Tex Perkins: swagger, panache and buckets of (his own) blood

There is nothing smug or Sting-like in Tex Perkins. He’s creative, sarcastic and wears a Wrangler shirt with style.

Tex Perkins’s book begins with buckets of blood. His own.

Memoirs about positive people who jog are not for me. I far prefer a big fat rock memoir with a black cover and razor-wire font. You don’t read these books for redemption or life skills, though, strangely, they sometimes contain them.

Often a toxic tale, say Scar Tissue by Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, will squeak out some clean memories. Expunged of chemicals and body fluids, like a donor organ. Hence the obligatory ‘‘detox’’ bit at the end of some rock biographies: Sting assuming full lotus position or Elton John hanging another Rembrandt in the loo.

If a rock star lives to the last page they will share the spoils of their pirate code. So in a bestselling memoir such as Keith Richards’s Life there will be a smattering of homey photos showing a beautiful Nordic wife, some kids and a dehydrated shrunken head version of the road dog himself, usually smoking a big spliff. “Still got it!” they seem to croak from the depths of Connecticut or Tuscany.

Some may end on a tidy note but the meat of a music memoir is the mess. Tex Perkins knows his genre. Like me, I bet he once wasted a whole Sunday reading all the juicy bits in the unauthorised Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods, or the authorised one of Mariane Faithfull,and copped a truckload of Dionysian self-destructive impulses. His book begins with buckets of blood. His own.

Live (but barely conscious) on stage with the Beasts of Bourbon in 1997, Tex (real name Gregory) is baptised with a bottle of Crown Lager that lands squarely on his forehead. Covered in blood he keeps performing as if baptised, and his recollection is effusive: “this — to be bleeding profusely, defiantly singing in front of a ferocious, ugly rock ’n’ roll band to an angry mob — was what I’d always wanted”.

Perkins reveals a somewhat ambivalent relationship to violence. Born in Darwin, raised in Brisbane, this boy as thin “as a streak of pelican piss” is continuously beaten up, first by his elder brothers, then by teachers at St Joseph’s boarding school in Nudgee, then by any Brisbane boofhead who doesn’t like the look of him.

The abuse he describes seems arbitrary, but serves to plant the seeds of his dark humour and subtly defensive persona. For every insult he hurls at himself you can’t help but think he’s getting in before anyone else can.

The axis of a good rock memoir pivots on the escape from mediocrity, boring people and church. In Tex, Perkins dispenses each one lovingly and swiftly.

By page 31, it is Christmas 1978 and he is given a guitar. “Phew,” you think, at least he won’t be getting shock treatment like Lou Reed. But, oh dear, a page later he has abandoned the acoustic instrument because he’s not “an equipment kind of guy”.

It doesn’t matter. By page 35 Perkins is 15, has quit school and seen AC/DC and the Ramones live. Promptly he goes from classic rock to post-punk and his mum is taking in all his jeans: “No more flares, no more Hawaiian shirts, no more old-fart bands.”

The home piercing of his ear is painful and messy, with “blood everywhere”. Viscera tinges almost every adolescent memory but the narrative is also cleanly mapped.

It is apparent quite early in this book that Perkins is something of a meticulous outlaw. Equal parts Mick and Keith. His rebellion resume for dead-end jobs has a mathematical grace to it: “Over the next 12 months I had half a dozen different jobs. Most of them would last exactly eight weeks.”

After a short stint in a band called Corpse of Christ, Perkins forms Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums and is invited to play in Sydney. Promptly the band members (average age 16) use masking tape to inscribe the words DUM DUMS to the side of a Dodge van and drive south.

As a storyteller Perkins milks dry every romantic rock and ocker vernacular cliche. This is a man with a voice like molasses served over gravel, but he rarely reflects on his “art”, his talent or his methods.

Instead the pathway to success is full of missteps, reversals and deliberate self-sabotage. When he fails in London at 18, he moves to Adelaide. For the subculture apparently. This is what makes this book so unpredictable and endearing. Perkins is talented but ambivalent, ambitious but cagey. Just when you think our antihero is going to hang out with Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth all night in New York, he doesn’t. Instead he goes to a hotel room with his sweetheart Kristyna Higgins to watch The Twilight Zone on TV.

This book makes generous use of the word f..k. But it is in no way crass. Perkins reveres “the rock” while chipping away at it slowly, joke by joke. His recollection is fresh in that it breaks genre with unexpected meditations on love, Aussie rules football, man-crushes and clothes. He admits to uncool acts and transgressions against punk. In fact, he happens to like the ­Eagles — the official ‘‘old-fart band’’.

This book goes easy on tedious technical information about recording sessions, has few petty gripes (though Jagger and PJ Proby do not come out well) and, sweetly, devotes a lot of time to friends, family and relationships. The homage he pays to both his wives and all four children highlights his tenderness.

Which leads me finally to the question of success. Did Tex Perkins blow it by shying away from mainstream popularity and persisting instead with eclectic projects such as playing Johnny Cash in a musical cabaret and crooning with his covers band the Ladyboyz?

Maybe. But only technically. By the last page Perkins is living on a goat-covered mountain in northern NSW fronting yet another “new” band called THE APE.

There is nothing smug or superannuated or Sting-like about him. He’s creative and sarcastic and can still wear a Wrangler shirt with mean panache.

Yes, sighs the happy reader. He’s still got it.

Anna Johnson is a Sydney-based writer and artist.

Tex

By Tex Perkins,

with Stuart Coupe

Macmillan, 352pp, $34.95