Reviewed onSunday February 28 (photo by Katrina Clarke)
It’s an odd thing to sit beneath the uninterrupted canopy of the sky and listen to songs about incarceration. Indeed, at first the striking contrast between setting and sound worked against Far From Folsom, a night of Johnny Cash covers led by Australia’s equivalent to the Man In Black, Tex Perkins. Audience members listened to songs about injustice while snacking on overpriced containers of cheese and fig jam, tapping their shoes along to the line in ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ in which Cash rails against “rich folks … smoking big cigars”.
Things weren’t helped by the shakiness of the support either. Though Vic Simms tried his best, his lukewarm, cover-heavy set failed to connect with the audience, and he was met with relative silence as he belted out songs by the likes of The Everly Brothers and wiggled across the stage, his gold shirt catching in the dying light. The bad vibes were palpable; even the giraffes a few cages over must have felt them.
That said, perhaps Simms can be forgiven. After all, the biggest act on the bill struggled too: for the first few songs of his set, Perkins failed to find communion with the audience, and a couple of his jokes fell heavily on some very deaf ears. And then there was that strange vibe, made even stranger by the mocked-up prison shirts for sale in the merchandise tent.
But the longer Perkins strutted about the stage, intermittently joined by the talented Rachel Tidd, the more natural the whole thing felt. The humour of the songs bubbled to the surface: the morbid ‘25 Minutes To Go’ was as farcical as it was ferocious, and Perkins’ decision to rephrase ‘San Quentin Blues’ as a song about despising Taronga Zoo rather than the prison paid off in droves. “Taronga Zoo, I hate every inch of you,” Perkins gleefully spat, and the audience cheered and laughed.
Eventually, almost an hour in, the evening began to make sense. As Perkins strolled around the stage as though it was his own living room, so at home he could have started to undress and it wouldn’t have seemed out of place, the strangeness of the night settled. The truth of the matter revealed itself. Johnny Cash didn’t write songs about prisons. He wrote songs about the world. He didn’t write songs about death. He wrote them about life.
