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.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] 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

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