Beasts of Bourbon formed in 1983 with a line-up that has changed as the band splintered and reformed several times. Although they received limited commercial success, they are widely influential and critically acclaimed. They helped define Australian Swamp Rock and are somewhat of a supergroup, featuring line-ups of some of the most popular musicians of that sub-genre over many years.
The Beasts of Bourbon's music has often been compared to that of a rougher Rolling Stones (whose 'Cocksucker Blues' they covered), The Gun Club (who they played with and who some Beasts filled in for) and The Birthday Party. In Germany, the band were described as 'Muddy Waters on crack'. Their music is a tough amalgam of country music, blues, rock and roll and punk parsed through the garage sound of The Stooges and the drunken mayhem of Australian pub rock. It often touches on themes of depravity, morbidity, despair, drug abuse and violence.
The group were initially thrown together by vocalist Tex Perkins to fulfill a booking his previous band, tex Deadly & The Dum Dums, could no longer make. The band began playing together in small venues in Sydney. The initial version of the group included Spencer P. Jones of The Johnys, Boris Sudjovic and Kim Salmon of The Scientists and James Baker of The Hoodoo Gurus. Recruited in large part because they were often found in the Southern Cross, an inner-city Sydney bar, these members form what is considered by some to be the 'classic' line-up. This lineup was featured on the band's first album, The Axeman's Jazz, recorded in 1984 in a single afternoon for one hundred dollars by Tony Cohen. The album was an excursion into deranged Gothic country and western, with a strong sense of irony and irreverence toward country music's cliches. A cover of "Psycho" was a hit on alternative radio. Although the album became an underground success, the band continued, for the time being, to be just a side project for its members until 1988.
