The way that Gregory Stephen Perkins – known to the world as Tex Perkins – is spoken about, you’d think he’s more mythological beast than man. The veteran performer is revered for his work in pub rock, blues, alt-country and adult contemporary circles over the course of several different bands and an extensive solo catalogue.
As a figure of Australian music, he’s omnipotent and omnipresent – if he’s not making an album, he’s touring it, and vice versa. He’s just finished with the former – a new record with his long-time collaborators, The Dark Horses, entitled Tunnel At The End Of The Light.
“Originally, I had planned to call this album Journey To The End Of The Day,” he explains. “I often map out albums. This album, you could say it’s from midnight to midnight. There’s a middle of the night, there’s a morning, there’s an afternoon, there’s an evening and then there’s the end. It’s seasonal, even. It’s cyclical. The last album had a very similar opening sentiment – an opening of the eyes, seeing the world around it and thinking, ‘What’ve I got to deal with today?’ There’s a lot of existentialism. That can be positive, and it can be not so positive. It can be, ‘Why do we bother?’ but it can also be, ‘Why shouldn’t we bother?’”
Perkins is, as one might expect, the kind of interviewee who takes whatever ball you throw his way and runs with it. Just as in his own songwriting, he mixes gentle ramblings and meanderings with vivid imagery and the occasional bit of storytelling – which, really, is fitting, given that his own approach to creating new music is the very next subject we touch upon. As far as Perkins is concerned, everything he creates is both contextual and circumstantial.
“A lot of the songs that I write are stemmed from their environment,” he says. “Through the various bands I’ve been in, sometimes a song would spring out of nowhere – it would just appear in front of me. I’d have to decide which band it would come to life with. I think the best way, though, is to assemble those musicians and start playing. Hopefully someone’s recording your ramblings, and you pick out the parts that seem to work. You could be jamming for 20 minutes and find ten seconds of that whole jam and be like, ‘Hey! That part!’ It can build up again completely from there.”
As logic would predict, Perkins and his Dark Horses are following up the completion and release of Tunnel At The End Of The Light with a tour in support of it. When it comes to his demographic, Perkins is incredibly self-aware. There’s the rock-oriented folk who are best acquainted with the man through acts like Beasts Of Bourbon and The Cruel Sea. Concurrently, Perkins has also drawn in a crowd that knows him best for his quieter solo material, as well as his many tribute shows in which he portrays the legendary Johnny Cash. So, who’s coming to see Tex Perkins these days? People like him, apparently.
“What I’ve really noticed is that my core audience is my age – late 40s, early 50s,” he says. “That’s who I generally see – the people that have known about me for the last 20, 30 years. You also tend to notice different people that come to shows depending on the venues that I’m playing. If we’re playing a sweaty, rock’n’roll club, it’s a rock’n’roll audience. If we play a nice comfortable club, you’ll get the people that like the nice comfort. I don’t think I’m picking up the teenage audience – they’re not really in tune with what I’m doing. It’s still pretty broad, though. I try to put the right crowd in the right venue, and therefore the right audience will come.”
Of course, there’s no rest for the wicked – and Perkins has proven to be one of the most wicked figures out there. As well as dates with The Dark Horses, Perkins has some regional dates planned with long-time cohort Charlie Owen (remember Tex, Don & Charlie? He’s Charlie). Even more curiously, Perkins has a run of shows coming up with television personality and occasional singer Justine Clarke. Although seemingly an odd couple, the pairing makes more sense as Perkins paints the picture.
“Justine and I have known one another for something like 25 years,” he says. “We’re almost family. We’ve done little things together over the years – we used to have dinner parties and we’d sing songs and make stuff up on a four-track. One time, we decided we should do a show together. We started to collect a whole bunch of songs for us to do together, and the music of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood kept coming up. We picked a song of theirs, then another, then another… eventually we were like, ‘Do you just wanna do all of them?’ We did one of these shows about two years ago, and I’m very excited to be doing them again.”
Perkins also vouches for Clarke’s work at her day job as a Play School presenter. “With all respect to the others, everyone knows the A-team of Play School is Justine and Rhys [Muldoon],” he says. “I know it, my kids know it – fuck The Wiggles off, it’s all about those two!”
Tex Perkins And The Dark Horses have Tunnel At The End Of The Light out now through Dark Horse/Inertia. Catch them at Lizotte’s Newcastle onSaturday July 18 and Oxford Art Factory on Sunday July 19.
