At 53 years of age, Perkins doesn’t know the meaning of the word hiatus – but a memoir published last year has made him ponder life’s pace in a time of loss.
When Perkins chats to Beat, he’s sitting in his country NSW home’s comfiest chair. He hasn’t had breakfast yet, a detail that tugs at him during our phone call. Perkins, member of Australia’s most lauded rock groups The Beasts of Bourbon, The Cruel Sea, Tex, Don & Charlie is promoting yet another new group – this time Tex Perkins and The Fat Rubber Band with long-time friend Matt Walker, playing at the upcoming Heart of St Kilda concert, a fundraiser to help feed the homeless in what he calls his “chosen home”.
The Heart of St Kilda is hosted at another location close to Perkins’ heart – the Palais Theatre. In 2014 the singer ran for state government as an independent candidate in Albert Park, purely to secure funding for the increasingly decrepit venue from incumbent Labor member Martin Foley.
“It was a form of electoral blackmail to influence policy making,” Perkins says.
As soon as the Palais had funding committed, Perkins dropped out of the race, satisfied with what had been done, albeit not completely (“They spent $25 million and the backstage is exactly the same!”).
Musing on the “physicality” of the Palais leads Perkins to happily regale plenty of gig tales, many of which appeared in last year’s memoir, Tex. The career retrospective unexpectedly caused the singer, perhaps for the first time, to take stock of his relentless career.
“Not that I regret the many collaborations, but possibly I’ve spread myself thin. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s that book…I plan to do a lot less, even though there are two projects in the pipeline as we speak,” he laughs darkly.
The songwriter might have outrun his prolific tendencies if it weren’t for this year’s tragedy; two original Beasts of Bourbon members and lifelong friends Brian Hooper and Spencer P. Jones, passed away in April and August respectively.
“When Spencer was still here, the idea popped up after Brian [Hooper]’s benefit [concert] off the amazing strength Brian and Spencer showed by doing that gig. It seemed like anything was possible at that point, and we all said quick, let’s all get into a studio.’ Brian died a week later.”
“The idea was then to get Spencer on tape one last time. We managed to get one song out of him but we recorded ten other songs with a completely different version of the band, and now we have that project,” Perkins explains.
“Beasts of Bourbon was a band I started with Spencer, and I really feel now that he’s gone it’s not quite the Beasts of Bourbon as we knew it.”
Almost forty years ago, Perkins departed home at 17, the spectacle of rock’n’ roll bedazzling him in his chaotic first group, The Dum Dums. Songwriting however, quickly trumped Perkins’ showmanship in The Beasts of Bourbon. Asked what flicked the switch, he doesn’t quite know how to answer, instead offering a Spencer anecdote.
“I had this song on the first Beasts of Bourbon record called ‘Evil Ruby’. It was just a bunch of lyrics and I expected it to be like a lot of the songs I had written up until then… I lived with Spencer Jones at the time, we’d often get together in the lounge room and I’d write out these lyrics…The final lines were ‘So the moral of this story, if you don’t want to end like Dan, forget that girl and take that train’ but I didn’t have a final line. I paused and he yelled ‘And leave for Vietnam!’ and I went ‘fuck yeah!’”
