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FROM LEFT Drive in Saturday,
The Huxleys (2022) photograph.
Road to Nowhere, The Huxleys
(2022) photograph.

“But you don’t look like any Elvis I remember,” continues Will in the voice of the
local who expresses a longing for simpler times when women didn’t send pictures
of their “private parts” to potential suitors. “When I met my wife, she wouldn’t have
sex until we were married and I was always trying to get into her pants. She said
that the only man she’d have sex with before marriage was Elvis and I reckon most
women around here would have said the same.”
Pondering the irony of their art premise playing out in real time, Garrett notes
that the only reason the protagonist stopped to talk to them was because of the
way they looked. “It gave a hint of how Elvis might have felt. Yes, our costumes are
queer and more exaggerated, but with that hair, high pants and swivelling hips in
small-town America in the 1950s, he would have been every bit as shocking. ‘Elvis,
keep your pelvis, far from me’.”
The fear and resistance that fast softens to amused engagement is all part of the
“reel-in” of The Huxleys’ art and its wider narrative, says Will with the tell of more
uproarious anecdotes and the observation that “they are so refreshingly not woke”
in the country. “We give them the blinding beauty then deliver a little bit of poison,”
he says, citing the Leigh Bowery belief that everything benefits from a toxic shocker
and a bit of humour. “It takes a lot to look this stupid.”
Nailing the cross-generational, cross-gender, cross-border appeal of Elvis down to
sex — a word that Garrett says was concealed in the 1950s Afro-American euphemism
rock’n’roll — The Huxleys believe The King created a safe space for men to flirt with
outrageous flamboyance. “I feel as though Bowie, Prince and an entire glamazon
of rock gods borrowed from Elvis and Little Richard before him,” says Will. “Even
today, the likes of Lil Nas X pitch their camp in his grounds,” and give voice to an
intrinsically Australian appreciation of irony, vulgarity and the gloriously gaudy.
“He made it OK for masculinity to cosy up to romance.”
thehuxleys.com.au

Jul/Aug 2022 63