Perkins - Tex

About Tex

Tex Perkins embodies rocknroll.

He has the swagger, presence and indomitable attitude that comes from three decades fronting some of Australias most intense and spirited bands: The Cruel Sea, Beasts of Bourbon, Thug, Dark Horses, Tex Don & Charlie, The Ladyboyz and Toilet Duck?

Texs no-holds-barred, laugh-out-loud memoir is written with brutal truth, raw power and feral humour, and lays bare an extraordinary life played out on the road, on the stage and on the edge.

To my beautiful children. Stop reading right now.

Seriously.

(Mum, youve already read too much.)

STOP THROWING BOTTLES AT THE BAND THROW THEM AT MEEEE.

Yes, here I was onstage at the Lava Lounge in Melbourne telling our audience to stop hurling bottles at the rest of the guys in the band. If they wanted a target, then aim for the frontman. And they did. And they hit me. Hard.

How had the Beasts of Bourbon disintegrated or ascended to this level of full-on confrontation with the audience? I asked for it.

This was probably the darkest, meanest, most in-your-face Beasts line-up. It was 1997. Rowland S. Howard, who supported us that night, wrote later that we were a lazy, insolent, cocksure, sneering, lascivious, threatening bunch of men. He was right. Rowland also wrote that this gig was truly one of the greatest nights of my life and that he later overheard a young girl breathlessly saying, It was just like Altamont!

How had it come to this?

We had sound-checked and then gone to Chinatown to eat at a Japanese restaurant where we got on the sak a special kind of drunk where anything can happen. By the time we got back to the venue we were pretty activated me most of all. Im bouncing off the walls before the first bands even start.

Rowland goes on first and it seems to me the audience arent paying enough attention to him. Hes playing solo and people are talking and ignoring him. This is Rowland Howard, you stupid fucks, ex-Boys Next Door and Birthday Party, one of the greats! Im embarrassed and incredibly annoyed, pacing around watching from the side of the stage muttering to myself like an ice freak.

I decide there needs to be some more noise onstage to get the crowd to shut up. A drum kit is already set up for The Blackeyed Susans on next. I walk onstage and sit down behind it. Rowland says, And on the drums, ladies and gentleman, Tex Perkins.

I start playing. Im thinking Im doing well. Not that Im a drummer, but its sounding all right. But nothing changes. The crowd are still looking uninterested. I storm off.

Next on, The Blackeyed Susans, now the crowd are into it? Dickheads. Shit-eating pricks! Fuck these shit stains! Im furious. About to explode.

By the time the Beasts come on its ugly. Im sneering and taunting the audience. The crew are copping it, from the band AND the crowd. Microphones are getting bashed. Amps kicked over. Were all drunk, as usual, and were playing... pretty well... but its angry playing. Fuck you playing.

Pretty soon things start getting thrown. Rubbish and bottles are lobbing onto the stage. Theyre sort of aiming at the stage, and kinda at us. A few are lobbing dangerously close to Brian Henry Hooper, our bass player.

Brian is over it. He steps up to the mic. Throw whatever you like at him, but not at us.

I grab the mic again. Yeah, they cant take it. DONT THROW BOTTLES AT THE BAND THROW THEM AT MEEEE.

And then you could count it down. Three. Two. One. And from the back of the room this perfectly lobbed Crown Lager bottle sails maybe 30 or 40 feet, arcing through the air and cracking me in the middle of the forehead.

Ive seen a photo of this moment and youve never witnessed so much childlike glee on the faces of the audience as Im hit. Just at the moment of contact they look so happy totally entertained, like preschoolers watching a Punch and Judy puppet show.

Anyway, the hit is a beauty. My legs go wobbly. I buckle.

Theres blood streaming down my face. I sink to my knees.

But then I decide that I want I need to keep playing. Partly its blind rage, but mostly its defiance. I cant let it end here. No, this has just begun.

I can literally taste blood on my lips now the best kind, my own! We play more songs (after all Im a professional). Blood is streaming down my chest Im that worked up and the room is so hot the claret pours out of me like a tap. Im completely rabid! I start grabbing whatever I can find onstage and hurling it at the crowd. Plastic bottles, microphone stands, milk crates. Then monitors from the front of the stage. People scream, and run! Its complete madness not so much of a meltdown as an eruption with more and more blood.

Security run onstage, tackle me to the ground and drag me off. The crowd are still baying like a pack of wolves chained to a lynch mob.

I give in to security pretty easily. Im barely aware of what is happening. But I remember the curtains slowly closing. Bottles are still being thrown, a few getting through the ever smaller gap as the curtain closes.

Im off to hospital for stitches. As Im waiting at emergency, photographer Marty Williams turns up also needing medical attention. Hed been in the photo pit at the front of the stage and copped a few meant for me.

What had just happened left me totally exhilarated. Im in a good mood, a very good mood, like Ive just won a grand final or something. Instead of being consumed with anger or remorse I felt elated, and mischievous. Marty starts taking photos of me covered in blood, sneaking around inside one of the hospitals supply rooms. Another of me, limbs askew, posing on the hospitals waiting-room floor. A few years later its the cover of the Beasts live album Low Life.

When I look back on it today, I guess I did ask for it. I told the crowd to throw shit at me. And they did as I asked. Thank you. Now this wasnt the first time Id had things thrown at me or the first gig where the audience were my adversary. But the one thing that sticks with me from that night, as I was staggering around the stage covered in blood, is I had this really strong sense that this to be bleeding profusely, defiantly singing in front of a ferocious, ugly rocknroll band to an angry mob was what Id always wanted.

That this was what it was all about.

You probably know me as Tex, but I was born Gregory Stephen Perkins in Darwin on 28 December 1964.

But I will answer to Greg, Gregory, Perko, Mr Perkins, The Ape, Dad or Darling.

My dads name was Robert Adolphous Perkins (aka Bob Adolph). Mum was Auriel Joan Anderson. All my brothers and sisters are a lot older than me and were born in different places. I was the only child born in Darwin. Before I came along there were two older sisters, then two brothers, then me. We were white, lower middle-class, Labor-voting Catholics.

The Perkins mob are Queenslanders. The family lineage comes from Thomas Perkins who settled near Toowoomba in 1864. He left England at the age of forty-two and came out here as a free settler, married an ex-convict Irish girl and theres been six generations since.