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Interview with
RAY AHN and TIM ROGERS
from
THE HARD-ONS

(8th October 2021)

Interview by Karen Lowe

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The Hard-Ons 2021! Murray Ruse, Peter Black, Ray Ahn, Tim Rogers. Photo by Michelle Young/Lantern Studio.

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“The Hard-Ons were and still are amazing” – Warren Ellis (Dirty Three/Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)

“(The Hard-Ons) should be in the ARIA Hall of Fame!” – Dave Faulkner (Hoodoo Gurus)

“The Hard-Ons are trailblazers!” – Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys)

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You guys have been around for almost 40 years, when you first started out did you think that you would ever still be around now?
R: No, no, when I was on my first tour of America, I was 22 and I went and visited my auntie and she said “is it the same band as before, when you were in high school?”
I was like “Yeah!”
“Good god you’ve been in that band for a long time!”
I’m like “Yea I know! I’m 22 now!” (Speaking as his auntie) “Didn’t you form that band when you were 16?”
I said “Yeah!”
She asked “When are you going to stop?”
I said “Probably when I’m 23/24” Now I’m 56!

And still here! Tim, You first saw The Hard Ons in your teens. Did you ever think that you would end up recording a record with them?
T: Nope. No ma’am (laughs). Absolutely not. I think my greatest ambition for many years was being able to Blackie’s amp out of the venue. I offered a couple of times but he’s such a fit bugger. He’d always be able to do it and Ray similarly. And then, when we got to be friends, you know, acquaintances and doing some tours together, festival tours, it just felt a million bucks just to be able to have a chat.
Getting the call from Ray a bunch of months ago was easily the most surreal moment of my life just easily. And now it kind of makes sense sometimes, when I’m walking down the street and get this jolt and I think ‘how the fuck am I having an anxiety attack?’ and it’ll just be this ‘Fuck! I’m actually, I’m in my favourite band as it happens’. It makes it all – life – absolutely worth living for those beautiful moments of bewilderment and joy and terror.

Speaking of recording, how did it go with the latest album and are you both happy with how it sounds?
T: Ecstatic!
R: Very, very happy thank you! It came together really quickly. A lot of the pre-production was done beforehand obviously so we kind of hit the studio running – all four of us and it came together very quickly don’t you think Tim?
T: Oh yeah, as Ray said with pre-production, the songs were written and constructed and song structures. The Hard Ons are a far heavier rehearsed band than any other one I’ve ever been in; even when I was in The Bamboos for a little while.
When I walked in to do the vocals in the studio we’d have rehearsals and it’s just fun and intimidating and all that. I walked into the studio and I was quite knocked about when I heard the songs coming through speakers and I was sort of ready to go in and record and I asked Lachlan (Mitchell) the engineer “How many weeks did you spend doing these?” and Lachlan said “Yep, that’s a day and a half”.
You Am I records take a bit longer but definitely don’t do anything other… well; probably just drinking and drugging. Twits, basically. It was just bewildering at first and then I heard these songs. I knew the demos really well, that I got sent, but, there they were – just larger and more exciting than what I’d heard previous and so to do eighty percent of the vocals in one day and then coming in the next morning and sort of finishing it by lunchtime I thought ‘well this is The Don’s (The Hard Ons) ethic or something’.
You work hard; you have fun hard and that played out. It was fuckin really inspiring you know at 51 being involved and making,.. you know, probably, we’ve, between us made about the same amount of records together, you know? Because Ray does a lot of stuff outside the Dons and it does well and Murray’s (Murray Ruse) got a big recording history and really, at 21 I thought I’d still be learning how to make records better but at the age of 51… here I am.

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Did you have to change your vocals at all Tim?
T: I’m not sure, really, yeah, I’m not sure. I kind of figured they asked me to sing for a reason and so I’ll just be uber Tim. One thing I know Blackie (Peter Black) is that he is really self-critical about his voice. I am as well. I love Blackie’s voice so much, whether he’s playing his solo stuff or with the band.
I love Keish’s (Keish De Silva) voice. It’s just so beautifully melodic, so no, I didn’t think about it much. Maybe time will tell. It’s a fuckin work out though!

I could imagine, I’ve seen The Hard Ons live. I’ve shot them and that was hard.
T: You shot them? Wow, that’s an intense reaction! (laughs)

Yes, in mojos! And Ray are you happy with how Tim sounded and working with Tim?
R: Yea we actually asked him to sing on the record for a really good reason. We wanted somebody who had this rattle of both melody and harshness and we knew that Tim could do both.
I think, to be fair, Tim’s vocal approach for You Am I, for example, tends to be a little more melodic. There’s stuff that The Hard Ons do that require him to scream for example in those songs and we knew that he could do it. I remember a long, long, long, long time ago meeting Tim and his brother and they seem to both be into bands like Napalm Death and some English hardcore and American hardcore.
I knew Tim was into, over the years I knew that Tim was into really heavy music as well and also I know for a fact that Tim also liked classic Rock. People think that The Hard Ons are a Punk band but we have a lot of things that come from classic Rock – really, really, heavy duty, muscle-bound rhythm grafted onto super melodic vocals. You know; that classic sound.
The backing rhythm has to be super dynamite but the vocals have to have a fair bit of melody coming in and out and we knew that Tim’s vocals would be perfect for it because that’s what he liked and that’s what You Am I is like. If you listen to and see You Am I play, Rusty’s drumming is… well you can see that he’s influenced by people like Keith Moon – you know; somebody who does a drumroll. When somebody in a band like that does a drumroll, the drumroll doesn’t lose power. In fact it gets louder so it’s a series of explosions and The Hard Ons have that in common with You Am I in that our songs… I mean our songs are probably shorter in a lot of ways but our music is melody based and rhythmically, it’s a series of really violent explosions and that’s how our drummer plays and that’s how I have to play as a bass player.
Tim’s vocals are suited to that because it’s a really easily recognizable classic rock approach and Tim’s got that approach. So that’s why his vocals would suit our music. he’s not as one dimensional punk singer for example and we just can’t have fellas like that playing in The Hard Ons. I don’t know if that makes sense?

How have the dynamics of the band changed with Tim as a front man?
R: It’s hard to say because the band was always with me and Blackie as the founding members pushing everyone else around. You know like if you’re in a car? In a car, you’ve always got the driver and a passenger navigating and two guys in the back seat, right? So it’s always been like that with The Hard Ons. Me and Blackie in the front seats driving and navigating and whoever else is in the band, they have to get in the back seat.
It’s not a necessarily good way to be in a band because, well, you know… I don’t think a Rock n Roll band is ever a democracy because if it is a democracy those bands that are democracies sound like shit. Someone has got to be in charge and so the dynamic of the band hasn’t really changed at all.
When Tim joined the band me and Blackie really pushed him to contribute as much as he wanted to and he was comfortable with. He was saying stuff like ‘can I come up with a melody for this song?’ and we were like yeah we want you to! We didn’t want him to be a hired gun for one recording session where he does what he’s told to do. We wanted him to stretch out and do as much as he can and back himself to be able to contribute as much as he thought he was comfortable with.
So that’s why a couple of songs Tim’s come up with a melody line and the lyrics and all that kind of stuff because we wanted him to. When he came on for the project the songs were already written but some of the songs had huge holes in the songs, you know, like the melody line and stuff. A couple of the songs were just riffs and we said ‘Tim?’
He said ‘I’ll come up with something’ and we said ‘We want you to come up with something!’ and he did and now those two songs are probably our favourite on the record!

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Nice! Now over the years The Hard Ons have faced many challenges but, rather than focussing on the negatives, what are some of the positive things you have learned from these challenges?
R: You mean the things that have happened recently for example?

Everything
R: I’ve learned a lot about myself, that’s for sure. I mean, The Hard Ons, it was a weird band. When I joined The Hard Ons; the band was already going for a year as a high school band and we were all in year 9 together but I wasn’t in the band. It wasn’t until year 10 when I was 16 that I joined the band.
My family came to Australia in 1974 so when I joined the band in 1981, I hadn’t been in Australia for that long. Going straight into a high school band and then within the next couple of years touring around everywhere playing music, I still hadn’t felt like an Australian.
Joining The Hard Ons really fast tracked me to becoming a young Australian adult. (laughs) It’s hard to explain but I just learned so much from playing in a band and meeting people who were, at the time, much older than myself. Playing in a band, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough to anyone and Tim would probably say the same, I think. You never stop learning when you’re playing in a band.
I think there’s a huge prejudice against people of a certain age, for example, Triple J has this thing called the youth network right? The music industry’s really heavily skewed towards the younger people but my favourite musicians have always been people older than even myself. I’ve learned a lot from people and I’ve never stopped learning. Tim will probably say the same. You never stop learning. Being in a band is a really great place to learn about who you are and how life works and people’s tolerance as well.

With lockdowns happening here and there, Tim – what are some of your most positive moments over the last year and a half?
T: Apart from being in the band and putting out a new record, my friendship with these guys has been really important through some really difficult times. The way our friendships are bourgeoning and we know that we’ve done something really special together has been so important. Just continuing on from what Ray said; bands are an interesting little microcosm with the way people can get along. You really have to lay yourself on the line and for my egocentricities and everyone’s idiosyncrasies, you have to have a common purpose.
It may not be exactly the same but you’re working for a group and I remember very early on, in the late 80s, my best friend Nick and I (whose common interest was in the band – the Hard Ons) and Nick said to me ‘you know people look down on these guys as just a scuzzy, punk rock band from Punchbowl’ but they’ve toured the world.
It may have been the early 90s that we are talking about – just before the first break up and if you read Ray writing about those experiences; they were these young guys who toured the world and got to experience socially, the things that the most successful people in the world would never experience and how can it be justified to look down on these guys in any way like it’s a lower artform or that they are somehow sub-standard people because they are playing hard rock/punk rock music when they’ve toured the world?
It just really got to me because I still had my head in the clouds and thought that to get on stage, you had to be dropped from a cherry picker and come in on a parachute. I was a big Rolling Stones fan and when we used to go and see the Hard Ons or bands that they played with, we’d see them and have our minds completely blown by the musicianship, the energy and then there was a chance we’d actually get to talk to them after?
They’d say ‘c’mon and grab a beer afterwards’ but that felt completely alien to me. Not only was it like science-fiction; you were meeting your heroes but you could converse and walk away with compilation tapes and records and singles and you had a whole new bunch of friends.
Karen, I can’t remember what you originally asked but that’s my answer. (laughs)

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That’s a perfect answer
R: Karen, we are a really lucky band, the Hard Ons. Really lucky. We’ve been able to stay invisible to a lot of people for the whole part. Just to give you an idea, most bands have got a good idea of where their station is. For example, if you are in Powderfinger, you know how popular you are. You play to a certain number of people, you get on certain TV shows and, to a lesser extent; if you are a Spiderbait or You Am I, you know where your level is in terms of what venues you can play.
With the Hard Ons, we just don’t know because it’s so unpredictable. There’s more ambiguity and unpredictability with the Hard Ons than any other band that I can think of. I’ll give you an example. I had to go to Japan ten years ago to buy records for my work and I was in Fukuoka which is in Kyushu island so off the beaten track and; fair dinkum, I was in a place called Kokura which is a small village and I was buying records from this tiny little shop and some eighteen year old kid came up and grabbed me and he started screaming “Hard Ons! Hard Ons!”
I was thinking ‘what do you want?’ and he kept screaming “you’re in the Hard Ons!” He recognised me and I asked “how do you know I’m in the Hard Ons? I mean, all Asians look the same right? How do you know??”
He goes “oh you guys are legendary!” and he started showing me all these photos – all these Hard On images that he’d saved on his phone. I was blown away and was like ‘wow!’. In all seriousness, how many people know the Hard Ons in Australia? It’s not a household name so it’s really unpredictable being in the Hard Ons.
In 1991, we had to go on this big European tour but one of the last shows that we did here was at a place called Jaggers at West Ryde. Do you remember that place Tim?
T: Certainly do my friend
R: So we played to about twenty seven people with a band called The Plunderers so we didn’t have a setlist as there were so few people so we just let the guys in The Plunderers call out their favourite songs and we just played them and that was it. This was a week before we were about to go to Europe. And we’re going ‘oh my god. Here we are about to get a flight and go to Europe and we just played in front of twenty seven payers. Who are we? What are we?’ One of the first gigs we did was at a place called Camden Palace and to two thousand people!
We went from playing to twenty seven people in West Ryde to playing in front of two thousand people in London in the space of a week! So, go figure. You just can’t tell. We’re a lot smaller than a lot of people understand but we’re a lot more famous than other people give us credit for. What that does is… if you’re in the band then you can’t take anything for granted. The only thing you can do is concentrate on the music because with everything else – who knows? Are we playing at the Landsdown next week and how many tickets are we going to sell or are we going to be playing at The Foundry? We don’t know. It’s all a whimsical, wheel of fortune and whoever is spinning – it could be the Devil spinning that wheel.
T: Raymond… Raymond – it’s Adriana Xenides.

Ray – how did you feel when fellow Sydneysiders’ Frenzal Rhomb honoured you with your very own song?
R: That was really funny and I was really flattered but I found it nonsensical and unreasonable but really flattered. I said to Jason Whalley “why’d you write a song about me?” and he said “Oh I don’t know man. You’re a bit of an inspiration.”
I asked “In what way?”
“You make a lot of sense like an old Asian philosopher.”
“Nah, I’m just an idiot.” I said. “I was just lucky to come up with a couple of quotable things.”
It was about seven or eight years ago and there was all this hipster hate going on. You remember when everybody hated hipsters? I was talking to Jason about it and I was like “Look – I don’t hate hipsters, I think we should make fun of them because they’re begging to be made fun of but I don’t think we should hate them because they are not our enemy. They’re us! It’s just that they have moustaches and we don’t. That’s the only difference. They’re not the enemy but do you know who the enemy is? George Pell.”

Ahhh – the shirts…
R: And we know what happened. George Pell got charged with child sex offences and the first thing I did was call Jason and said “I told you so. I told ya!” Mind you… he was acquitted later but…

Tim – one for you as a footy fan, how do you feel about the AFL Grand Final being played at Optus Stadium? 
T: I don’t have great thoughts about it very truthfully. I’m a West Australian – I’m from Kalgoorlie. I hope people enjoy themselves and I hope they keep themselves safe but sporting events having crowds and no shows at entertainment venues is an anomaly that I find disturbing. Until I have a scientific, medical reason or a solution, all I can say is I hope people enjoy it and take care and look after each other. I don’t really know what else to say ma’am.
I am a West Australian by birth but I’m a Tasmanian now. I don’t have any great thoughts on it but I’m very much enjoying the way the Melbourne Demons are playing at the moment and glad Footscray won and I do want the East Fremantle Football Club to live long and prosper but the whole crowds at sport and not at music events rankles me greatly.
If the Parramatta Eels can get over Melbourne a couple more times, I’ll be a very happy man as well.
R: You know what they are going to have a sporting even where they cram tens of thousands of people in, they should be made to watch twenty bands.

I agree – all local bands too
R: Yeah – you can watch football but you have to sit through twenty concerts from twenty up and coming bands that have had no chance to play live music. It doesn’t have to be the Hard Ons or You Am I. We’ve had our days in the sun right but imagine if you are an up and coming person trying to form a band now? Where would you be? Make the twenty or thirty or fifty thousand people watching football… make them sit through thirty bands for example.
T: Karen, Karen… just for the record Karen. Ray Ahn is my spirit animal…

(laughs) I think that is the perfect note to end the conversation on. Thank you both so much for your time today.

KAREN LOWE

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