INTERVIEW – RAY AHN, HARD-ONS, October 2024

INTERVIEW – RAY AHN, HARD-ONS, October 2024
By Shane Pinnegar

Your Grandma’s favourite Aussie punk band of the late ‘80s, early ‘90s and… well… NOW… stage another righteous blitz on West Australia this very week!

Playing Amplifier on Thursday November 7th, The Indian Ocean Hotel, Scarborough on Friday the 8th, then zooming to Adelaide for Sunday November 9th’s Froth & Fury, it’s the tail end of their Aussie tour for latest album I Like You A Lot Getting Older.

Their third record with Tim Rogers as frontman – double dipping from his day job with You Am I, of course – I Like You A Lot Getting Older is another great entry in the band’s eclectic catalogue, and they have a long-awaited documentary coming soon as well, Hard-Ons: The Most Australian Band Ever.

Ray generously spent some time chatting passionately about the band and the criminal state of the Australian music industry. It’s a sometimes sad read, but here it is in all its brutal truth…

Hey, Ray, thanks for your time today, man.

Thank you, Shane. How are you?

I am well, Sir. It’s good to talk to you again – there’s so much going on in Hard-Ons land.

Sure. Like it’s our 40th anniversary.

I know, it’s crazy, man. I remember buying the Girl In The Sweater single when it first came out. I can’t believe I’m that old.

That was 1986. In February, it came out.

Yep. And the new album’s just great. I had a listen to that today, just awesome.

Ohh, thank you. Thank you very much. We’re really happy with it.

Is it fair to say that this latest incarnation of the band is pretty much a rebirth?

Yeah. Well, the band was, ummm… I guess needed something new and exciting to happen… and I think getting a new singer was good for a few different reasons. Musically speaking, we really like Tim’s vocal approach. It’s something that really we didn’t have in the Hard-Ons. It was something that we just didn’t have, you know, that kind of soulful approach to singing, the ability to be really expressive in in the vocal department, so I guess some of the songs here and there tend to be very personal sounding.

When you have a punk band like the Hard-Ons, and there’s a melodic element to it, if you listen to the first Ramones record or the first Saints record or something like that, it’s very in your face and blistering, but they’re not like very soulful personal approaches, you know. But Tim has that quality to his vocals, which none of us had before. Having said that, on the new album there are a few songs that are very typical Hard-Ons, with multi layered main singing to make it sound big – and what that does when you multitrack the vocals, is that it stops becoming very personal. It doesn’t sound like you’re singing to one person, but what it makes it do is it makes it sound like a big sing along, a fist in the air anthem kind of a vibe. And there’s a few of them as well. But Tim’s really good at singing – he’s very talented. And plus, he’s a good guy to be in a band with too.

And a great songwriter as well. So that’s bringing that new element – Blackie is collaborating a bit more now.

Yeah, I think the idea of the Hard-Ons is to extract whatever talent there is in the band, in terms of, like, what are the strengths of the band? And I guess it’s left to me to do all the artwork because I’m the one in the band that is the best visual artist. But then if you have someone like Tim who knows how to craft melodies really well then I think you should let him do it, you know. Do you ever watch cricket, Shane?

Yeah, mate. Yep.

Do you remember a cricket player – he’s from our neck of the woods, Bankstown – Steve Waugh?

Yes, of course.

Yeah. So he was an all-rounder when he started. He was a bowler and a batter. And when they interviewed Richie Benaud about Steve Waugh, whether he should be concentrating on batting or bowling, Richie Benaud said, ‘He should do whatever he wants to do, what he thinks he’s good at.’ So if he thinks he’s good at bowling and batting, let him do it. And so basically, don’t leave anything in the tank. Explore all options. That kind of idea. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do with the Hard-Ons too. I mean, if somebody in the band can have a different approach to melody, and it’s actually suitable for the band, then that’s working to its strengths. So yes.

Absolutely, absolutely. You wouldn’t want to waste Tim Rogers being in your band, would you? I mean, that would be crazy.

No. And he gets very enthusiastic about writing new songs for the band. Yeah, he always says, ‘would you mind if I tried a different melody?’ And there, and of course the answer is always going to be yes, you know.

Since Tim’s been a Hard-On, since 2021 – he’s obviously got a reputation from his great work with You Am I. Has it changed the perception of the band at all from in the eyes of fans or the media or promoters or anything?

No, I think not really. I think on the whole we’re still pretty much invisible to almost everyone except a small group of people, you know. So that is… I mean it’s not something we dwell on too often, because I think it’s a really brutally hard industry to be involved in, the music industry, mainly because you can’t measure it. So, for example, you can measure a sport because there’s always a winner and a loser, and you can tell definitively what the score was. You know how much a team lost by in the Grand Final and that kind of stuff. It’s very concrete. But in terms of music? We’re a band that takes away how many people we play in front of and how many records we sell – we take that away from the equation because we’re not interested, so we just erase it from the operations of the band. We’re not in the business of selling records or playing in front of lots of people. We’re just in the business of putting records out and being on stage, so that’s the business [for us]. We take the second half of the equation away because we’re only interested in the first part, which means that in a simplistic way, we’re trying to be pure. You know, that’s very true to why we formed the band. And when a band is like that, you operate with freedom. It’s very intoxicating because you’re, all of a sudden you don’t have obligations. You can just do whatever you want. And that’s a really great way to be. Of course, it doesn’t pay the bills and it’s terrible in that sense – but we can’t measure art. You know, me and you can talk about who our favourite is, and no one’s gonna be right or wrong, so you can’t measure it. So when you’re in the business, and not being able to measure something, then the only thing someone like we can do is just concentrate on the music. So, to answer your question about other people’s perceptions, I’m sure that that there are other perceptions about Tim joining the band, but for us we just can’t really take that on board. If somebody says, you know, like on social media, for example, somebody says, ‘why the hell did they get that guy from You Am I to be the lead singer?’ You’re like, well, because it’s our band, you know? There are people who are apologists for our first singer Keish, as well, but they have absolutely no idea about the mechanisms of how a band works, the relationships and what people bring to the table for a band like this, and the only people who know are the guys in the band. There are lots of reasons why people change and stuff, but all I can say is, you know, I mean, why are we musicians and artists in the first place [if not] to express something that’s happening in your life? And so your art should reflect who you are as a human being and human beings are always changing, you know, from the moment you’re conceived in your mother. Have you ever had kids, Shane?

Yes, yes, I have one daughter.

So have you been to the hospital when they show you an image of the foetus inside the mother?

Yep, the ultrasound, of course…

OK. Yes. And then it changes. It changes again. And then when they’re born, they look like something. And then when they’re three, they’re different again. When they’re 5, they’re different. So we’re talking about people changing physically through time. Imagine what’s happening in your brain. You’re always changing. People are changing all the time. And so all of a sudden a band changes and a band is an artistic project and an artistic project should reflect a human being and the human being is changing. Then you’re reflecting change. Somebody gets a different singer. The band’s changing whoop dee do. It’s meant to change. And over a period of forty years, how can you expect somebody who’s in a musical project to remain exactly the same?!?! That is ridiculous and unfathomable because the moment it becomes exactly the same over a forty-year period, it is no longer art. So, it’s not reflecting who you are, but it’s reflecting your business sense, so it becomes entertainment. But we’re not entertainers – we’re artists. If we’re artists, then we have to reflect change. And if we’re entertainers, we’ll play our greatest hits over and over and over and over and over again because we’re entertaining, but clearly we don’t have an audience that’s big enough. You know, we don’t play in front of two thousand people at night, so we’re not obliged to be entertainers. We can just be us, and I’ve gotta tell you, the people who like the Hard-Ons, like that aspect of it 100%.

Absolutely yes, right.

So for that reason, I feel really privileged.

Absolutely. I’m with you all the way. It’s just weird that there’s always – no matter what band you’re talking about – there’s always some people who just wanna live in that particular slice of time. When that first single or that one album they got into came out and they expect it to be like that forever. And it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t work that way.

Yes. But it’s also understandable because a lot of times they’ll, you know, somebody will tell you, ‘when I was 17, I bought such and such, and that’s my favourite period [of the band]’ and you go, ‘well, thank you. But that actually says something about you as well as my band.’ So, a lot of growing up, you know, discovering things about yourself, discovering things about life, and a lot of questions that are of metaphysical nature are being answered. Who am I? What am I doing? What are my favourite music pieces and why is it so? What’s my future looking like? All those questions are being answered when you’re 17 and 18 – when you’re a teenager, and we happen to play a lot of music to a lot of teenagers. You are now middle-aged and I have to tell them, listen, a lot of things have changed. A house in Marrickville is not $150,000 anymore, you know…

Ain’t that the truth?

Like a HK Kingswood is not $1000 anymore second hand! So a lot of things have changed. Bands change, you’ve changed – but your nostalgia and a sense of memory remains, and you’re basing everything around your heartstrings and the pang of what you were when you were 17 or 16. And we happen to be somehow hooked onto that, so that’s what you’re saying to me. And I’m very flattered. But while you’re mulling over that, I’m putting out a new record. And you might not like it, but that’s how it is. I’m sorry, you know.

Absolutely. Ray, we’ve spoken before. I know you’re not one to dwell a lot on the past. But with this documentary coming out and with the fortieth anniversary of the band, have you taken pause to reflect on your career and what it means to other people?

No, unfortunately. We’ve been so busy this year, we haven’t. And we’re going to Europe – our guitar player Blackie left for Europe today and Murray our drummers leaving in a day as well. I’m going to be the last one to get there and I’ll just make the tour, and none of us have even thought about going on tour to Europe, and we’re going to be in Europe for two weeks and we haven’t thought about it! Fortunately, for whatever reason, as you get older life does speed up and it’s a bit of an illusion. It doesn’t really speed up, of course, but what happens is you get less and less time to do things, so it looks like things are going faster. So at the moment there are so many things happening in our personal lives and also the Hard-Ons. We haven’t had a chance to go, forty years of the Hard-Ons! That’s a job well done! We haven’t been able to think that at all and that’s why the movie is made by Jonathan Sequeira, who made the Radio Birdman movie because none of us are capable of sitting down and self-reflecting on something that happened for the last forty years. We just can’t because it’s not our business too, because it would stifle us. There’s a fear that we’ll get stuck on one period. A lot of bands go away, reform and then they concentrate on one part of their career that was really successful for them and they stick to that. And that’s fair enough too, you know. But where the fear for the Hard-Ons is, we want to be moving as fast as we can in all directions as much as we can within the paradigm of the Hard-Ons. So, we’re not going to put out an electro album, for example. We’re not going to put out a free jazz record. But within Hard-Ons pop music, what can we do? You know, just move around a bit more than what’s expected of us. And so, yeah, we haven’t been able to self-reflect at all and that’s the good thing about having someone from the outside like Jonathan Sequeira, the filmmaker, to come and go, ‘I’m going to have a look at your forty-year-old career and say something about it, would you mind?’ We’re like, well, no, go ahead. I haven’t even seen the movie. I don’t know, but apparently it’s really funny.

OK, well, I’m looking forward to seeing it. You talked about being pretty much invisible to the music industry. I remember a very early gig in Perth, possibly Club Limbo or some long-gone place like that, and you were on your knees soldering the back of your amp, which had broken in the middle of your set…

Ohh yes.

35-odd years later, is touring with the Hard-Ons a little more financially stable nowadays?

No, not at all. We make a lot less money than what we used to back when we were touring Perth and stuff like that. We were making a decent weekly salary from the Hard-Ons. I joined the Hard-Ons at the end of year 10 in high school and so Hard-Ons were happening [while I was in] Year 11 and 12. All four years of my university years, like by the time we got to Perth, that was my last year of university. Back then there were so many places to play, so it was like a job, you know, you’d look at the tour schedule and go 3 gigs this week, 4 gigs this week, two gigs this week. And then all of a sudden you’re playing twenty gigs a month, fifteen gigs a month. A ridiculous amount of playing, and of course that’s a lot of money, coupled with t-shirt sales and that kind of stuff. And remember back then, people used to buy records en-masse. Obviously people tend to get their music for free nowadays or at minimal cost. If you sell three to four thousand copies of a record nowadays, you’re doing cartwheels, you know. You’d go and buy yourself a Lamborghini – back then if the Hard-Ons sold three thousand records, we’d be distraught. [We’d be selling] fifteen, twenty thousand more like it, you know. So the industry is not there to give you lots of money. If you want to play music for a living, you can’t play four gigs a week anymore. You can’t. Well, you can, but you can’t sustain it for the whole year, you know? At some point, there’s the tipping point and the saturation point seems to be a lot less tolerant nowadays. So to answer your question, none of us are making money. Whatever money we make from the tour, we put it back in the bank for the next time we go to make a record, or we use it to print shirts or whatever, or we drag the money out and buy plane tickets to go somewhere and play. We use it to pay for our rehearsal space and that kind of stuff. So there’s a little bit of money always in the bank, but none of us are making money. We all have day jobs, even Tim doesn’t make much money from the Hard-Ons. He’s makes money from doing lots and lots of other projects and that’s what he does for a living, but he’s talented enough to have a big, broad palette in the world of arts, and that’s a real strength of his, you know. But the other guys in the Hard-Ons, we don’t have that luxury. Our drummer, Murray works in a cafe. Blackie, the guitar player, he’s a personal trainer, so he gets people out of bed early in the morning and whips them into shape by making ‘em run around an oval and stuff like that. He’s really good at that, so that’s what he does for a living. That’s his career. You know, I work in a record store, so I stand behind a counter with hands in my pocket with a big smile on my face with Metallica playing in the background, and I sell CD’s, that’s what I do for a living. But yeah, none of us are making money from the band. It’s just not there.

It’s criminal…

Well, because you can’t measure it, you see. You can’t put a value on it because it’s so esoteric and arbitrary. People can’t even agree on what’s good and what’s bad because everyone’s got an opinion. You’ve got ridiculous things like Triple J’s hottest 100. It’s like, since when did art become a popularity contest? You can’t measure things. I mean, you can count the number of people at a gig, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how good a band is, that’s all up for debate. So once you can’t measure something like the quality of music then you can’t go and ask somebody for more money. You can’t say, hey, listen, my band is fantastic. Have you heard that album Yummy? It’s fantastic. Have a listen to this. I reckon I deserve $5000 to play your gig, you know? You can’t tell people that – they just want to know how many people you pulled the time before, you know, and that’s how they measure art. It’s terrible. And this is when the government should come through and go, ‘listen – this is something really worthwhile.’ Why? Because we’re human beings, right?

Yeah.

Like, some people have got God, that’s good for them. But for the rest of us who don’t have God, they’ve got to have something else. What is it? Family? OK, everyone’s got family. What else? Art and culture? OK, so it’s important to human beings and civilization. ‘We’re going to help art and culture to thrive, so we’re going to fund it.’ And then somebody said, ‘we’re not gonna fund that. We’re gonna fund sport instead.’ Ohh. Game – set – match. You know, that’s kind of how it tends to happen in in Australia.

Unfortunately, that is exactly how it happens. And like I said, it’s criminal, man. Definitely.

Yeah. I live in the western suburbs of Sydney, and every time the government wants to please [the people] what they do is they build another sporting stadium. Well, don’t build us a sporting stadium build us maybe an art gallery, build us maybe a rehearsal space and let 100 bands that exist there locally practise there for free like they do in places like Sweden and the Netherlands. Or maybe have a massive youth centre which doubles up as a café and a place of food and also music. Why don’t they do that, like they have in France, and then fund it, you know? But instead, it’s like we’ve given you another [sporting venue].

It’s that mentality, that the politicians give themselves pay rises twice a year, but they then will fight the nurses and the schoolteachers about pay rises and things like that. As if feeding people sporting arenas is really gonna help…

Well, sporting arenas are good, but maybe they should really think about how to fund grassroots art and music, but there is no grassroots art and music funding in Australia because it’s almost like they, well, we can’t even decide what good art is. So it’s just too hard. It’s almost like the dumb heads only can understand sport because there are winners and losers, you know?

Exactly and the revenue it makes that’s all they care about.

That’s right. Yeah. It’s so primitive…

It’s very disappointing. I’ve used up a fair bit of your time already, mate, so just very quickly to finish up. You and Blackie, you’ve been together in these bands for forty-odd years – the Hard-Ons and Nunchukka Superfly – some people say that being in a band is like being in a marriage. Has it been a rocky ride at all, or are you guys like best mates and everything’s sweet the whole time?

No, we’re pretty much good mates, but I gotta tell you, with the Hard-Ons, we’ve known each other that long, including the original member Keish. We’ve known each of that long, we’ve had like, you know, pretty messy fights and stuff like that in the past. But with me and Blackie, I mean, we’re both in our late 50’s and he has his family and stuff, and I have my family. And so when we were at school and stuff, I’d see him every weekend. We’d go to record shops together and buy records and stuff like that and we’d go on tour. And we were, like, in our teens and early 20’s, going to Melbourne for the first time and going record shopping together and all that kind of stuff. So it was a pretty big social group, but I have to tell you that in the last probably twenty years or so, I mean Blackie, his son is like thirty four, for example. So, conceivably he’ll be a grandfather one day. And when we were kids you wouldn’t think that we’re ever going to be parents, let alone grandparents – but now we’re in our late fifties! We tend to kind of keep to ourselves and see each other when we’re on tour and when we’re rehearsing, and stuff like that. But we get along really well, because when you’ve known someone for that long you kind of know how each other works, what ticks them off, what makes them happy, and all that kind of stuff. At some point, when you say to yourself, ‘this guy is my friend’ – or this woman is my friend or whatever, when you say, that person’s my friend, then you accept them. You accept them for all their strong points and all their weak points, and you expect them to accept you for all your fallacies, and all the faults and also all the good things about you, you know. And that’s part of what friendship is. And when you’re young, you’re a lot less accepting, so there are more things like arguments and punch ups and that kind of stuff. But as you get older, those things get pushed aside and your relationship becomes more like, okay, this guy is behaving this way now and that’s okay – move on. So, you accept people a lot more and, you know, there’s Blackie: he accepts me for most part pretty well, anything that’s going on that’s not perfect about me – there’s plenty he accepts and I do the same to him and that’s because we’ve known each other for that long.

With three albums of this incarnation of the band now, are you at a point where you could pretty much only play the songs that Tim’s collaborated with you on?

No, that’s not true, because Tim, when he joined the band, we asked him to join because he had a really good knowledge of the Hard-Ons back catalogue, and for a lot of people they only know the first incarnation when we were a three piece and Keish, our drummer, was the singer. That’s what people tend to do. A lot of our fans come up and go, ‘look, I stopped listening to you after you broke up the first time in ‘93 or whatever,’ and that’s really up to them, you know. But when we reformed back in 1999, when we toured Europe and we put out all these albums after we reformed and, you know, most of them don’t have Keish on them. Most of them have got Peter Kostic on drums, he’s from Front End Loader, and the other albums have got Blackie singing and Murray drumming and Tim, funny enough, he knows all those other records, too. We got like, 15 or 16 albums out and he knows all of them. So, when he joined the band, he said, ‘listen, I want to do this song and this song,’ and we’re like, wow, they’re really obscure deep cuts from records from 2014, 2006, that kind of thing, and he wants to play them, yeah.

Fantastic. Love seeing you guys together, last time was at The Amplifier a year or two ago, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that movie.

Thanks for coming. Ohh yeah, apparently [the movie]’s really great. I’m looking forward to it, also, I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it’s funny.

Category: Interviews