Live Review: Tex Perkins & Murray Paterson

After recent go-rounds channelling Johnny Cash and/or Lee Hazlewood, tonight it's Tex Perkins in the somewhat unusual role of… Tex Perkins. As offsider/straight man/musical foil: Murray Paterson — the often invisible darkest of Perkins' Dark Horses, who writes a lot of the songs but chooses not to tour much. Here, relaxed between a couple of bottles of white and/or red, they're a couple of blokes sitting on the verandah, strumming guitars and having a chat — possibly only missing the passing of jazz cigarettes between them as tunes of busted people and busted relationships are traded.

There's songs from various Perkins guises and bands, but the opener Conflict With Nature as a win at the greyhounds gets blown on "hookers and sushi" pretty much sets the tone. Perkins does most of the pouring, and pouring it out. Murray sits back, looking like the guy who just finished driving the truck back up the Pacific Highway. There's the melancholic Whenever It Snows, a bit of bushranger balladry in the traditional Streets Of Forbes, and an interval for our Gen-X bladders to be relieved, and queue at the bar for another bottle of that rather nice shiraz.

There's more hits and memories in the second half: a nod to the ailing Spencer P Jones "needing a new liver" in Can't Say No, and to an audience turning Paycheques "into wine". Then there's "a song I've been singing since I was 18" — although this is a more bent country-ish take than the Beasts Of Bourbon's version of Psycho. The smartarsery drops away completely for Townes Van Zandt's achingly beautiful If I Needed You, which they balance with an encore of "the greatest song of all time": Kiss's I Was Made For Loving You. Yes, really. Yes, that kind of night.