The Cruel Sea

Stop! Stop right there buddy. Don't move a muscle `cause I'm gonna set the scene a little bit here. I'm gonna mix us up a little gumbo. A little visual stew. Yep that's it. Now turn around. Give me the keys to that Falcon hardtop `cause I'm gonna gun her down that long golden mile. Whooeeee! Wait a minute...Hang on! Did you hear that? Sssh! There it is again. Shut the f*#k up!.... Shoot! It aint nothin' but that long low lonesome moan of the wind in those high electric wires. And who's that stragglin' by in the heat and the dust looking just like Harry Dean Stanton? And what's that concoction he's listening to on his two-bit transistor radio? Hell, if I didn't know better I'd swear it was the old original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green running down their instrumental hit Albatross. Maybe with some echoes of Ennio Morricone and the Tornados. Maybe a hint of Africa with a dash of what's been labelled `world' music.... Okay. Looking good! Now, let's add a little element of danger. Let's just sit right down here next to this old red-belly black snake. Go ahead. Reach out and touch it... Or maybe we could dissolve out of this scene into an old time lynching. You know the kind. Swamps. Creeping vines. Muffled screams. Cool Hand Luke. All right! So you got all that? Now just keep those images in your mind. Once you've got it all in place let's put Lee Hazelwood out the front and let him bellow a bit. Let him growl from deep down in his bones. He'd be singing something like this..."just like snake skin, shed your old self, burn off the excess, use your new mind, just turn around, forget what you’ve been told, let yourself go, leave yourself behind." Got all that! Good. Cause now you're somewhere in the vicinity of The Cruel Sea. Cool huh?

But there's far more to The Cruel Sea than a few sketchy impressions. They've been around long enough to have a history of their own. Initially they named themselves after an obscure Ventures B-side which itself was named after a Nicholas Monsarrat war-time novel and they played surf music and early seventies reggae. They didn't take themselves too seriously then. At least not until Tex Perkins signed up for the ride. He was making a quid and keeping the wolf from the door by doing sound for various bands including this instrumental one. He was intrigued by them and suggested that they needed a singer and he knew just the guy. Himself! Tex's charismatic persona was just the thing they needed. An ironic situation as it's been reported in other interviews that the band was formed because they were ‘tired of the limitations of being three chords to support the personal and sexual politics of a lead singer’. Jim Elliot, the gentlemanly drummer from The Cruel Sea, who was winding down at home on Boxing Day after flying back from the West Australian leg of their current tour laughed heartily at the suggestion.

"Well...we didn't do it to get away from lead singers," he smiled. "It's a great thing for a band to be able to do. We didn't even know Tex at the time. When we were playing instrumentally we always hoped that we would attract the right singer and of course we did. Thankfully. And he's the man."

Perkins, as you may already know, is also involved in other bands and side projects like The Beasts of Bourbon and the Don, Tex and Charlie album. This doesn't seem to have caused too much conflict within The Cruel Sea.

"No, not at all," Jim states firmly. "As far as being a musician and an artist he's a workaholic. He just has music coursing through his body twenty four hours a day and he just simply has too much of it for one band. Thankfully, he's never tried to make us play music that wouldn't work with us. You know he has `the Beasts' to do his heavier stuff. The stuff they do and his solo album, stuff like that wouldn't be suitable for us. I think it's great. It's very admirable. I mean, Kenny (the bass player) and I, actually did his solo album tour with him so it's all still pretty close. I say ‘good on him’. You know I doubt if people would ever have heard of us if he hadn't joined us because we're actually a fairly lazy collective of musicians. You know we could have played at parties and done the odd gig, but I don't think we would have ever been a success on CD. He really is the motivator."

Four albums, an international tour and a string of awards later The Cruel Sea have been accepted into the pantheon of successful Australian bands. But coming out of the inner-city Sydney scene has also made them wary of the praise the music industry, in particular, has lavished on them. After the release of their third album The Honeymoon Is Over The Cruel Sea walked away with numerous Aria awards. They had the Best Australian album, Best Single, Best Song. They also were given the accolade of Best Australian Band.

"It's always nice to receive the plaudits and whatever, but it did make things a bit difficult for us. It just increased expectations and it was not a very good time for the band. We were not getting along that well for various reasons and it just put bit more of a spotlight on us and seemed to magnify our problems. Don't get me wrong I'm not whingeing about it, I've still got the awards hidden away somewhere. It was just a strange time for us. It put us right in the middle of the spotlight and Australia is a very funny place, you know. They'll love you up to a point and the nearest whiff of success they will turn on you and say `sellout' and `wankers'. From then on it became quite a task to try and maintain some credibility and just keep out of people's faces which I think we managed to do by not doing anything for two years."

Despite trying to maintain a low profile The Cruel Sea have been one of the major bands to fill the vacuum left by the success, excesses and dispersion of previous Australian frontrunners. Ironically it was the publicity of the Arias that helped them achieve their current status. Rather than remaining an innercity band they can now tour the suburban and country areas and draw an appreciative crowd.

"Yes, I know what you mean," he concurs. "That year we won those awards was supposed to be, and I hate the expression, `the changing of the guard'. And every year it's supposed to be. You know, for us it was `The Cruel Sea's signalled the changing of the guard'. The next year it was `You Am I and silverchair signal the changing of the guard'. This year for Savage Garden it was like `um, it's like it used to be'. I mean I can certainly respect the Oils and all those aforementioned bands, but they come from another world. They've racked up fifteen years of touring hard on the Australian circuit, right through the f*#ked-up 80s. They're still the good guys, but we're not like any of those other bands really. I mean, we're not the sort of band who can comfortably go out in the suburbs and `kill an audience'. We're not a rock band so we don't have the sort of repertoire that can just rock a crowd anywhere in Australia. We had an experience just the other night in Western Australia where the promoter put us in this real rock 'n' roll sort of yobbo pub. Anyhow, if there's one thing that really shits us, especially Tex, is people yelling out for songs that we've obviously stopped playing three years ago. They still yell out for "The Honeymoon is Over". Tex decided three years ago that he didn't want to voice that sentiment any more and it just really shits him when people stand up the front and go `Honeymoon, play Honeymoon'. And I mean we didn't have a very good night. They practically ended up booing us off the stage. We're just not that kind of band who can go and just play you're arse off just for the sake of it. We don't play that sort of music. Like there's always enough people, so it seems, that just enjoy good music or what we think is good music."

They do however think that the band who billed themselves as the `greatest rock and roll band in the world' was worth getting involved with. The Cruel Sea had the dubious honour at one stage of opening for the Rolling Stones. For many bands it would've been an overawing experience.

"No it wasn't, it was...no not all. We just did it because we wanted to meet them," Jim laughs. "They treated us really well. We got to meet them all, you know. It was like `Hi. I'm Mick', blah, blah, `yeah, I know' blah, blah. They let us hang out in the Voodoo Lounge and all that. But it actually wasn't a great musical experience. Everyone's there to see the Stones and we got to play for half an hour and it's usually when people are looking for their seats and so on. It would've been silly for Tex to push himself onto the crowd or to communicate with them when they'd paid a hundred bucks to see the Stones, you know. We're just the warm up act. We're just there for the experience."

And now they've taken that experience out on the road and back into the studio. They've just about completed their fifth full studio album and are road-testing some of the material.

"Yeah we just finished a couple of weeks in Victoria and Western Australia and got back on Christmas Eve," Jim says a little quietly. "We've been out there learning how to play the songs because, as happened with our last couple of albums, we wrote the material in the studio. When we're in there we've just gotten used to putting ourselves under this sort of pressure. Especially with this album. We went in there with very few prepared songs and it turned out amazingly well. They just came out of us and we just thought we'd get away from the prying eyes of the east coast and go to Western Australia and trial them - see which one's we could play live - which ones work. I must say that with this album probably a greater percentage of the LP was generated from the bass and drums whereas in the past they've been generated from the guitars and of course Tex was in great form. There were a couple of songs that were instrumentals, completely instrumental, and he'd come in the next day and have a vocal line and melody for us. Songs just appear, are created that way, with us. We're very happy with the album. I would have to say we've probably changed with the times. We're all a couple of years older and we all listen to what's going on around us and it's probably a little more contemporary. We've used a couple of samples and a loop. We only sample ourselves which is good. But it still sounds like us. At the end of the day it still sounds like The Cruel Sea."

Maintaining that continuity has been possible only because the original band has remained intact. "Yeah, well it's the line up that's done all the albums." Says Jim, matter of factly. "Once you start losing members and changing members I think that's just a bad time for a band and we've avoided that up-to-date. We've had a couple of close calls but we're still all together and we're probably getting along better than we ever have. Which is good."

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