Two legendary rock n roll acts hit up Geelong’s home of rock music this November. The Barwon Club will stink of Texan smoke and aged Bourbon, as The Beasts, formerly Beasts of Bourbon, roar through our town on their upcoming, ‘Still Here’ tour. They will be bringing with them one of the biggest rock chicks of the ’90s from Magic Dirt, and Geelong home-brew, Adalita.
“She’s one of my best friends and one of my favourite artists in the world. She’s a very dear friend but I really do love her solo stuff. I’ve always loved Magic Dirt but I especially love her solo stuff, it hits me really deep,” says The Beasts legendary frontman, Tex Perkins. “Maybe we should go on first at the Barwon. I think it’s the first show of the tour so she might be doing us a favour if she does that one. It’s pretty much a double headline as I see it.”
This is the second tour for the new formation and reincarnation of The Beasts for 2019. Their first tour came in February following on from the making of ‘Still Here’, an album, and line-up formation, spawned from the sad passing of bandmates, Spencer P. Jones and Brian Hooper.
“The tour we did at the beginning of the year was a result of the album we recorded whilst we were tributing and saying goodbye to Spencer P. Jones and Brain Hooper. We are very much born out of the departures of those guys and we ended up with a new album and we ended up with a new line-up of The Beasts. All of these people have been in the band at some stage but never at the same time. It’s a very interesting reshuffling of the ingredients of the band. We have Kim Salmon and Charlie Owen playing in the same line-up and Charlie joined the band, replacing Kim,” Perkins explains.
“Whatever bad blood there was, I think it’s been washed down the river long ago if I can mix my metaphors as clumsily as that,” he laughs. “If there’s any bad blood it washed under the bridge years ago, how’s that for a line?”
Perkins continues, “But we didn’t even mean to form the band, it was based around trying to record Spencer before he passed away and it was like an open invitation for all of The Beasts from the original line to the current line-up – whoever really got to that studio the day after Brian’s funeral- that was who was going to play on that record and how it’s ended up.”
Moving forward to tour two, The Beasts want to move past the mourning stage and embrace their album title sentiment, celebrating the fact that they are in fact ‘Still Here’, and still able to tour and play good, old rock n roll.
“You don’t want to be in mourning forever so I guess this tour is about the continuing on. I guess what remains with us that we can use is that we are all closer to the end than we are to the beginning and time is precious and I’m going to enjoy every minute that I’m going to spend with these particular people and playing this music. It’s going to be ferocious and very ugly rock n roll but there’s going to be a joy to it. Expect me to do a lot of smiling! This coming tour will be more about the joy and the thrill of playing live rock n roll together with these survivors.”
Celebrate life, friendship and rock n roll with The Beasts and Adalita Thursday 28 November 2019. Tickets at Oztix.
Written by Tammy Walters