Tex Perkins has been around the ruthlessly ageist Australian music industry to know an opportunity when he sees it. “As far as Boomers and generation X punters go, it’s all about anniversaries these days,” he says with a dry chuckle, somewhere on top of a hill (the mobile reception is better) near his home in northern New South Wales.
But when it came to reforming the Cruel Sea to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the band’s double-platinum selling, multiple Aria award-winning third album, The Honeymoon is Over, in 2023, there were major obstacles to overcome. The biggest: tracking down guitarist and leader Dan Rumour, whose very name positioned him somewhere between man and myth.
Rumour was one of the great lost talents of Australian music. For nearly 15 years, he lived miles off the grid, on his father’s property in rural NSW. Perkins hadn’t spoken to him since The Honeymoon is Over’s previous anniversary reunion (20th) in 2013; he didn’t even have his phone number. By Rumour’s admission, he didn’t often have a phone that worked back then anyway.
Eventually, Perkins says, drummer Jim Elliott came up with an old number. Perkins got through. What happened next is contested. Perkins describes Rumour’s response to the proposal of a tour as an adamant, “Fuck yeah, let’s do it!” Rumour disputes this – “Not at all,” is his flat response – but regardless of whose memory is correct, an old flame was lit.
The Cruel Sea had not made an album since 2001’s Where There’s Smoke. They had also lost a key member: guitarist and keyboard player James Cruickshank succumbed to bowel cancer in 2015. But after talking to bass player Ken Gormly, Rumour says, “I knew I had to record all the demos I had – that it was on, and I’d better be ready. So I got ready, real quick.”
When Perkins walked into the room for the band’s first Honeymoon rehearsal (with Cruickshank’s shoes filled by old friend and fellow traveller Matt Walker), Rumour handed him a CD. “Danny said, ‘Here’s some tunes, Tex, I hope you like them, maybe you can write some words.’ I thought, fuckin’ take it easy – let’s see if we can remember the old ones first!”
The result is Straight Into the Sun. Self-produced and financed, it most closely recalls the band’s debut, 1989’s Down Below, in its relaxed, surf-side feel. There is not an ounce of fat on it, no expectations and no pressure. “We had 10 songs, and that was enough to go ahead. It wasn’t born out of any desire to re-enter the marketplace,” Perkins says.
To understand how the Cruel Sea got here, you have to know where they came from, and the long shadow that followed. Rumour formed the group in 1987 with Gormly and Elliott as an instrumental trio. The first three albums – containing most of the band’s best-known material – are all based on music written by Rumour before Perkins joined two years later.
It seems obvious that the immense charisma of Perkins took them from support slots in inner-city venues to major headline status. But that was not so obvious in 1989. Perkins – then still in his early 20s – had been taking the piss in a series of ensembles with names like Bumhead Orchestra, Toilet Duck and Thug, who boasted a charming single called Fuck Your Dad.
He returned to making more conventional (and much more aggressive) music with Beasts of Bourbon, whose second album, Sour Mash, was released the same year as Down Below. But the Cruel Sea’s sound – an intoxicating gumbo of Cajun, swamp, surf and spaghetti western themes – proved commercially irresistible, and they quickly overtook the Beasts.
Their sweet spot, though, was brief. Perkins posits that at the Cruel Sea’s peak the band filled a gap between the old guard of Australian music (Crowded House, Midnight Oil, INXS) and the new (You Am I, Silverchair, Powderfinger). Their fourth album, Three Legged Dog, went to No 1 in Australia in 1995. America and Europe were beckoning.
But the band was cooked. Cruickshank was seriously injured in a car accident and was battling a heroin addiction. He wasn’t the only one. “Everybody imploded, everybody was at a low ebb, and that was the end of that,” Gormly says. “We turned our backs on America. We got to the boardroom and just said thanks – we’re going home.”
By the band’s fifth album, the undercooked Over Easy (1998), they were no longer flavour of the month and, as post-punk relics, too old besides. They had also lost focus. Where There’s Smoke did better, thanks to the success of the single Cocaine, but turning their back on the overseas market meant grinding themselves into the dirt via endless touring back home.
Quietly, the band went their own ways. There were occasional reunions (in 2008, 2010 and 2013) but nothing more. And Rumour, who had his own addiction issues, vanished. “Well, they were wild days, the 90s,” he says wryly. “I can now afford to rent a place, thank God. I’ve got enough work to do that. But it wasn’t always the case, mate.”
All of this makes Straight Into the Sun mean more. If the Honeymoon anniversary tour was far from inevitable, a new album was beyond unlikely. But Rumour had his mojo working. “I’m not going to go out and play the same old fucking shit – much as I love it – I wanted new shit! So, what can I do about that?” He slips into the third person: “Go and do it, Dan, do that!”
Perkins is grateful. “Over the years that we haven’t sort of played, I realised how unique Danny’s thing was. I didn’t necessarily need it to be in the Cruel Sea, but I knew I wanted to work with Danny again. It’s Danny’s band. It’s his unique approach to music that the whole thing is based on.”
Straight Into the Sun is out on 7 March (Universal Music)
