Tex

by Tex Perkins

  MY BETTER HALF

  T’N’T / 2006

  Shane O’Mara’s backyard garden shed studio was perfect for Tim Rogers and I to scratch together this interesting little album. It ain’t perfect by a long shot but it has some wonderful things on it. ‘Cunnilingus’ for one. Tim’s ‘Dinosaurs’ is one of the most beautifully vulnerable songs ever recorded by anyone ever. It kills me.

  RECORD LABEL: Liberation

  CORE BAND MEMBERS: Tex Perkins (vocals/guitar), Tim Rogers (vocals/guitar), Shane Walsh (double bass), Shane O’Mara (guitar).

  THE APE – THE BAND

  I’m into apes in any shape or form so I guess it was only a matter of time before I put together a band called The Ape.

  The Ape came about as a vehicle for a lot of material that I had that I’d found no other place to use. It was stuff that I had hanging around that definitely wasn’t Dark Horses material. It wasn’t quite The Cruel Sea and it wasn’t quite The Beasts Of Bourbon.

  In some ways the genesis for this project goes back quite some way, and perhaps even earlier than I sometimes realise. It was probably in the middle of doing some working with Tex, Don & Charlie and The Dark Horses, bands whose music leads me into a variety of emotional areas.

  I think sometimes I just need to make music for me that no one will ever hear – or at least when I’m coming up with it I’m thinking that it won’t ever go out anywhere. That’s fun for me. I really believe that not everything needs to be put out there for people to hear, but I guess I’m not alone in thinking that. There’s probably a large chunk of my music some people wish I HAD just kept to myself.

  I have lots of stuff – LOADS OF STUFF – that no one will ever hear. It’s part of me just keeping my craft together, staying engaged with the fundamentals of putting music together.

  There was a long period when I relied on James Cruickshank for demoing because he had a little studio set up. But then I moved to using a laptop and the Garage Band programme which I guess I’ve been using for about a decade now. That enabled me to always be dabbling in things and putting ideas down when they came to me, often just for the hell of it.

  I had some drum loops that I played some riffs over and I built up four or five things that I made up and put down very quickly. It was exciting so I kept returning to it, and seemed to be edging towards something, but it never had a home or a context. I had no idea where I was going with it but I knew it didn’t really fit any of my existing bands.

  I saw this music as completely separate to what I was trying to do with everything else and I actually had this idea of creating an identity. Getting a bunch of cute 15-year-olds together and pretending they made this music together – and fool Triple J into playing it. It was a fantasy but I still hold on to that fantasy – to create something and not have me as the visual identity out there selling it. A Milli Vanilli sort of thing. I still might. But maybe you’ll never know . . .

  And that music eventually became The Ape. I hadn’t played music with riffs and grooves for quite awhile. No opportunity to play it with anyone had presented itself, and it wasn’t quite something I could put to The Beasts Of Bourbon. It wasn’t dark enough for the Beasts but it was too heavy for The Cruel Sea. But over a couple of years of tinkering with these pieces of music and ideas I sort of built them in to songs and then I started to feel okay about a few people hearing them and when they did they said that they really liked them. So I started to believe they were telling me the truth.

  Around the time when my last contracted solo record had been due, I decided to play the record company game and ask them what they wanted and engage with them and do demos and all that bullshit. I actually did demo some of those songs for what I thought might be my next record. Believe it or not but I’d never done that before – we always just delivered whatever album it was to the record company, complete.

  The Ape, 2016.

  I demoed them with Kram of the band Spiderbait (who was great to work with) and then played them to the A&R man at the record company. That’s when he decided that maybe a covers album might be good and we ended up doing the Ladyboyz album. So that sort of knocked my confidence in those songs for awhile. You can imagine how it felt – you demo all these new songs that you think are pretty good and a guy at a record company listens to them and suggests you make a record of other people’s songs. It’s demoralising. But I knew the songs were good despite what this record company dick thought.

  So the songs sat on the reject pile and more years went by and then I think I was at a stage where for some reason I wanted to do something and certain musicians weren’t available as they were doing other things. I know Murray and Charlie were busy.

  That made me realise that at times I’ve become just a little bit reliant on a comparatively small group of people to get something happening, and that if they’re involved in other things I’m sort of stymied until their time frees up.

  At this point I decided that I’d put together a new rock band and I’d call it The Ape. I could get people who were easy – and by that I mean easy to be with, easy to play with and fun to be around. The music wouldn’t be introspective and it wouldn’t be difficult. It would be rock music with grooves, riffs and melodies.

  I immediately turned to Raul Sanchez, who I knew from Magic Dirt, for guitar and my go-to drummer, Gus Agars. I thought we needed a keyboard player – a utility musician who could play a lot of different things. We were looking for someone like that for awhile before I thought, What a minute, I wrote those piano parts – we don’t need a piano player to play piano parts that I wrote. So when Pat Bourke agreed to play bass AND piano the line-up was complete. (Pat had never played piano before either.)

  A few other people contributed to the album – Dan Luscombe, Mike Noga, and even Bob Murphy is in there doing vocals on ‘Man On A Mission’. Is he the only captain of an AFL Premiership team on a rock record? Probably.

  In some ways The Ape record is the most ‘me’ album that I’ve ever made. It’s one project where I don’t feel like I need to adopt a persona. The Dark Horses music is often introspective and melancholic, due to the fact that I write with Murray Paterson. His music is often dark and sweet so I follow that muse. The Beasts’ music is dark and ugly so that leads me to those places. The Ape’s music is heavy but it has a grin rather than a scowl. After all, apes just want to have fun. Tellingly, it’s the only record I’ve done where I’m credited as Greg Perkins on the back cover – and not Tex.

  The Ape is a great blend of what I love doing. It’s got the sense of fun that can be found in The Cruel Sea and then there’s bits of the Beasts heaviness about it but it’s not as nihilistic. It’s certainly heavy and it’s very much a rock’n’roll record but I didn’t need to turn into THAT GUY – which is maybe why I decided to use my real name on it.

  With The Ape I can enjoy myself when I’m inside the songs. They have a power to them but also a humour. It strikes the right balance. Even though when I wrote all those songs I wrote them as something that wasn’t really for me. I wrote them as an exercise in writing music and at the time I couldn’t imagine myself actually playing them live. Partly, I guess, because I was using drum loops and had played everything myself. I wanted to do something I didn’t usually do. It just came out very quickly without thought, context or analysis. I had no framework or a vision of where it was going to go.

  So there’s probably a lot more of me in there than even I realise. Any psychiatrist will tell you that this is where a lot of the truth will slip out – when you’re doing something that you don’t expect anyone else will hear.

  As I said, I formed The Ape at a time when people I usually worked with were unavailable. I love The Ape, but lately it’s getting harder to get everyone together. Gus and Pat have gigs with younger and more successful artists who can give them a smoother ride than I can. The age of The Ape may have already passed . . . Time for a new band.

  THE APE

  THE APE / 2013

  One of my
favourites to record and to listen to. My kids like this one – a 10-song rock’n’roll album with a grin, rather than a smirk or a scowl. Simplicity is the crucial element. It’s made from songs I’d been accumulating over the last six years that never quite fit with any of my usual collaborators, although at various stages I thought to try some of them with The Cruel Sea and the Beasts. Some of them were part of the demos the A&R guy at Universal rejected that led to The Ladyboyz. I enjoyed playing heavy rock’ n’roll music without having to channel some sleazebag or a homicidal maniac. This music was heavy, wild and loud, but fun. Raul Sanchez, who I’d known for many years by then, was the first I thought of to play guitar alongside me, Pat Bourke on bass, and of course, Gus Agars on drums. I love The Ape.

  RECORD LABEL: Bang! Records

  CORE BAND MEMBERS: Greg Perkins (vocals/guitar), Raul Sanchez (guitar), Gus Agars (drums/vocals), Pat Bourke (bass/piano).

  SAVE THE PALAIS

  I’d never aspired to be involved in politics.

  The very idea of getting involved in that sort of thing seemed ridiculous, and not very much fun anyway. But sometimes somebody has just got to stand up and do something. The Palais Theatre campaign: my very successful manipulation of the political process in 2014.

  The Palais Theatre is a state-owned, heritage-listed, but completely rundown art deco 3000 seat theatre near the beach in St Kilda. Although hosting thousands of local and international acts for more than 70 years, in 2014 it hadn’t had any sort of standard maintenance for decades and was becoming increasingly dilapidated. It was being constantly used, but seemingly run into ground. There was a group of people who had been lobbying successive state governments saying that it is the largest seated theatre venue in Australia, and if they let it deteriorate any further it wouldn’t be able to be used at all. The argument was that the government owned it so they should cough up and get the restoration done.

  But no one would do anything. It was really strange that it was such a non-issue with all these politicians. I mean, just look at the basics. If you have 3000 people going to see a show at the Palais before and after the show, they’re all in the cafes, bars and restaurants around St Kilda spending money. Along with Luna Park, it’s basically the nucleus of the local economy. You take the Palais out of the local St Kilda area and it’s a very different outlook. Physically, culturally and economically.

  But putting all that to one side, I basically just love the building. It’s a huge deco thing with towers and turrets. It’s beautifully monolithic and I’ve always loved it. I loved it way before I ever performed there. I loved it before I even went through the front doors. My love of the Palais is nothing about having great memories of gigs I played or anything like that. It’s just a great love of its physicality and an appreciation of its history and of what it means to St Kilda.

  Anyway, this group was lobbying the state government for many many years with no success. But in 2014 there was a campaign with a guy called Serge Tholman behind it. He was getting people involved and running this campaign called ‘I LOVE MY PALAIS’. He was approaching actors, writers, musicians – anyone with some sort of a profile – and the idea was that you just had a photo of yourself taken with the I LOVE MY PALAIS sign in your hands.

  The Rolling Stones played four nights in a row there back in 1964, and when they toured again in 2013 Mick Jagger made special mention of the building, urging the state government to wake up to its responsibilities. Even this made no difference.

  Serge approached me and of course I said that I was happy to help in whatever way I could; I said that it was important and I’d do ‘whatever it takes’. Saying the words ‘whatever it takes’ was a little bit of a flippant cliché, but I did say it. So Serge grabbed me from time to time during the campaign, usually to do any interview about the Palais.

  Then he called me one day and said, ‘Tex, I must see you, I have an idea.’ I was on my way to a rehearsal so I said I could meet him for 10 minutes. We dashed into a cafe and he says, ‘Tex, you will run as an independent in the state election.’

  ‘This guy’s lost it,’ I thought.

  The Palais is in a marginal seat, the electorate of Albert Park, and Martin Foley, the ALP guy, had a majority of less than one per cent. Serge’s idea was that I would run in the election with just one policy – to save the Palais. The margin in the electorate was so slim that any vote changes – anything that took votes away from one candidate and to another – could really make a difference. I thought he was insane. But the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like mischief. And you know how I love mischief.

  Okay, so now I’m running as a candidate in an election, with just one policy. But in the context of the votes in that area it’s a significant one and one that gets lots of media exposure. I was on the front page of The Age when it was announced that I was running and immediately the phone started ringing.

  The thinking was that we expected Foley to win, and we wanted him to win as he was the incumbent Labor guy. I met with the Liberals but they weren’t prepared to offer any deal beyond saying that they ‘liked’ the Palais. (Phew.) The Greens were right behind me but they weren’t expected to win. So basically I had to make a deal with Foley.

  Not only was I dealing with Martin but also his supporters. Labor people came out hard against me. One particular columnist launched a series of very ugly attacks not only on me, but the Palais itself and St Kilda in general. ‘Fuck the Palais, let it save itself,’ said she. ‘Who goes to St Kilda anyway? Yeah sure it was cool in the ’90s but now it’s an uncool junkie sinkhole.’

  While she flapped and squawked about ‘hidden motives’, and that I ‘didn’t belong on the ballot’, she missed the whole point of the exercise: I didn’t want votes, I wanted to make some noise and make a deal. While she tried to connect ‘punk rock’ with the Palais (what the?) and somehow make this about the glory days of the ’90s, the deal was being done. She and her online congratulators, missing the point once again, compared me to Peter Garrett and Bono. I gotta admit that hurt. Meanwhile the deal was done, but I had to keep quiet until Labor made its policy announcement.

  The other thing I noticed during that time was Labor’s growing hatred towards the Greens and Independents. If yer not with us, yer against us! It’s sad. It’s like they resent anyone more Left than them. The Greens have stolen their soul, as Labor try to stay as close to the centre as possible, gradually and inevitably becoming irrelevant. Still smarting from the fallout over Gillard’s coalition with the Greens, Labor believes the voters turned on them because of the policies they were forced into. But really, it was just that Gillard was a terrible saleswoman and Rudd is a narcissistic nutjob.

  Anyway, Martin wanted to take on my policy and that made me (happily) redundant. I agreed to endorse him and give him my preferences. And that’s what happened. He personally wanted to save the Palais anyway but he didn’t have the leverage to go back to his party and tell them that they needed to put some funding into its restoration. Me saying I was running gave him that leverage as they couldn’t risk me giving my preferences to someone else, particularly the Liberals – which of course I didn’t want to do. But this pressure made them realise that there was a very real possibility that he could lose his seat, so the whole thing worked perfectly. Anyway, it was just the right thing to do, and he’s a good man.

  Labor announced a thirteen-million-dollar contribution to its restoration, I endorsed Foley and the policy and then from that point on I told people not to vote for me. I kept campaigning right up until the election telling people NOT to vote for me and they’d say, ‘What a unique, refreshing approach, I’m voting for you.’ It was a total Catch-22. For a little while I was sweating with the idea that I might actually win, and that would’ve been the worst result of all.

  I don’t think I ever actually said the words ‘Vote For Me’, but in the end about 1300 people did. And that was the sort of margin that could have made a difference if my preferences went elsewhere.


  Something that nobody knew at the time was that I had the backing of the CFMEU. Dave Noonan, the head of the union, is an old friend of The Beasts Of Bourbon. He and I had a meeting during the election campaign. We threw around a few ideas including a union green ban if it got to the demolition stage. It was good to have his support. He’s a good man and far from the thug union boss the conservative filth try to portray him as. Although being an old friend of The Beasts Of Bourbon wouldn’t necessarily help his reputation.

  I have to say, I bluffed my way through this whole thing. At the start I had no idea, but I learned quick. The mental pressure I was under for those four weeks was immense, and I was glad when it was over.

  In the end Foley and the Labor party won and today the Palais is in good nick and continues to function. Me? I voted for the Greens and went back to doing whatever I was doing before.

  OTHER STUFF

  There have been many one-off collaborations, coalitions and collisions over the years. So many I will probably forget to mention a few but what I definitely remember is recording a version of Kev Carmody’s ‘Darkside’ for the Cannot Buy My Soul tribute album and show put together by Paul Kelly. A song Kev wrote with a group of street kids from the notorious Logan city, south of Brisbane, it’s a spoken word street poetry docu-drama that transports me to that world with startling efficiency.

  In 2007 I was asked to contribute a song to the album No Woman’s Man and to choose a song normally associated with a woman. ‘I Am Woman’ by Helen Reddy was the first and only song that jumped into my head. My ragged version apparently offended some people. Other people were offended by the very fact I chose that particular song. (A feminist anthem can’t be sung by a dude? For fuck’s sake.) Looking back they should consider themselves lucky I didn’t go for ‘Natural Woman’ by Aretha Franklin.