Presentation Night featuring Bob Murphy & Tex Perkins

Former Bulldogs captain Bob Murphy and his sidekick, Australian rock legend Tex Perkins, took a packed Spiegeltent crowd through an hour-and-a-half of footy and music and it made for a damn entertaining night in.

Presentation Night - Bob Murphy. Picture: Supplied by Adelaide Cabaret Festival

“Footy and music, music and footy, are they friend or are they foe?” former Bulldogs captain Bob Murphy asks at the start of Presentation Night.

“One thing we do know – there’s a fair bit if bulls**t in both of them.”

Murphy and his sidekick, Australian rock legend Tex Perkins, took a packed Spiegeltent crowd through an hour-and-a-half of footy and music bulls**t on Thursday and it made for a damn entertaining night in.

Murphy is a natural host – erudite, humble and funny, he’s the anti-Sam Newman.

Perkins’s ability to spin a yarn is famous, and together they make a classic odd couple.

In a vaguely scripted show Murphy and Perkins discuss times when rock and footy most certainly did not mix well (Angry Anderson in the fake Batmobile at the 1991 Grand Final, Meat Loaf in 2011), Tex’s early musical career in garage bands like the creatively named Toilet Duck, and how a 17-year-old Murphy was convinced by a photographer to take off his shirt and do chin-ups for a newspaper shoot.

Presentation Night - Tex Perkins. Picture: Supplied by Adelaide Cabaret Festival

It’s a little bit RocKwiz, a little bit The Front Bar.

Murphy tells how he was destroyed by a heckle from a Crows fan in the cauldron of hostility that was AAMI Stadium and Tex shares the story of how a well-aimed Crown Lager bottle split his head open during a night where he went to war against a Beast of Bourbon crowd he didn’t like.

Near the end Murphy regales the crowd with a reworking of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire called Blaming the Umpire, and unfortunately that’s the extent of the music.

A couple of songs from Tex, who has an amazing back catalogue from his time with the Beasts, The Cruel Sea and Tex, Don and Charlie to choose from, would have taken Presentation Night to the next level.

Hopefully we’ll see them back for next year’s Cab Fest.

Presentation Night featuring Bob Murphy & Tex Perkins

Australia

Rating: ***1/2

The Famous Spiegeltent

June 20