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"The Cruel Sea", published in Australian Rolling Stone (Sydney), April 1995
THE CRUEL SEA SHOULD have broken up. If the tale of these five contrasting characters had been a work of fiction -- complete with all its bizarre twists, the drama, the violence, fame, fate, the rock & roll -- that would have been the story's natural conclusion. Even Tarantino would have been proud to pen such an epic tragedy. In the real life version, this finale came close to being acted out. But only the players in the Cruel Sea will ever know just how close. If it had been another band, the battle to overcome what everyone involved calls the worst year of their lives would have been less of a struggle. But, for the Cruel Sea, all the compounding traumas coincided with their new status as one of the biggest rock bands in the country. They were celebrities. Every action, every development in their story was being magnified for immediate public consumption. And that definitely wasn't helping matters. But somehow, they defied their lot. They went underground, out of view, licked their wounds and reassessed. Why were they putting themselves through all this stress? Now that the fun had gone, what was the point of continuing? It took time, but the answer came. Alone in a room in Byron Bay, only the five of them left to face each other and choose their future, something was reborn: the music. THE FRUSTRATED VOICE of Tex Perkins is the first thing heard as you approach the studio door. With his usual tone of authority still intact, he's making a point to everyone in earshot: "You stay here and be what you are. I'm getting out of here in a rented car. See ya later." You open the door and the street-fighter stature of Perkins is the first thing you see. You immediately feel a strange current in here, a disturbingly vibrating wave which is pounding through your stomach. Perkins spots you, and sends one of those half-manic smiles your way. "Come in if you darc," he shouts, gesturing you to move forward. Inside, everything seems to be swirling. This is strange, different, but you immediately recognise "See Ya Later" -- the track which is currently flooding out of the studio monitors -- as the Cruel Sea. Even if Perkins' voice wasn't up front, the song's soft-edged groove, its eternally intertwining guitars and that euphoric chorus make its source unmistakable. It�s early evening, late-November, and The Cruel Sea are in Megaphon studios, Sydney. They've got the place booked for three more days; three days in which to complete Tbree-Legged Dog, their follow-up to 1993s The Honeymoon is Over. More than a dozen songs are already in the can, and the next couple of days will see them put the finishing touches to another two or three. Ken Gormly wraps up his bass overdubs on �See Ya Later" (which won�t make the album�s final cut), and another new track, -- �Save Me� -- is pulled off the shelf for one final assessment. It rides slowly and delicately on one of Gormly's melodic bass lines. Above sparse percussion, the guitars merely hint at the notes they should be playing. In the cracks, Perkins whispers sexually. The five members of the Cruel Sea -- Perkins, Gormly, drummer Jim Elliott, guitarist Danny Rumour and keyboardist/guitarist James Cruickshank -- sit on the couches behind producer Tony Cohen, each with their eyes fixed on different points in the room. The only motion is coming from Cohen's hands which frantically rush around the hundreds of knobs set out in front of him. After a few more twists, he steps back, freezes for a moment, then lights another cigarette. The silence left by the end of the song is sustained for a moment. Everyone starts looking at each other. Cruickshank is the first to speak, saying he wants to attack his guitar track one more time. Fine. The rest of the band decides it's time to shoot some hoops. The basketball ring set up outside the studio has been a saving grace for the band, the dead hours of hanging out here over the past few weeks filled with competitive shoot outs: five dollars to be in it, best of five, winner takes all. Today, it's Elliott's money, pipping out Perkins by three baskets to two in the play-off. There's a hastily arranged dinner of pizza and wine, and then it's back to the studio. But interest is starting to wane. Perkins is playing the motivator, suggesting a handful of things they can get on with right now. He's wants something to happen, anything. Cruickshank is still behind the glass, rehearsing another guitar part, while Cohen feeds another song into his desk. Elliott suggests some more percussion on one of the tracks; he and Perkins immediately start exchanging verbal versions of the forms the sounds should take. Rumour sits back, taking all this in. When everyone's had their say, he leans over to Perkins and whispers something in his ear. Okay, let's try that. Time is running out. It's going to be a long night. IT�S BEEN A LONG NIGHT. CLOSE TO 3 AM, the scene is chaos. There are people screaming hysterically, there's blood everywhere and Tex Perkins is being crushed under the weight of half-a-dozen men in dinner suits. This resembles a Godfatber film -- Perkins prefers to compare it to Scarface -- but it's the post-ARIA awards party, April 1994. Moments ago, Perkins smashed a beer bottle over the head of a drunken guest who was attacking his girlfriend, photographer Krystina Higgins. His knee-jerk reaction provided a dramatic end to an evening which had already done its fair share in redefining the face of Australian popular music. The members of the Cruel Sea hadn�t been looking forward to these ARIA awards. It had been nearly three months since they'd stepped on a stage together, their most recent shows played to Big Day Out audiences around the country. (For those shows in January, Charlie Owen filled in for James Cruickshank who was still recovering from injuries sustained in a car crash the previous month.) Now they had to deal with their year-old release, The Honeymoon is Over, garnering them nominations in all the major categories of the ARIAS, turning them into the ceremony's somewhat unwilling guests of honour. The wide-spread rumours of internal unrest which preceded the Cruel Sea�s arrival into the Sydney State Theatre that night were perpetuated by the notable absence of Cruickshank, and further fuelled by Perkins� quips that a fourth Cruel Sea album was by no means a certainty. The attention during the evening, as always, honed in on the singer; and if Perkins wasn't enjoying it, he was at least being as gracious as he could. Although vehmently opposed to the whole concept of music awards , he later admits the idea of not attending on the night was never a viable option. �It's a no-win situation," he says. �You've just got to go along and say, �Well, if you really want to give this to us, thank you very much. I hope it means something to you.�� As expected, the Cruel Sea did go on and sweep the pool taking out the awards for best group, album, single and song of the year. Furthermore, Tony Cohen -- the man who for 20 years had been the icon of the music anti-establishment, the guy who Nick Cave punched in the face during the recording of �The Mercy Seat", a true unsung hero of Australian music -- was named producer of the year. So, on to the post-ARIA bash, the band�s swag of awards in tow. A couple of hours into the party, two of the silver pyramids have found themselves hammered point-first into the wall. (In the ensuing confusion, the two awards end up getting stolen.) According to Perkins, he was in �chill-out mode" by this stage of the party, engrossed in a conversation with Kev Carmody about the bush. Then, as the singer tells it, �I see a flurry of blonde hair and I say to Kev, 'Excuse me, Kev, I think my in girlfriend's in trouble:'� Perkins pauses as he reluctantly prepares to recount the rest of the story, quietly laughing to himself and gesturing with his hands and face that he still finds the whole thing ludicrous. 'Then I get over there and there's this guy; she's got him by the hair and he's got her by the hair and there's this fight. �So, I had a beer bottle in my hand and I just whacked the fucking guy. I mean, I wasn 't going to be polite and say, 'You Sir, stop that!'. So I slapped him with the fucking bottle and, after that, the place exploded." Perkins laughs some more. �I got all these guys on top of me. People were screaming in the disco -- 'Arrrgh!' -- and there were all these celebrities with blood all over them. Then I just left after that.� Perkins adds he doesn't regret hitting the man, only the method of execution. �Basically, the lesson I have to learn there,� he confides in a more sombre tone, �is to consider placing violence a little better. I just went into dog mode. There was no thought process between me seeing what was going on and my actions actions. They were just completely automatic. I really would like to be able to spend one second thinking about �� He pauses again. �I could have easily got him by the neck or done something more constructive. But, anyway.� AS IT PANNED OUT, THE TITLE OF THE HONEYMOON is Over, the Cruel Sea's third studio album, couldn't have been more prophetic if God had written it himself. If the band were having trouble dealing with the pressures brought by the record's success, they only had themselves to blame: it was a product designed for mass appeal. Even before any of its tracks had hit the airwaves, everyone involved with the band knew this was the record which would break them into the mainstream. All the signs looked good. The previous album, 1991's This is Not the Way Home, had earned the Cruel Sea an ARIA nomination for best group. Meanwhile, the band's pub gigs could no longer satisfy demand. As soon as Honeymoon made it into the stores, everything was confirmed. The album debuted at number four on the mainstream album charts, an accomplishment by a local act which, in recent years, had only been matched by the likes of Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham -- cross-generational celebrities whose markets were stiff hangovers from the '80s. The Cruel Sea represented a new breed. They came from the indie circles, old punks who had slyly camouflaged their aggression to strike a populist vein. �That album was done for a reason and it worked,� explains Cohen, a self-confessed fan of pop sounds. �It got them on the radio.� "At the time, we were seeing everything in a pop sort of way,� adds Perkins. �Even though it�s not pop music as such, we didn't indulge ourselves with meandering and experiments; we went for hooks and punchlines, stuff like that.� For the rest of 1993, �Black Stick� and the title track became staple features on play-lists around the country. The Cruel Sea could now headline theatre shows and be guaranteed capacity crowds: they were verified pop stars. This would have brought a smile to anyone who could still remember Perkins' vocal on the mid-'80s Thug classic, 'Fuck Your Dad', or his satanic bent as frontman of the Beasts of Bourbon. FOR THE CRUEL SEA, THESE HEADY DAYS WERE A long way from those first gigs back in 1988, playing behind the pool table at the Harold Park hotel in Sydney. �The guitarist would have to move so someone could play a shot on the black,� recalls Ellliot fondly. Only Elliott and Rumour have been there from the very start. For those early shows, they were supplemented by the Gorben brothers, Ged and Dee. When Dee decided to leave early in the band's life, Rumour and Elliott approached their old Sekret Sekret cohort, Ken Gormly, to take over the bass duties. Sekret Sekret had been Danny Rumour's outfit since 1980. From early in its career, the band had a couple of diehard fans in Gormly and Elliott, two surfie kids from Cronulla. Gormley earnestly states that the first time he saw Rumour's previous band, Urban Guerillas, it changed his life. �Danny was playing guitar, doing 'Search and Destroy� and there was this wild girl singing," he remembers. �It completely blew me away, totally. It was that sort of moment where you go, 'Fuck! Rock & roll!' Ever since I saw them that night, I thought, �I want to be in a band.� Soon afterwards, Jim Elliott -- best friends with Gormly since childhood -- scored the drummer's seat in Sekret Sekret. As soon as the opportunity arose, Gormly was also in. Sekret Sekret broke up around 1987, having released three singles. By 1989, through the Cruel Sea, its core was back together. The quietly-spoken Rumour had envisioned the sound of the Cruel Sea while still a punk in the late-70s. A regular at a pub called the Grand, he'd jump up on stage with a few other local musicians whenever a band blew out or there was no gig on. �We had some equipment out in the back room and we'd just grab it and play an all instrumental set,� says Rumour. �Just any old set of tunes we knew, but really loud and really fast. And people loved it. That's when I realised an instrumental band would work.' A decade on, his vision was being fulfilled. Within a few weeks of starting their residency at the Harold Park, the instrumental Cruel Sea were drawing regular crowds of up to 300 people. Anyone who'd been paying attention to the light guy during these early shows would have recognised him as Tex Perkins, frontman of that rock & roll animal, the Beasts of Bourbon. It wasn't until a party in Darlinghurst a few months on that the band and singer were formerly introduced. �We pulled off this really good gig at this party,� says Elliot. �It just completely went off. Remember they paid us with ecstasy?� he asks the rest of the band. �Anyway, Tex must heard the call that night and he said, 'I'd like to put lyrics to some of your instrumentals: and we just went, 'Yeah!' We'd always thought, this is great playing instrumental, we can do whatever like, and we know each other so well musically. But we thought one day we'd attract the right person to add vocals And we attracted the right person.� During another residency, at the Lansdowne hotel, James Cruickshank started getting up with the band on a regular basis. At first he was only adding keyboards on the Booker T covers in the set, but his position was also soon cemented. By the end of the year -- 1989 -- this vindicated line-up recorded and released its first disc, the 12� �Down Below� (which, early in the following year, would be extended to an album of the same name). IT�S MAY, A MONTH ON FROM THE 1994 ARIA awards, and all five members of the Cruel Sea are sitting in the loungeroom of Tex Perkins' home in Sydney. Paul Kelly used to live in this house. At another time, so did Jules Normington, the man behind Phantom records. Then it belonged to John Foy, the head of Red Eye records and the guy responsible for releasing the bulk of Perkins' recorded material There's a story that Perkins, Foy and Normington ran into a little trouble with the law one time, digging graves in the backyard to make the neighbours think they were burying bodies. It worked. Last night, the Cruel Sea played only their second gig of the year as a full unit; another small step forward in the slow rebuilding process. A week ago, the band escaped Sydney and locked itself up in Byron Bay's Rocking Horse studios. No new material had been written by any member since the release of Honeymoon and Danny Rumour�s once bottomless well of songs had already been sucked dry. The time had come to see if there was any new music left in the Cruel Sea. If the week in Byron had proved non-productive, that would have been the end of that. The members will later confess that the Cruel Sea was a very 'ill band' in the months leading up to the Byron trip. The heightened profile, the continued chart success (Honeymoon would go on to sell 140,000 copies), physical injuries to band members and, finally, the drama with the ARIAs had all placed added pressure on the fragile webbing holding the unit together. For Perkins, the frustration reached breaking point. "I was about to leave," he admits at a later meeting. �We hadn't written a song for 12 months and there was all this shit going on. We were all at our lowest ebb and there was nothing there to keep me. I was going, 'What am I doing in this band?' Then the Byron Bay thing was do or die. That was the test: 'We've got to come up with something or this band is dead in the water.' And we came through with flying colours. But really, if it didn't work, I was going to say, 'Fuck this. I don't need all this shit:�" So, back in Perkins' loungeroom in May, the band still feels somewhat unbalanced. They say there was no truth to the rumours that Cruickshank had been sacked from the band and then reinstated. Regardless, they now want to put all the troubles of the past year behind them and, as Gormly puts it, �start from scratch. That night was like the end of a chapter, and now it's like starting all over again." And with the foundations for a new album now laid, there's finally some reason for quiet optimism Rumour is quite excited about the new material, describing it as a �distilled version of what we do; much more intuitive.� According to Gormly, it took a while for the creative juices to start flowing once the band arrived in Byron. �We were stiff pretty constipated for a while there," he says. �All of us sitting there with our cams on and the tape rolling, going, �Someone just play something, anything!' We've got all these reels with all this silence on them.� But then, as Perkins puts it, �It was like we had a creative laxative and just a shitload of stuff came out.� Now, the next item on the agenda is a European tour which starts up in a couple of weeks. It will be two-months long, incorporating support slots with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and a series of headlining shows. The band is confident it will have a full album's worth of material by the end of it �There'll be 50 soundchecks to do,� says Elliott. �All those nights off and all those wonderful experiences we will have. It's just been great that we've shown ourselves that we can still do it. We have a future.� BACK AT MEGAPHON STUDIOS, THERE ARE TWO DAYS left to deadline. Cohen is busy building up rough mixes of the completed tracks for the band to hear before they have to get out tomorrow. He's covered one of the walls in the studio with long strips of masking tape, each one representing a different mixing desk setting for every song. There's also a small strip of masking tape stuck to the back of his chair. It reads: �Grand Poo Bah�. Cohen has produced all the Cruel Sea's recorded output, barring 1989s debut, Down Below (which was produced by Ed Kuepper's long-time engineer, Phil Punch). 7his is Not the Way Home was recorded in this very room four years ago. Cohen's relationship with Perkins stretches nearly a decade further back; the two met during the irfamous eight-hour session which produced the Beast of Bourbons� debut, The Axeman's Jazz, in the early '80s. �It was pretty full on in here last night,� divulges Cohen with the cheeky enthusiasm of a novice. �Tex had had a few and he can't remember anything. But he was trying to get everyone to work on past midnight and everyone else was pretty tired. I had the good sense to call a taxi and make a hasty withdrawal. I heard he ended up at the Courthouse [hotel].� Asked to define his relationship with the Cruel Sea, Cohen sums it up in two words: �Stress and fun.� Personally, he rates them as the best band in the country. �And they're getting better in leaps and bounds," he adds. �After a tour, they're fantastic. They're just so tight. Kenny's bass playing has improved so much since we first met. Danny's just a remarkable musician. James is brilliant -- he's got an amazing ear for hooks and melodies. Jim is a legendary drummer. Tex is one of the few real singers in the world at the moment, as far as a frontman -- a person who can jump up on stage and not only sing but project a personality.� He reaches across the desk and grabs a Walkman. �Tex played me this the other day,� he says, hitting the play button. "It's basically the guys on the bus writing songs.� The riff through the distorted little speaker sounds like it belongs to �Anybody But You', one of the new album's most immediately accessible tracks. �As long as they stay together and remain friends,� continues Cohen, �I think they've got a chance of being absolutely huge. Really well-loved, not just rich. I hope so.� A bit later in the evening, the band are back to work on a track named 'Too Fast For Me'. It's another in the new mould of Cruel Sea songs -- a five-way collaboration which was built up during one of the sessions at Rocking Horse in Byron. Following the success of the first trip and fresh from their European tour, the band headed back up north for a second week of writing and jamming in October. Perkins has come up with an uncustomary lyric. �Jet planes fly too high,� he sings in nearly a whisper at the top of the track. �Man wasn't meant to fly/Should I tempt fate to say/Feels like I�m gonna die in an aeroplane one day.� At the other end of the song, he repeats the verse in a squealing falsetto. Again, the instruments surrounding the voice are incredibly understated, each sound momentarily weaving its way to the foreground and then just as quickly dropping back. It's still recognisable as the Cruel Sea, but it's also a completely new model. The band seems to have found new spaces in the music, developed a more economical way of delivering its intrinsic element. �It's always a problem when you sell a lot of records that everyone just wants more of the same,� says Cruickshank as the track is played for a third time. �I think this is the best thing we've ever done because it's the first time we've ever written together, rather than Danny going off and doing something over there and me doing something else or whatever.� THAT�S NOT OUR PLANE, IS IT?� QUERIES ELLIOTT as the Cruel Sea's tour van approaches the runway at Newcastle airport. The rest of the band breaks out in laughter: this Mini with wings is supposed to get them to Brisbane for tonight's show. Last night, the band played the Newcastle Worker's Club. It's now January '95 and, apart from the Big Backyard concert in Sydney last November, this short tour in support of the �Better Get a Lawyer� single is the first chance local audiences have had to sample the Cruel Sea's new material. After the gig, the Cruel Sea's manager, Wendy Boyes-Hunter, brings a handful of punters backstage to meet the band. They enthusiastically remind the members of their past shows in the local pub, about how much better it used to be to see them play in that more intimate setting. The venue's manager comes in and tells the band there were exactly 2,000 payers tonight (Thursday) -- up 400 from the last time they were here. Boyes-Hunter reminds him of their debate regarding whether the gig should have been advertised on television. (The band have a no-TV advertising policy.) The venue manager still argues that, with television, they would have got another 400. The backstage visitors are urging the band to come out with them, listing a selection of venues still open at this time on a Wednesday night. One of the guys suggests a place on the outskirts of Newcastle, but a car will be needed to get there. �I can't drive,� Cruickshank tells him. �Not until 1999, at least.� Cruickshank lost his driving licence, and also nearly his life, after crashing into a truck on his way home from a rehearsal at Christmas, 1993. Despite being able to fulfil their Big Day Out commitments with the help of Charlie Owen, the accident forced the band off the road for six months. �That didn't happen for nothing,� analyses Perkins a year after the event. �That was the hand of fate stepping in. Basically, we were all in head spins and we were all getting too out of it and not dealing with how things were going. That accident was the hand of fate stepping in saying, 'James, wake up!'" IT'S THE FINAL DAY OF RECORDING AT MEGAPHON and there's little action. Tony Cohen is getting the last of the rough mixes together, while Paul McKercher - the engineer on these sessions - prepares everything for the move out. Outside, a few of the band members are having the last of their basketball shoot outs. �This is the point in the creative process where you start having self-doubts," says Perkins. �You don't know what the fuck's going on because you've become desensitised to the whole thing. But I'm sure it's good.� Perkins, his form removed from the grooves which spring it to life on stage, is still an awesome physical figure. He's ridiculously thin, his arms and legs seem slightly longer than they should be, his brow protrudes far forward, casting a permanent shadow over his eyes. The only things that are small about him are his two front teeth. He chuckles often. He's as much the joker as he is the leader. Although the recording is now finished, Perkins and the rest of the crew have a busy schedule set for 1995. December win be spent mixing and then January will be taken up by a national tour. The band's management is also negotiating a spot on the second leg of the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. Roger Grierson, the managing director of Polygram music publishing and a long-time associate of all the band members, believes the Lollapalooza shows may be the best way to introduce the Cruel Sea to the American public. �You can't put them in a box,� he says. �They could play with the Neville Brothers, Iggy Pop or Henry Rollins, all of which would probably have them, but we have to present them in a way where people don't think, 'Oh, they�re that kind of band,� because they're not like any kind of band. They're like the Crel Sea, which is the whole point." Grierson can take a lot of the credit in �discovering� Perkins, recognising his talent at an early Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums show in Brisbane in 1981. �I wasn't alone,� Grierson points out. �Everyone could see it. I happened to be the person that said, 'Look, here's my address, come to Sydney and we'll see what happens'." So Perkins, still in his teens, bred in Brisbane on the music of Countdown and hand-me-down punk records, made the move to Sydney soon after. The tone his career would take over the next decade was set early. Supporting the Johnnys at the final show of the infamous Southern Cross hotel, Perkins' third gig in Sydney, he watched as the skinheads in the crowd started throwing beer glasses into the overhead fans, turning the place into a bloodbath and leading the proprietor to pull out a sawn-off shotgun to emphasise the party was over. On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks later, in the same building, the Beasts of Bourbon were born. In the following years, Perkins would go on to be associated with an endless array of bizarre acts, most of these collaborations being captured on records through John Foy's sub-label, Black Eye. Having most recently recorded an album with Don Walker and Charlie Owen, Perkins says he's content to focus solely on the Cruel Sea, at least for the time being. He admits he misses the Beasts, but is just as happy with what he's doing now. He also adds that a future solo project is not out of the question, �because I have a lot of music sitting around that hasn't got a home, so it's probably Tex Perkins music.� As the frontman of the Cruel Sea, Perkins bad to deal with the brunt of the stress the band went through. He blew out a second tour of Europe, believing it would have burnt out both the band and himself. Furthermore, like Cruickshank, he bad to put up with the pain of physical injury for most of the year, having had his knee dislocated when everyone jumped him at the ARIAs. He says the knee injury heavily influenced the tone of the lyrics on Three-Legged Dog. "The knee was a real thing for me for about two months,� he explains. �I was on crutches and it really changed my attitude. And a lot of these songs were written at that period where I felt completely vulnerable, not being able to do anything I wanted to do. "So there might be a few themes of vulnerabaity on the record but it's certainly not moany. It's resigned to the fact that everything is larger than you. It is like, 'I'll just sit on my porch with my shotgun.� It's that kind of laid-back aggression where you don't really have to do much because you've got a shitload of power in your hands.' The injury also forced the 30-year- old Perkins to reassess the physical toll which a second decade of touring and recording was starting to take on him. (Apart from a few beers and a bottle of vodka, the backstage band rider on the forthcoming tour will be made up of mostly fruit drinks.) �Every time I come into these places,� he says, pointing to the studio, �I automatically have to get drunk or something. I really would like to break out of that. It hasn't become a problem yet but I've noticed that every time I come in here, I just have to get out of it. �It�s part of the working thing. You know - drinking, writing, thinking, drinking or smoking pot. You can see how people can get into trouble in rock bands, using their creative fuel all the time, the artificial inspiration. Basically, it's not a good thing.� Perkins agrees that he's the motivator in this band, but explains that every member plays a crucial role in the make-up of the Cruel Sea; just as each adds his unique input into the musical pot, they also each add a particular element to the band's dynamic. Can Perkins explain that? �Well, yeah. Ken cares about things. He worries - not that he's an old woman or anything. He�s the most sober amongst us. For a long time, Danny was the musical core of the band and that spread out a bit. What would you call him? The genius. He's the band genius. �I�m the band bully. James is the boy - make of that what you will [smiles]. And Jim�s the noble gentleman, straight up and down sort of guy. �So, what have we got there? The bully, the genius, the mum, the boy and the gentleman." IT'S A WEEK AFTER THE CRUEL SEA wrapped up its recording at Megaphon and the band members, sitting in their manager's office in Sydney, are looking very relaxed. They want to share a joke. Tex Perkins pulls out a CD by an obscure American performer named Jon Wayne. He plays a track called 'Texas Jailcell'. It's familiar, very familiar. In fact, the chorus is exactly the same as the one the Cruel Sea use in 'Better Get a Lawyer�. They've used it, along with a few other choice cuts ('Don't drop the soap/ Don't smoke no dope"). Wayne, Perkins assures us, will get his royalty percentage. We're about to leave the Cruel Sea, healthier than when we first joined them and probably more focused than they�ve ever been. But Perkins stops us at the door. �You know, I don't think 'genius' is the right word for Danny," he says. Danny moves towards the conversation with interest. �I don't know, Danny, how would you describe yourself.?". Perkins freezes for a moment. �I know,� he decides, �enigma. Danny is the band enigma.� The emgma is smiling. The bully is laughing loudly. They can afford to laugh again now. The Cruel Sea is calm.
