The Cruel Sea LANDMARK: The Honeymoon Is Over by: Ed Butler Tue:20-May-08 Label: Red Eye Year: 1993 WB rating 82 out of 100

The Australian rock scene is now officially venerable. While it took a while for the land of convict heritage, gold rushes and universal suffrage to find its feet, in a cultural sense if nothing else, by 2008, any true music fan can reel off a litany of influential acts that have produced some of music's most seminal albums. The Go-Betweens, AC/DC, You Am I, Slim Dusty, The Easybeats, Paul Kelly, JOK, The Saints, Nick Cave, the list goes on. Goes on, in fact, to The Cruel Sea, Tex Perkins' follow up after his early, hard-drinking, hard-rocking days with the most wonderfully named The Beasts of Bourbon.

One of the challenges faced by Australian musicians over the past three decades has been to create a genuinely Australian sound. With a mere 200-odd year history of white music dominating the public consciousness (indigenous music was only beginning to find a mainstream foothold through Yothu Yindi), it was up to bands during Australia's cultural nascence to nurture and develop a new, uniquely Australian musical brand.

Of course, it was inevitable that the historical Britishness of Australian music would have an impact, but the Cruel Sea, like few bands before them, looked further afield. On their first two albums, Down Below and This is Not the Way Home, The Cruel Sea wore their country influences on their sleeves, all slide guitars and woozy vocals from Perkins. The Honeymoon is Over is, by contrast, light years ahead of its predecessors. Sometime during the two years prior to its inception, the band seemed to absorb funk from the US East Coast, reggae from the Caribbean, soul from Motown and delta blues from Louisiana, and melded them with the country they grew up listening to. Creating a sexy, dirty mélange of sounds that, while American in its conception, was proudly and unambiguously Australian.

From the grinding, downbeat blues-funk of 'Delivery Man', to the smooth reggae of 'Let's Lay Down Here and Make Love', the hyperkinetic country-rock of the title track and the frankly awesome 'Black Stick', the growth of Tex Perkins from booze-soaked pub rocker into a true frontman is astonishing. He lends a national flavour to every track he appears on, perfecting the smooth, charismatic-next-door-neighbour-who-just-might-be-burying-bodies-behind-the-shed style that has made him one rock's most respected figures. If in any doubt, listen to the gently sinister croon of 'Blame it on the Moon', and wait for the chill down the spine.

Of course, all this begs the question, how is it a landmark album? The answer calls for a personal digression. The Honeymoon is Over introduced me to rock music. An impressionable twelve-year-old struggled to get their hands on rock music in 1993, and the ARIA-award winning album and single of the same name meant that suddenly The Cruel Sea found mainstream attention directed their way. As a result, 'The Honeymoon is Over' found itself on one of the innumerable, ubiquitous, and generally appalling compilations, most likely bestowed with the imaginative title of Hit Machine 5 or Processed Crap 19.

As a result, nestled in between Johnny Gill's 'The Floor' and East 17's lamentable cover of the Pet Shop Boys' 'West End Girls', came a fiery blast of aggressively sexual, thumping, acoustic rock. This came at a time when rock music was packaged exclusively in the form of rehashed Chisel or 'Thunderstruck', and all a pre teen could listen to was the parents' old vinyls (of which Thriller received an inestimable number of spins). So hearing The Cruel Sea was, to this writer, something akin to hearing Johnny Cash play 'Folsom Prison Blues' for the first time in 1955.

The band's confidence in its material was, and still is, evident in the number of instrumental numbers; after all, how many bands would score Tex Perkins as a frontman and then decide to heartily under-utilize him? When listening to The Honeymoon is Over as a complete entity, these often downbeat, funky, numbers slide in and out of sight, maintaining pace and mood without ever overstaying their welcome. However, when listened to in isolation, particularly next to Perkins' husky growl, they do suffer, but only because the sung tracks are so good.

Perkins' hiccups on the title track, like a booze-soaked Michael Jackson, the barely concealed bluesy sexuality of 'Delivery Man', and the industrial countrified funk of 'Black Stick' are all high watermarks in the canon of Aus rock, and they are amply backed up by the smoother, more soulful tracks, where Perkins revealed his future as a crooner, over James Cruickshank's silky slide guitar, never better than on 'Woman With Soul', or the reggae bounce of 'Naked Flame'.

Australia has a rich history of country music, to the point where it could genuinely be considered a 'national' sound. The Cruel Sea, reared on a diet of Slim Dusty and Banjo Patterson, broadened their horizons with The Honeymoon is Over, and in the process inadvertently broadened Australia's, too. The Cruel Sea would make many more records, and Tex Perkins would go on to establish himself as one of the country's preeminent vocalists and personalities, particularly on his outstanding solo work with his band The Dark Horses, but if you're seeking the point where he and his band stepped out of the shadow of their predecessors, go no further than here.