By Samuel J.Fell
Tex Perkins & Matt Walker (w/ Felicity Lawless): Byron Bay Community Theatre, April 4, 2025
Byron’s heaving on a Friday night. Nothing new, really – mid-autumn almost but still summer in the sub-tropics, the sun setting out to the west and the colours bruising purple and people wandering Johnson Street in the dwindling heat, sitting out the front of the Northern at wooden tables with half full schooner glasses like gleaming and slick chess pieces between them.
Out in Byron on a Friday night with little about which to worry, some beer money in a back pocket, light of foot and free of mind.
We park at the Rails, full too, a band setting up at the small stage down the end, people spilling out into the carpark. We head across toward the Community Centre and its backlit sign hanging from the balcony which proclaims Tex Perkins is playing tonight and people mingle out the front, waiting for the doors to open.
They do and we get a beer and sit in the garden out the back. The cans sweat in the warm air. The place gently fills, an older audience; if anyone younger than us is heading out to this particular gig, they’re probably over at the Rails, shooting pool and talking shit and killing time.
Felicity Lawless is the opener, a last-minute addition, I think. She’s local. Wears feather in her hair. She’s effortlessly proficient, with her classical guitar, at looping and foot percussion, deft and thorough and her playing itself is assured, no doubt. She’s a constructer of songs and she builds them before us and they eventually bloom into something she’s been planning, and in between songs she laughs and banters and the crowd is into it. It’s nothing new – an acoustic guitar being looped in Byron Bay – but it’s done well, a short set, back out into the fallen dark for another beer, a smoke out on the pavement where I run into Jimmy Dowling and we talk about antique ship’s lamps and how our families are.
Tex Perkins and Matt Walker come onstage and build some songs of their own. Walker, renowned six-slinger that he is, alternates between a six and 12-string acoustic while Perkins holds close his black Telecaster and together they build dark and stormy blues missives that take on lives of their own in the dark theatre, insinuate numbers that seem palatable but that have sharp edges which will cut you if you get too close, and in these intimate surrounds, there’s little chance of escape.
Tex banters in between songs. It’s lighthearted, two old mates having a good ol’ time. Walker says nary a word. Not that he’d be able to – Perkins is in vintage Perkins form, the stage is where he belongs. He makes jokes and the crowd laughs and people lob retorts back to him. He tells us he’s written his share of songs about drugs, the seamy underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, “But this one is about home ownership, about being house proud,” he says, and off they go again.
They cover Gene Clark’s ‘Gypsy Rider’ and The Cruel Sea’s ‘Woman With Soul’. Tex introduces a song called ‘Brand New Man’, about meeting his grandson for the first time after pandemic lockdown. They do The Fat Rubber Band’s ‘Place In The Sun’. And they go off on guitar-fuelled tangents and the air of respectable theatre show thins and is replaced by a more muscular aesthetic and I find myself wishing I wasn’t seated and that I was standing, propping up a bar somewhere as I watch and listen to this – not that it’s a full throttle rock gig at any point, but it’s loud and Perkins’ Tele is sharp and distorted and Walker hits his 12 strings with an intensity that reverberates out and into us and feet thump the wooden floor in time with the stoner blues, with the building of a wall of sound, brick by sonic brick.
They don’t overdo this though. They build big sound, but it’s part of a song, and so when the song needs to finish, it does. They have a good time, and by extension, so do we, and when the night needs to finish, it does and so we’re cast out into the proper dark and onto the still warm street in amongst the people beelining about under the fruit bats effortlessly swimming above us and over to the Rails’ carpark and leave Byron behind us on a Friday night, the thrum of that Tele’s bottom E still taught in my spine, which isn’t a bad thing at all.