5 minute read
TEX MESSAGE
Tex Perkins and Matt Walker collaborate once again for the Fat Rubber Band’s second album.
By Bernard Zuel
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Even reading this it’s possible, no matter your sex, that your shoulders may broaden, your voice deepen and a sudden desire will rise up to heartily slap your best friend on the back. It’s fair to say that a considerable degree of amiable testosterone fills the Surry Hills hotel room occupied by Tex Perkins and Matt Walker, two men with great hair, varying styles of facial fur and faces that say, ‘I’ve been a few places, seen a few things, done a few more’. There may be chest hair involved. Perkins is in denim, Walker in a pearl-coloured Western shirt, and it’s Perkins name up front of their latest venture, the second album for the slow-groove blues/laidback roots rock Tex Perkins and The Fat Rubber Band. But for all intents and purposes, the pair is a singular unit, as songwriters, bandleaders and vibe-merchants. They met in the mid-‘90s when Melbourne long-termer, Walker (a multifunction polis of a guitarist, capable of anything and described by Perkins as “a surprise package: you never know what he is up to really”) was a new solo artist and Perkins was in his peak Cruel Sea years. By then Perkins, who feels like he’s approaching 2m tall and is built like a stockman who will be having that second steak for breakfast, thanks love, was a literal and figurative giant on the Sydney independent scene. He’d come down more than a decade earlier from Brisbane as a 17-year-old who’d had “this stunted existence growing up in Brisbane, where everything was kind of horrible really” – from Bjelke-Petersen’s brute force police and roving bogan thugs, to questionable school days – and found an inner-city community all in (long-legged) walking distance, “and people didn’t treat me like shit”. What took them from a couple of musicians playing together to a collaboration where they would write and work, and sometimes even think, as one? “I’ve tried to work with other people and I don’t know, the environment, settings, timing, it just hasn’t been conducive to a natural [arrangement],” says Perkins. “But Matt and I had already been spending quite a bit of time together through the Man In Black [the semi-stage show, telling the Johnny Cash story through tales and songs, with Perkins, naturally, playing Cash] and knew each other well.” Walker says, “I reckon we both knew, even though we hadn’t really spoken about it, that we had a lot of crossover influences that informed both our music. We had been circling around, crossing paths every now and then, back to the 90s when I would support Cruel Sea”. The timing, the Cash magic even, was right and inevitably, “I started getting song ideas and thinking, shit, it would be cool if Tex sang this one, it suits him more than me,” remembers Walker. Perkins was amenable. And the appeal of the not-quite-opposites is clear. “Matt’s just a really great player who can make really simple things sound really effective,” says Perkins. “He’s a seasoned player and you can sense the effortlessness in his playing, but also the economy: he is very direct when he needs to be. He can be anything that [the song] needs to be. That’s why our bread-and-butter gigs are duos.”
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For Walker, “I reckon, stylistically, you’re not often in a situation where it feels completely right, and that’s what it’s like to me. I never think, ‘Oh I don’t want to play that song’, it’s always, ‘fuck yeah’.” He says he sees in the music and artists that they might bring to each other’s attention a commonality in “the feeling within the music, the important parts. It’s got to have an earthiness, it’s gotta have a bit of toughness, then other songs are really beautiful.” Other World, the new album, will be defined by the notes not played and the space not filled, even the presence not imposed. Tracks like ‘This Monin’ (sic), and ‘The Devil Ain’t Buyin’,’ are examples of songs that deliberately don’t push just when you think they might, just when you are sure they must. And that is by no means suggesting it’s a soft record; it’s a band showing restraint, the playing of Walker, drummer Roger Bergodaz, bass player Steve Hadley and percussionist Evan Richards sliding up almost slyly. “I think that’s more the case with this record than the other [self-titled] record,” says Perkins. “There’s a lot more subtleties on this record; we’re not striking the hammer as hard, and it’s not as necessary to do so.” Walker describes Other World as “sonically different to the first one” and can pinpoint even further. “Maybe the rhythm section has a different role in this then it had on the first. Maybe the first album was a bit more guitar based – a lot of songs were written on the 12-string and that was spearheading it – but with this we were often bring in new songs fresh into the studio and the guys in the band would just set up such a solid foundation.” Perkins backs this impression, saying “we knew each other as a unit a lot better when we came to record their second record. We were putting the band together, literally, on the first record. Everyone now knows their roles and their strengths so songs could feel almost complete very quickly.” This gentleness, this amiability, even extends to what may sound like straightforward advice, like that in one new song, ‘Nobody Owes You Nothin’,’ that offers some hard-earned – dare we say manly – wisdom. “What I find with advice-based songs, philosophical songs, ethicsbased songs, they’re actually pointing back at myself. Me reminding myself of stuff,” says Perkins. “And I think a lot of it’s based on fear: I wouldn’t want this to happen. I almost write a song to prepare myself for this moral or ethical situation I might find myself in. A lot of times you write a song in the situation will literally appear a couple of years later, and you go, fuck this is what that song was about. “So, you write a song that sounds like you are pointing outwards and it’s actually very much inwards.” Do they listen to themselves, take their own advice? “Eventually,” says Perkins, as Walker chuckles beside him, knowingly. “Eventually. After you’ve fucked up.”
