Interview by Kris Peters
Australian music was a melting pot of talent in the early 90s with bands like Tumbleweed, Regurgitator, Spiderbait, Magic Dirt and the Superjesus planting the initial seeds that would see them still knocking crowds dead to this day - some 30 years later.
Punk upstarts the Hard-Ons were also a major player in the thriving scene, but it is an offshoot of that band - formed after internal bickering led to one of the band's many breakups - called Nunchukka Superfly who made perhaps the biggest impact of them all despite never releasing an album and disbanding after a few short years.
In that time Nunchukka Superfly - Ray Ahn and Peter Black from Hard-Ons, Massappeal drummer Peter Allen and former Harpoon frontman and future Drones co-founder (and now JJ McCann Transmission main man) James McCann - earnt a fierce reputation as a must see live band, managing to record an albums worth of material that was seemingly lost to the ether and never to be seen or heard again.
Until now.
The masters of that album found their way back into the hands of McCann, who dutifully passed them along to the rest of the band, ensuring the collection of now timeless punk rock tunes would finally see the light of day.
The band released Nunchukka Superfly 95 earlier this year and announced a run of shows in celebration, proving there's still life in the legs and lungs of this Australian musical enigma. And where there's life, there's hope, as evidenced by the fact Blackie and James reached out to us here at HEAVY to talk about the past, present and future of Nunchukka Superfly.
We start with the album and ask how it felt to finally release it after so many years.
"I guess you could call it strange," Blackie mused, "but at the same time it felt really good, and I think we can thank James for that because I didn't even have a copy of the recordings. I forgot what it was like even. But James got in touch about a year and a half ago and said mate, have you heard that fucken thing we did all those many moons ago? It's really ferocious. We should release it and I remember thinking yeah, yeah, maybe one day. He sent me a copy, and I was like holy fuck he's right. This is mad."
"I had it on cassette for years," James added. "And I think we all had a cassette copy initially, but I wore that out eventually. In Sydney Jason, who recorded it, was working across the road from where I lived at the Hopeton Hotel on the weekends, and he said I have that DAT tape of that Nunchukka Superfly recording, do you want a copy? I said yes, and I sat on that for years because I didn't have a DAT player (laughs). I had access to this old 90s DAT player about ten years ago at a friend's studio, so we plugged in the old player and put the cassette in and BAM, there it was loud and clear, and somehow I had stored it away well enough to obviously have not lost it. That was the start, then I got it digitized and sent it to Blackie and Ray."
In the full interview, Blackie and James talk more about the release of their debut album, Nunchucka Superfly 95, after many years, and the upcoming reunion shows. They shared their memories of the band's formation, their last show in 1996, and their chemistry during the first jam session, expressing excitement about the reunion and the potential for future collaborations.
Blackie and James also discussed the process of obtaining and digitizing the original recording of their debut album, emphasizing that no alterations were made to the original recording. They reflected on the quality of the music and the positive reactions on social media and strong initial sales, including overseas interest, and expressed pride and gratitude for the continued interest in their music after so many years.