Australian rock band The Cruel Sea has released new music for the first time in more than two decades.

Straight into the Sun was released on 7 March, marking the band’s first new album in 23 years!

The Cruel Sea will perform at Canberra Theatre Centre’s The Playhouse on 3 May.

The Straight into the Sun tour shows will be a one-off, very special experience.

Tickets for the Canberra show can be purchased at canberratheatrecentre.com.au/show/the-cruel-sea-2025

The Cruel Sea last played in Canberra in late November 2024 as the support act for Cold Chisel’s 50th-anniversary tour.

Ahead of their return to Canberra, CD chatted with Aussie music legend Tex Perkins about the band’s new music and tour.

Tell me a bit more about the new music the band is bringing to the Canberra stage.

This tour is very specifically an opportunity to play, promote, and present the new album. We’re going to perform it in its entirety, in order.

We will do two sets — play the album in full, then a little intermission, a little toilet break for you to grab a snack and do various other chores you can fit into 20 minutes.

We’ll come back and do a second set — deep cuts of songs that’s not a rock and roll show. I see us as more of a dance band, a lot of the music is based on groove.

There’s a tiny bit of groove on this album. It deliberately has some dynamics to it, and I didn’t want it to be a bit of this and a bit of that. Danny (Rumour) presented instrumental demos to me, which some of them became songs, and some remained instrumentals. The ones I was connecting with were of this old school nature. The Cruel Sea started as an instrumental band and primarily covers, but that music is a specific style of our instrumental, the early 1960s.

The Cruel Sea was always playing music of another year but contemporising it.

That’s the way the band started — those were the elements that attracted me to Danny’s elements — the feel of the music is reminiscent of The Cruel Sea.

I wanted to make an album that had a consistent feel and also had very strong dynamics within that. You’re not getting the same thing over and over again. And I think we pulled it off.

Why is the show a “one-off very special experience”?

It will just be this particular tour set during this tour. We’re having Mick Harvey guest with us on keyboard and percussion. He played on the new album. He was very helpful in providing interesting keyboard parts. We are very fortunate to have him on the tour.

This particular show we’ll probably never do again. We’ll be back to rocking and rolling.

This is a very special, once-in-a-lifetime show never to be repeated, so we’d love to see you all there.

The next project in the pipeline is Universal reissuing 30th anniversary things. We’re in the anniversary business — the next one on our list is an album called Three-Legged Dog (released in 1995), which has its 30th anniversary.

Universal is putting it on vinyl for the first time. Significantly, that era from 1992 well into the 2000s was dominated by CDs — and when streaming took over, CDs weren’t seen anymore. But slowly vinyls have come back. There was a whole two decades of music that was never on vinyl and now we’re systematically correcting that.

It’s been more than 20 years since the band last released a new album. Why now?

It happened because of the anniversary. The promoter said, ‘Are you going to do it?’ and I said ‘Well it’s not as easy as it seems because one of us has died, we haven’t played in 10 years, and we don’t even know where Danny is’.

We got back together for that, and at the very first rehearsal I walked into the room and before we even really decided to do the tour, Danny gave me a CD and said here’s some new tunes — that was his motivation all along.

I didn’t listen to that CD for months because I wasn’t ready for it. When I finally did it, it all came funnelling out and by the next February we were popping out a new album.

You tour with The Cruel Sea, solo and alongside fellow bandmate Matt Walker. Do you ever have free time, and if so, what do you do when you’re not creating or playing music?

Raising children, they’re aged between 11 and 34 — 11 and 14-year-old boys and 21, 30 and 34-year-old girls.

The girls have all left home they live independent of us, but we’re still deep in the trenches of parenthood with the two boys and realising how easy the girls were (to look after).

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