By Erin Free
Aussie singer, songwriter and guitarist Peter “Blackie” Black is a delightfully open book in the new doco Harder And Harder, the incendiary sequel to The Most Australian Band Ever!, which chart the fascinating history of his legendary punk band The Hard-Ons.
“I freeze up when someone sticks a camera in my face, right?” laughs Peter “Blackie” Black. “I don’t really know what to do. There were days of intense filming and questioning, but after about four hours, you just start yakking and yakking and yakking.”
Over the last couple of years, Blackie has well and truly had to get used to having a camera jammed in his face. He has been tracked, interviewed, and quietly filmed for a period of several months by director Jonathan J. Sequeira, the man who previously told the story of seminal Australian 1970s-era rock band Radio Birdman with his blistering 2017 doco Descent Into The Maelstrom, a cinematic marvel praised by everyone from humble rock journos right up to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. In a show of extraordinary good sense, Sequeira chose to follow up his savvy cinematic portrait of Radio Birdman with a no-stone-unturned look into the continuing history of an equally vital and essential Sydney band in the ragged, perennially dialled-up form of The Hard-Ons.
Formed in the 1980s in the south-west Sydney suburb of Punchbowl by childhood friends Peter “Blackie” Black and Ray Ahn, who were joined shortly after by fellow pal Keish De Silva, The Hard-Ons were built on a rock-steady framework of youthful exuberance, cheeky insouciance, risque song lyrics, high-energy punk-rock playing, and pop-tinged songwriting smarts. Just kids when they started, The Hard-Ons have now been rocking for over forty years, building up a loving, dedicated fan base both in Australia and overseas, and accruing big-name fans like punk godfather Henry Rollins along the way.
Though there have been various line-up changes over those forty years, the forged-in-fire nucleus of The Hard-Ons has always been Blackie and Ray, a Mick-and-Keith in thongs and boardshorts, if you will. When FilmInk catches up with the utterly charming and disarming Blackie over the phone, The Hard-Ons have just enjoyed a weekend show as part of the three-day celebrations to mark thirty years of the legendary, much-loved independent Parramatta record store Beat Disc. “It was great,” Blackie says. “There were people there who hadn’t seen us for years. There were old fans who came up and said, ‘Here’s my daughter. She likes you guys too.’ It was a great show.”
Blackie is on the phone to chat about Harder And Harder, the second part of Jonathan J. Sequeira’s lengthy documentary odyssey with The Hard-Ons. The first part, The Most Australian Band Ever!, screened to great praise in cinemas earlier this year and is now set for a December Blu-ray release. The big, bustling, incident-filled story of The Hard-Ons, however, couldn’t be constrained by just one film. “Jonathan met with us when he was putting it all together, and he said, ‘Guys, I’ve been cutting and cutting and cutting, and I just can’t do it…I can’t do it…I can’t get it all into one film. This might sound weird, but I’m gonna have to do two docos.’ We were like, ‘Just do what you need to do.’ I’d never interfere in someone else’s creative process, and I certainly don’t know anything about making a film! I know what I’m like when people tell me what to do with the band – I fucking hate it! – so I’d certainly never tell someone else what to do with their thing.”
It was another good decision from Jonathan J. Sequeira. There’s more than enough grist for the director’s high-powered cinematic mill in The Most Australian Band Ever! and now Harder And Harder, and the docos are utterly absorbing from beginning to end. This wildly entertaining doco double-shot takes in the wide-ranging ups and downs of the band, whose unconventional racial make-up (Blackie is of Croation heritage, Ray comes from a Korean background, and Keish’s family roots are in Sri Lanka) saw them met with horrendous racism in 1980s-era Sydney, which often tipped over into violence. The Hard-Ons have also endured inter-band tensions, an ugly sex scandal involving a former bandmember, fan fallout as a result of the band taking a support slot on a Rose Tattoo tour, and even a tragic near-death incident when Blackie was assaulted while working as a cabbie.
Through the two docos, Blackie and his bandmate Ray Ahn are extraordinarily honest and candid, really opening up about the trials and travails of The Hard-Ons while also maintaining their famously gritty brand of knockaround humour. “When people see someone up on stage, they might think, ‘Oh wow, that’s so exciting,’” Blackie says. “But with us, you couldn’t meet anyone more boring, you know? All we do is work, rehearse, write songs and play. That’s it. We don’t really party much or anything like that. There’s no story there, right? But somehow Jono fucking snuck underneath it there, and said, ‘I’ll show you a fucking story!’ His girlfriend Sarah also worked with him in the interview process. Stuff just came out…I never really thought about it. Jonathan just got stuff out of us. I didn’t really think about it much, but after the first doco came out, people would come up to me and say, ‘Thank you so much for being so honest and open.’ And I’d just be like, ‘Uh, um, okay.’”
Despite keeping a tight handle on his band for over forty years, Blackie was more than happy to relinquish control when it came to the documentaries telling The Hard-Ons’ story. Neither he nor Ray Ahn were involved in any way with the creation of the docos outside of sitting down for interviews, being followed around with a camera, providing the required contacts, and handing over some stuff from their archives. “We just really liked Jono,” Blackie says. “We really trusted him. We knew what he’d done with the Radio Birdman doco. We were just like, ‘Whatever you need, go for it.’ I’m not going to get in the way of anything. It wouldn’t have turned out anywhere near as good if we’d had any kind of control over things. We would have fucked it up! Jono is just so smart. I stumble over my words and all that sort of shit, so Jono interviewed my sister and used Ray in a lot of ways to help tell my story when I couldn’t articulate shit.”
While The Most Australian Band Ever! and Harder And Harder effectively shine a light into the darker corners of the story of The Hard-Ons, the band now seems to be in a very, very good place. They’ve tapped You Am I legend Tim Rogers as their new frontman, and have a rock-solid musical engine room in drummer Murray Ruse. The Hard-Ons have constructed a nice framework too so it can all work out. “I have a day job as a personal trainer, and Ray has a day job in a record store, but Tim’s day job is doing about fifty other things,” Blackie laughs of the prolific Tim Rogers, who not only fronts You Am I, but also performs and records solo, and has a long list of collaborators and various creative side projects to boot. “When those schedules align, we do stuff together, but when they don’t, we work as a three-piece, and I do solo stuff. That’s working out for us.”
And yes, you read that correctly: the hard-rocking Peter “Blackie” Black has given driving cabs away, and instead now runs his own show as a personal trainer. Always rippingly fit and in remarkably good shape, it seems like a good fit for Blackie. “It works well, because I can keep my own hours, like I did when I was a cabbie,” Blackie explains. “Some personal trainers like to totally run their clients’ lives, and tell them what they should eat, and when they should eat it, and everything else. I don’t do that shit. I work with my clients and give them a solid framework, but I can’t be there all the time because I have to tour and record. It’s working out well.” Do Blackie’s clients know about his work in the band? “Some do, and some don’t. One of my clients came up with a picture of me with my shirt off and my guitar over my head and said, ‘Is this you?’ He just pissed himself laughing.”
Though Blackie doesn’t like being referred to as a legend (“That just means I’m old,” he laughs in Harder And Harder), what The Hard-Ons have achieved over forty-plus years – and continue to achieve right fucking now – is utterly staggering. Not many bands can stake a claim like theirs, and on top of that, The Hard-Ons have always operated as a no-frills, distinctly working class band. When FilmInk wraps up with a cliched request for Blackie to account for the incredible longevity of The Hard-Ons, he answers it with unbridled enthusiasm and laser-focused certainty. “Apart from my friendship with Ray, we just fucking love music,” Blackie says. “Today, I practiced on my acoustic, wrote a little, and read a book about prog-rock. I just love music. It’s a privilege to play it. Music can make you feel something…it can really move people in a way that no other art can. I just hope that when we perform, or with these docos, or when we do Q&As afterwards, that we can just spread a little bit of good stuff around as opposed to any nastiness. I just fucking love music.”
Harder And Harder will screen in cinemas through November and December in a series of special event screenings with Q&A sessions and live performances. Click here for more information.
Click here for our review of The Most Australian Band Ever!
Click here for our review of Harder and Harder.
The Most Australian Band Ever! will be released in December in multiple Blu-ray packages. Click here for more information.
