Hard-Ons: All Set To Stay
Sydney punk legends Hard-Ons have weathered splits, side projects – even grunge. Bass player Ray AHN gives TREVOR BLOCK the secret to eternal (sonic) youth.
In some ways it's difficult to believe the Hard-Ons have been around for 25 years. A trio of snotty punk kids, with a determinedly independent and individual outlook, they should have been crushed and tossed aside years ago. By commercial failure, by bad luck, by petty squabbling or large vices – all the things that spelled the end for so many of their peers.
You joined this band when you were 15 years old. How does it feel to be a Hard-On at 40?
Well, you know, I can't really answer that. I could only answer if I'd stopped, for some reason, and could look back on it, and I never have. It's been a continuous thing for me, and so to me it doesn't feel like anything has changed, or that I've changed. A while back I went and saw a reunion show by the __ [name deleted by request], who I used to see all the fucking time, and I thought they were great back then, you know? And I was good friends with their bass player, but when I saw this show, I didn't recognise him at all. After an 18-year gap, or whatever, away from playing the band’s music, he was a different guy. Not just older, different. He spoke to me, and I honestly didn’t know who he was.
One of things is, if you leave music, you lose something. The Hard-Ons broke up for six years, but I always kept playing, was always in music, looking for jobs, shitty jobs, and trying to keep going with my music. I've never left, so for me it feels like things haven't changed. It's just this constant thing. Physically, Blackie and I, we've never changed our lifestyle away from that music focus. We've always been pretty strict about things, because you have to be when you are running something like this, you know, a touring band that plays a lot. Even for a small band, you need discipline, really … I feel contemporary to any 21-year -old in any other band. I'm their peer.
“I feel contemporary to any 21-year -old in any other band. I'm their peer.”
But, of course, a lot of your actual contemporaries who split have tried to come back over the past few years.
Yeah, and all those other bands, when they split, while they were away, they had other things in their lives instead. Nice jobs, babies, houses, whatever. But because they split, and they moved away, they lost that spark. The Hard-Ons have never lost it, we've just fucking refined it. And, you know, I'm not really interested in watching a band who were mediocre or shit to begin with come back and do some mediocre reformation thing. And I'm not talking about being mediocre in popularity, because that doesn't matter, I'm talking about being mediocre musically, then and now.
You mentioned the Hard-Ons split earlier. You and Blackie basically went straight out and formed Nunchukka Superfly, didn't you?
Yeah. That split we did, that wasn't a band decision though. We got forced into it by everyone outside the band and the pressure. Look, we were The Hard-Ons, a bunch of fucking kids from high school. Left to our own devices, we did shit, like show up for photo sessions wearing thongs, you know, or Blackie would have a beard or something. Put out records called Dickcheese. Some stupid shit that we didn't care about, that didn’t matter to us, but did matter to other people. And around the time that Nirvana broke really big, people started telling us, trying to tell us, how to do stuff.
On one hand, we were being told we could change the band a bit, be more like this or like that and, you know, make everyone a million fucking dollars. And on the other hand, we were told if we didn't change, from being this stupid punk band, then we were dead, that the band would die. But we were guys who knew each other well, and we thought we knew better than anyone what we should do. And we were convinced, absolutely convinced about that, that idea that we knew what the Hard-Ons should do.
We went from being popular, to being a goose that some people thought should start laying some golden eggs, to a basket case, from all this pressure coming from outside. So we split.
Your artwork, the covers and posters and T-shirts, not just for the Hard-Ons but also other bands like the Spunkbubbles and the Mothers, created a very distinct look and feel, that changed the way a lot of Australian music looked.
You think so? No, I don’t think that change was all because of me, really. It was down to people being seduced by the lack of pretension, and the way we showed a kind of child-like approach to the music and the artwork, that comic book look.
Remember, back when we started, everyone at gigs wore black – black boots, black jeans, black waistcoats, maybe a fucking paisley shirt. But here we were, three stupid kids from the western suburbs, and we didn’t get it. We loved the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, but we didn’t think you needed to wear sunglasses and black winkle pickers to listen to them, you know. And when we were watching these other bands, and their fans, we thought that all sucked. We just wanted to have fun.
If it wasn’t us doing it, then it would have been someone else, I think, that shit couldn’t have gone on, with everyone looking like they were in the fucking Jesus and Mary Chain.
And a lot of that art we had, those covers, they weren’t at all serious. Anyway, our strength wasn’t in the covers, or the posters, it was in the punk rock pop songs.
Speaking of which, ‘All Set To Go’?
Oh, [laughs]. I love it, I still fucking love it. It’s got two chords, one melody, a chorus, you know, it’s fast … That is probably the one song that sums us up perfectly.
HARD-ONS FREE SHOW
Friday, January 23
The Esplanade Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
w/Fangs Of Satanic Soccer Mums + Wicked City + Useless Children
+
From his iconic cover art for Massappeal to his Hard-Ons fliers, Ben B…
Sydney punk legends Hard-Ons have weathered splits, side projects – ev…
Hey I like this article and I like its referencing too. good stuff. Can't see the gig cos I have babies and stuff but loving it and sure hope it's gonna be fun
LONGER ARTICLE ON THESE PRICKS PLEASE!!!!
I wonder who this is. hmmmm....
...vs fennesz
again, great article and replies from Ray there - he's a champ
saw em recently and they are ageless, the bastards still have it
good luck with Eschy drumming for the Euro tour too, he hasn't stopped grinning since he was told he had the gigs I'm sure
If I told you, I would have to kill you. Before Ray killed me.
good article, block
their show was just like back in the day
what a load of crap talking about people who liked the rock a bit different and they dressed a certain way if i remember rightly these bunch of no talent prats jumped on every bandwagon they could, first it was the garage punk thing,then when people got tired of that and went skate punk,guess who jumped with them,and then the hardcore stuff,just overrated at least the bands they put shit on stuck to there guns
that gig was fucking awesome, the new songs are so rad and soupfuzz you are probably old and really boring.
is that the only comeback you got zac i just get sick of these bands that think they r so important when they know they r not,hey zac im the same age as the hard ons and i still go and see bands ,i wonder if you will when you r in your 40s
Hmmm.... I do think Ray protests a bit too much, regarding other bands from his (my? our?) time that haven't maintained their original ''spark''. I mean, the flipside of that is just wheeling out the same old redundant punk rock cliches like the Ramones used to do, for the die-hard fans. What would be the point of that?
I say bring back Testicle Candy! Now there is a band that deserves acknowledging!
yeh well i just hope wen im 40, i dont use grammer like a 13 yea old.
learning to spell would be a start
whoosh.....
a little from column soupfuzz, a little from column teardrop.
i never liked anything they did after ''love is a battlefield'' (and i listened to that recently, it didn't hold up) but i think it's better they tried to do different things and keep themselves amused rather than stick to formula. soupfuzz is kinda right though, the constant musical progression always felt like they were changing with the times.
I'm not sure you do.
Oh, and rigid? Your opinion on ''All Set To Go''?
great single. as a kid i love everything they did up to ''love is a battlefield'' -- the garage stuff, the pop punk, the spastic hardcore, the metal, all of it. they changed a lot in those first five or six years and i dug it all. then ''yummy'' came out and it was all over.
I think the Hard On's do their newer songs alot better than their older ones. The Most People records sound WAY better than the Dickcheese songs live. I think a band that's been going for 25 years is inevitably going to change it's sound or become redundant over time. It'd be pretty weak if they made Dickcheese again and again.
have to agree with rigid, yummy was a pretty poor effort compared to the earlier stuff (maybe that is around the time ray was talking about outside pressures starting to take hold over the band) and i lost interest pretty quickly after that.
but yeah, being in my 30's , would i really be interested in revisiting the hard-ons? i seriously doubt it. i guess i'm one of those boring old people that ray is talking about. maybe i have lost the spark for dumb teenage punk, but that doesn't mean i have lost the spark for music alltogether. i guess my tastes have just changed / matured / gotten boring as i've aged. im sure ray is very happy with his lot but yeah it does seem like a bit of a whinge, as frankie has said the flipside is often just as sad, sticking to the ramones cliche etc. give me a break.
i actually don't know what my point is, or if i even have one. they were an OK band back in the day, i'm just very surprised they're still around . meh. what do i care either way? good on 'em.
much, much love & respect to the Hard Ons - one of the coolest bands i've ever seen play
anyone remember the Space Juniors?
The Hard-Ons are still one of my favourite bands. They definitely changed style over time to some extent, but I think that accusing them of being careerist bandwagon jumpers, like soupfuzz has, comes across as the historical revisionist rantings of a bitter old crackpot.
From what I can tell, they were always essentially a hard-rocking pop-punk band with a lot of other influences in the mix (the ''thrash'' influence probably coming to the fore a but too much around the time of Dickcheese- I think they got a bit too excited about the Stupids) right up until Too Far Gone when they pretty much abandoned any sense of having a ''sound'' and arguably tried a little too hard to do something different to their previous work.
I've always seen Too Far Gone as being the Hard-Ons rebelling against their ''cartoonish'' image, and being largely a result of the external pressure they felt at the time. I've heard people write it off as an attempt to jump on the 90s alternative rock bandwagon, but I really don't think that theory holds any water. It's a pretty blatantly non-commercial record.
Personally, I think they had a fantastic run of singles and EPs, but never really nailed things properly in an album. Dickcheese is good, but really overdoes the thrash side of things and has way too much stupid toilet humour even by Hard-Ons standards. Love is a Battlefield has weak production, a handful of lame songs, and Keish's worst recorded vocal performances. Yummy has possibly even worse production and some really similar sounding songs (they use the same ascending four-chord riff in about four or five songs). I think Too Far Gone is actually an excellent album- the production and songs are great- but only two or three songs on it actually sound like the Hard-Ons. And then they were a pretty different band post-reformation.
So obviously not everything they did was solid gold, but they've produced so many songs that I would rate as ''fantastic'' or better that they'll always have a place in my heart.
Christ, I think this post is longer than the interview.
he certainly sounds like one, but then i heard this same complaint coming from some of their peers back in the day.