Gremlins, racing against an acid tab and recovering a lost award: The cruel truth with The Cruel Sea’s Ken Gormly

After kicking off their thirtieth anniversary tour for The Honeymoon is Over in Brisbane, The Cruel Sea’s bass player Ken Gormly spoke to AJ MAHAR to reflect on the album’s legacy, and what fans can look forward to when they bring the celebrations to Fremantle Prison this Saturday, December 9.

Opening night was last night. How was it?

Look I think we’re really great. This place had three thousand people in it. Fortitude Valley Music Hall, sold out! We got a bit spooked, we got the jitters, and there was some gremlins running around, but we got over the line. I’ve been reading some good reviews. One thing I learned years ago is that when you’re playing, your perception of the gig is irrelevant. No one cares if your amp shat itself, or if you had a bad day, or if your washing machine broke down. No one cares. It’s their show.

How long did you guys spend rehearsing for this tour? It’s been a while since you last played.

Well, because Tex has been really busy, he’s got The Man in Black thing, he’s got all these other things. Matt Walker, who’s been our dear long-term friend and who’s in the band now, is Tex’s sideman, so there wasn’t a lot of rehearsing going on. But then again, we are not a rehearsing band. The first time we got together, we just had this ridiculous muscle memory. And it’s just a kind of groove; there aren’t any silly bits to remember. It was all just there right from the start.

I guess you had already played together for a long time before.

Me Jim and Dan, especially Jim. We’ve been best mates since we were nine years old, and we’ve been playing together for… forty years. It’s just, um…

It’s ESP at this point.

Exactly! That’s what I’m looking for!

Are you surprised that people still want to come out and celebrate The Honeymoon is Over thirty years on?

Well yeah, I am. We were really ambivalent about it, and we hadn’t really thought about it. I’m actually very ambivalent about that sort of nostalgia stuff myself. So, this thirty-year thing came around, and the record company decided to re-release it on vinyl and put it out with all the packaging and everything. I was like, ‘It’s just online if someone wants to find it’, but no, they gave it a push, and it almost made the top twenty. So that was basically a done deal for us to get together. We had been sort of thinking about it, maybe, but (inhales through teeth dramatically) it would be dishonourable not to do that!

You recorded some of the album at Planet Studios here in Perth; how did you end up there?

We were on tour; we just did that on the fly. We’d written this song, Black Stick, and we thought it sounded like a bit of a single, so we just got a day in the studio. Just like in the sixties when they’d chuck Jimi Hendrix in the studio for a day. But I remember we put down the backing track, and Perko [Tex Perkins] said, ‘Alright, I’ve just dropped a trip, so you really better get this vocal down in about fifteen minutes because it’s coming on real fast’. So that’s just one take, and it’s a fucking great take.

I came across something that said you were the one who recovered your infamous lost ARIA Award?

I just saw it on one of those Facebook pages. There was an eighties one, and now we’ve sort of moved into the nineties one. All these people turning fifty are like, ‘Move over boomers; this is now; this is our nostalgia.’ Someone in one of those groups posted saying The Cruel Sea’s ARIA was on marketplace for a dollar. There was this big sort of keyboard warrior, nanna, nostalgia lynch mob, and they absolutely hammered the guy selling it, saying (in a mockingly deep voice) ‘give it back to Tex now!’ They really upset him, this poor guy; he’s on methadone and living in a bedsit. He was just going through a skip out the back of Sony Records one day, and he just found it there with a whole bunch of other stuff.

I rang him up, and he was like, ‘oh fuck’ and he’d had the shits with it. I managed to calm him down. We had a chat, and I just said, ‘I don’t give a fuck about it; this thing has been gone for twenty-seven years, and we really didn’t give a flying fuck about it in the first place.’ I asked if he wanted a slab for it. He said sure, and I asked what kind. He said VB. I think he wanted it to go to a good home, but he also just wanted to get rid of it. So I went to this dodgy area; that’s another story I won’t go into! (laughs) But I got it off him; he was just a good guy. I made a post on that group explaining the story, and at the end I put, ‘Oh, and by the way, here’s a big fuck you to all the fuckers who put shit on him! You should walk in someone else’s shoes!’ We knew it was ours; it was bent where it went in the wall, and it also has Wednesday, April 30, 1994, on it. The Wednesday’s spelt wrong!