, some good things here but all in all, not a great record.
RECORD LIBEL: Universal
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Charlie Owen (guitar/piano/keyboards/synth), Murray Paterson (guitar), Joel Silbersher (bass), Scritch (drums).
BEAUTIFUL KATE
FILM SOUNDTRACK
TEX PERKINS AND MURRAY PATERSON / 2008
Rachel Ward asked me to write and record the music for her first film as director. Murray was the first person I thought of to help me. A lot of this music is our two acoustic guitars. The theme to the movie was written before we even read the script. We recorded a couple of things and sent them to Rachel just to see if we were on the right track. ‘It’s perfect’, was her response. The first piece we sent became the main theme. ‘This is going to be easy’, we thought. Well, it was, and it wasn’t. Some things we wrote and we left it up to the filmmakers to decide where to put it, but other times they were ultra-specific, asking for pieces of music of specific length that did certain things and hit various emotional points in specific places. It was a great challenge and a great pleasure. This one’s up there for me.
RECORD LABEL: Level Two Music
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Murray Paterson (guitar), Kristyna Higgins (slide guitar).
TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES
TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES / 2010
Recorded at Magoo’s church studio Applewood, we brought a stockpile of songs that had accumulated over the last few years, and it was time to record them. Mostly songs I’d co-written with Murray, there’s some good stuff here. Because there had been a drought we thought it best to try to record as many songs as possible, aiming for a double album. But what we ended up with was an overcrowded single album. I like this album but it’s another example of ‘would’ve been a better record with less songs’.
RECORD LABEL: Inertia Music
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Charlie Owen (guitar/piano/keyboards/synth), Jim White (drums), Joel Silbersher (bass/guitar), Gus Agars (drums), Steve Hadley (bass).
EVERYONE’S ALONE
TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES / 2012
After waiting seven years between Sweet Nothing and the last album, I wanted to see what it would be like to make the next album much sooner rather than later, while the band was still ‘warm’. We did a five-day session with Roger Bergodaz at the end of the tour for our previous album and threw what we had at each other. This made for unusual contributions. Most of the album has a stripped-back futuristic, hungover, country-folk feel as slide guitars meet synthesisers, but occasionally an aberration like Joel’s ‘A Real Job’ pops up and radically changes the mood. This album is also the last time we would record with James Cruickshank as he left for Berlin soon after. When he returned he was too ill to play and died a year later in 2015. Now that he’s gone, recordings of James’s vocals, keyboards and guitar seem to stand out – my ear going towards his parts more than the other components of the song.
RECORD LABEL: Inertia Music
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Murray Paterson (guitar), Charlie Owen (guitar/piano/keyboards/synth), Joel Silbersher (guitar/bass), Steve Hadley (bass), Gus Agars (drums), James Cruickshank (piano).
TUNNEL AT THE END OF THE LIGHT
TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES / 2015
Another quick one with Roger Bergodaz, this one completes the trio of Dark Horses albums we made since 2010. I think the track ‘Slide On By’ is our most successful attempt here. Built around an irresistible riff from Joel we let this epic unravel over eight minutes of atmospheric groove. Other things like the ghostly melodies of Murray’s instrumental ‘The View South’ are given plenty of space to drift like currents in a river. Thematically it’s an outward-looking record but occasionally it is extremely intimate. ‘All Is Quiet’ explores a magical night of resignation to insomnia.
RECORD LABEL: Inertia Music
CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar/harmonica), Murray Paterson (guitar), Charlie Owen (guitar/piano/keyboards/synth), Joel Silbersher (guitar/bass), Steve Hadley (bass), Gus Agars (drums).
HELLO, I’M JOHNNY CASH
I’d never really Imagined I’d be in a theatre show and working as an actor of sorts and doing a musical show based around the life of Johnny Cash.
I didn’t see that one coming – but it actually came into my life at pretty much the right time. Certainly the most convenient time. It came along at exactly the time when I didn’t want to make a record.
Let me explain. The Ladyboyz album came out in 2008 and effectively I’d then completed and delivered everything I was signed up to do. That was the good part. The not so good part was the clause in the contract saying that everything I did in the 12-month period after the contract ended – they had their claws into that if they wanted. This meant that whatever I recorded in the next year I had to play to Universal and then they could decide whether or not they wanted to release it.
So armed with that knowledge it was pretty easy to work out what the Tex position on this was going to be. I’M NOT GOING TO MAKE A RECORD FOR THE NEXT YEAR was the no-brainer decision.
Then, out of the blue I had an approach from ‘The Theatre World’, asking whether I was interested in doing a show based on the life of Johnny Cash.
Their idea was that rather than get someone from ‘The Theatre World’ they’d get someone from ‘The Rock’n’Roll World’ with some sort of ‘reputation’. They also said that they needed this ‘Rock’n’Roll Person’ to have a checkered career and a tenor voice. Guess who?
Strangely, they had no idea about my pre-existing fondness for Johnny Cash or that The Dum Dums had played a lot of Cash’s songs.
But in the end it was absolutely perfect for me. Too perfect. I figured this would be a good way to kill a few months doing something that came easily to me, ticking off the time on that 12 months I was beholden to Universal, and then I’d go back to my usual stuff. And also it was a bit of a career change because even though I fit very easily and comfortably into the Johnny Cash thing, this was something I’d never done before. It was a challenge to learn about and get experience in the theatre and doing this style of musical-meets-narrative performance.
Then the show just took off. I had no idea at the time that almost 10 years later I’d still be touring around the country doing Johnny fucking Cash shows.
THE MAN IN BLACK
So, suddenly I’m working on this show about the life of Johnny Cash.
The script for the production was written and owned – if owned is the ri
ght word here – by this guy from the ‘theatre world’ called Jim McPherson. It’s his thing. He ‘created’ it.
The original script that was presented to me was the one he’d written. This is the first time I think they were surprised to realise that this rock guy actually knew a bit about Johnny Cash. I pointed out to them that the script ended just like the movie did, in 1968 after he successfully did the show at Folsom Prison.
The script then just ignores everything that happened after that – which if my maths is correct is about four decades. It’s a bit like doing a show on Bob Dylan and stopping after he had his alleged motorbike accident in Woodstock in 1969.
Okay, I’ll concede that there was a lot of Cash stuff in the 1980s that is pretty easy to ignore, but he was still out there making music even if he wasn’t that fashionable and that to me is an interesting story in itself. But it also ignored the whole American Recordings period, all those amazing albums he did with Rick Rubin from 1994 onwards. The writer and producers were completely unaware that this stuff existed. So I had to explain that there was a really great period of music there that’s almost the equal of his early work.
They were a bit taken aback by this, and the fact that I was actually informing them about huge slabs of the Johnny Cash story – but they really should have known more about him if they were seriously going to do a show about him. So we just got stuck into the script. Cutting out chunks of flabby dialogue and rewriting much of it. I put in songs that maybe some other people wouldn’t have. Obviously there’s songs you have to do if you’re doing a Johnny Cash show but I certainly steered it in a direction that was more to my liking.