REVIEW AND PHOTOS BY: ALEC SMART

Hard-Ons sizzle under ‘Clandestine Sausage’ alias at secret show

The Hard-Ons, Sydney’s beloved punk rock troopers, played a not-so-secret ‘secret’ show at Frankie’s Pizza in Sydney CBD on 16 February. Advertised as a one-venue ‘World Tour’, it was in fact a second concert after a previous word-of-mouth gig on 10 Dec 2021 at Link & Pin in Woy Woy launched the limited two-venue globetrotting.

Both featured new vocalist Tim Rogers, singer-guitarist with YouAmI, settling in to his role as front-man for the veteran band.

Rogers joins long term members Peter ‘Blackie’ Black (guitar), Ray Ahn (bass), and Murray Ruse (drums) to make up the quartet.

The two shows, under the alias Clandestine Sausage, were a warm-up with Rogers prior to the Hard-Ons official March-April east coast Australia tour promoting their new album, I’m Sorry Sir, That Riff’s Been Taken.

Released 8 Oct 2021, it is the band’s 13th studio album since Smell My Finger in 1986, but the first to feature Rogers on vocals, since he replaced original singer Keish de Silva in March 2021.

It is also their highest-charting album to date, reaching number four on the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) official album charts.

As Rogers joked at the start of the show, “Number four is better than number one, because it is four times one!” The Frankie’s Pizza gig’s 17-song setlist included seven tracks from the new album.

Hard-Ons are Australia’s most commercially-successful independent band, with over 250,000 album sales during their 40-year career.

The new material follows their successful formula of blending fast, metal-inspired riffs with touches of psychedelia, surf melodies, Ramones-style hard rockers and the occasional punked-up ballad, played on Blackie’s distorted Gibson SG – a guitar made famous by Angus Young of ACDC. (Blackie began the night wearing an ACDC T-shirt).

Onstage, Rogers is a natural fit with the Hard-Ons, constantly moving, occasionally playing maracas. Unshaven and dressed-down in cut-off shorts and T-shirt, his only nod to his usual sartorial elegance was a peculiar pair of bright purple zip-up boots.

Almost all of the new Hard-Ons’ songs were written by Blackie, with Rogers contributing two sets of lyrics: Frequencies and The Laws of Gossip. Only the latter was performed at Frankie’s.

Rogers is credited anonymously as ‘TR’ on the new album, so it will be interesting to see whether he collaborates musically with Blackie, or contributes his own songs on any future Hard-Ons’ recordings.

Rogers has recorded 11 studio albums with YouAmI, founded in Dec 1989 and still active, plus eight solo albums and several other musical projects.

It is unlikely Keish de Silva will return to the band he co-founded after leaving under a cloud. From 1981 to the band’s initial break-up in 1994, then from its 1997 reformation until he quit in 2001, he both sang and played drums. In 2016, with Murray Ruse firmly in the drum stool, de Silva returned to full time vocal duties, recording and touring the album So I Could Have Them Destroyed (released Oct 2019) until his dismissal in early 2021.

The veteran multicultural group, whose three founder members were friends at Punchbowl Boys High School, began in 1981 under the name Dead Rats, then The Plebs, before settling on Hard-Ons in late 1982.

Because they were not yet of legal age to perform in licensed premises, their first shows were at school dances and house parties.

This reviewer remembers first seeing them in the basement of an Annandale house in early 1984. I clung to the drain pipes on the ceiling and hung above the band to better see them play, because the tiny space in which they performed was jam-packed with heaving teenagers.

Their first official advertised show was in the Vulcan Hotel in Ultimo on 20 June 1984, which this reviewer also attended. (Two years later, a band I was in opened for the Hard-Ons at the same venue).