Unlike a lot of old punkers who grow up and start listening to Band of Horses, Steve Milligan’s punk spirit never wavered. He talks to TIM SCOTT about his new acoustic project Black Is The Colour, battling his personal demons and his mixed feelings towards the country of his birth, Ireland.

Steve Milligan is perhaps best known as the singer for Mid Youth Crisis, the Melbourne hardcore punk band he fronted throughout most of the ’90s. Formerly known as One Inch Punch, they made a name for themselves around Australia and beyond as a fierce live unit who mixed the personal with the political.

Unlike a lot of punkers who grow old and start listening to Band of Horses, or worse, Milligan never lost his punk spirit. After a break from music and some considerable time in his native Ireland, he returned to Australia and started the Coue Method with fellow MYC member Adrian Lombardi. He’s recently embarked on a solo acoustic project, Black Is the Colour, which despite being more stripped back has lost none of Milligan’s DIY punk steel and ethos.

“I guess it all started off with Adrian [Lombardi] and I playing some acoustic versions of the Coue Method stuff,” says Milligan. “Then I saw Lachy [Hodgson, ex-Caustic Soda/Blueline Medic] who runs Trusty Chords records, and he asked me if I was interested in putting out a EP or something. So I just compiled a bunch of songs and that was it.”

The result is a seven-song, self-titled EP. Recorded with the help of Coue Method bandmates Lombardi and Sam Johnson, the sweet vocal harmonies of Bec Martin and the stirring mandolin and banjo of Mark Jennings (The Currency, Mutiny), the EP draws from Milligan’s life experiences. It covers themes as far reaching as addiction, recovery, death, suicide, exile, abuse, love, hate and fear to ideas about nationalism, culture and the law.

Like many an Irish storyteller before him, Milligan has had to deal with his share of demons. He speaks candidly about the reasons behind his return to the land of his birth.

“I had a fucking heroin habit and I had to get away. So Mum gave me the ticket to get the fuck out of here; a ‘geographical’ they call it. I went over there and there wasn’t much of a punk scene. That’s when I started playing in my bedroom and the first time I stared to play acoustic, purely because there was no one to play with. Up until then it had always been songs on guitar with lots of volume and distortion.”

The last 10 years has seen an emergence in folk and acoustic punk with labels and scenes dedicated to the genre but for Milligan it slipped under his radar. “To tell you the truth it went over my head. Well not even over my head I just didn’t know about it,” he laughs. “To be honest I didn’t even know about [US punk band] Against Me until I had started writing the songs and was back in Australia. But I think it’s cool.”

While Ireland gave Milligan a chance to straighten out his health and forge a new musical direction, he understands that the country has its own flaws. Yes, Dublin is often romanticised in song and culture as a place teaming with passion and good times - the home of Yeats, Behan, MacGowan, Guinness and streams of whiskey – but Milligan’s relationship with the city is bittersweet.

“I was born there but I grew up here [in Australia] pretty much. We came here when I was six. I went back to Dublin in 1999 and stayed for seven years. Ireland is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it has darkness too. I mean, I’m from Ringsend, a part that is known as ‘Dublin 4’ or ‘D4’ in the city’s south side that is considered to be one of privilege. But even though Ringsend was part of D4, there was a big difference.”

One of the songs on the EP, ‘Fall of Fatima’, is about Pat, a guy Milligan met in rehab who came from the infamous Dublin housing estate Fatima Mansions.

“When you’re an immigrant, you end up being cynical of both sides of your upbringing from both places that you’re from.”

“In another typical Irish case of irony, the Mansions was one of the worst and dodgiest housing estates in Dublin,” he says. “It was like a war zone. But it’s been knocked down now. It’s hard to believe that a city like Dublin which, when I was there, was so fucking wealthy, the economy was strong it was known as the Celtic Tiger, but people were living in this kind of squalor. That [Fatima Mansions] was just one of the estates. There were many more.

“Anyway, Pat was one of 13 kids. He had been in and out of [notorious prison] Mount Joy all his life and had become a Born-Again Christian as had most of his family. In his eyes he felt saved by that, and in a sense he was. But Pat had AIDS and he also had Hep-C so his liver was fucked. He was in a weird fucking state when I met him – he couldn’t take his medication for AIDS because it was messing with his liver, but he lost his daughter and two brothers to AIDS as well.”

Milligan becomes visibly agitated and frustrated as he explains the conservative social situation that remains in Ireland.

“The Irish are so fucking close-minded when it comes to dealing with drugs,” he explains. “You couldn’t get fucking needles over there. The only place I was able to get needles was one place in town and they were only open business hours and they’d close for two hours at lunchtime. People who lived in the estates just didn’t get them. Particularly in the ’80s when heroin and AIDS was literally a plague … Pat lost untold amount of friends and family to AIDS purely because the government was kowtowing so much to the Church about how to respond to this crisis.”

Milligan realises that as someone who was born in Ireland, but who grew up and now lives in Australia, it can be difficult to cast stones. But his punk upbringing means he can’t help but question injustices.

“It’s very frustrating but as an exile, if you will, I do have a romantic notion of it as well. So it’s a conflict in my head. I want to get back there eventually and live there again, but there’s a lot of things I fucking hate about it. There’s also a lot of things I hate about here as well. But when you’re an immigrant, you end up being cynical of both sides of your upbringing from both places that you’re from. In Ireland people would get shirty if I made any criticism, as they wouldn’t consider me as Irish – even though I was born there.”

Milligan says the acoustic setting is the perfect foil for his politically charged songs.

“There have always been topical elements to my songs in previous bands, he says. “But I think that because it’s stripped back it seems more obvious. I think that was a conscious decision too, to do something acoustic gives you a chance to communicate what you want to say without the interference of loud, fast music.”

He also explains that the solo nature of Black Is the Colour suits him as an older musician. “This record essentially came down to doing something and not having to worry about band members. It’s not easy to keep a band together anymore. When you’re younger, everyone has more energy, you’re all on the same wavelength and you all have time to do it – unless it’s an endeavor that’s fiscally rewarding,” he laughs. “But that’s not very punk.”

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Black Is the Colour will be launched at the Birmingham Hotel in Melbourne tonight (November 27) with Fear Like Us, Tom Woodward and Darren Gibson.