The Suns: Rock never die!

Update: The Suns play at the Sem­bawang Fes­ti­val on Fri­day, 20 Jan from 8pm

…Even if you slapped a fine and banned them from per­form­ing locally.
I’d have described them as ‘one of Melbourne’s finest rock bands’ of recent times, think­ing that Sin­ga­pore has not been kind to The Suns, much less con­tributed to any part of their con­sid­er­able success.

But as the band’s drum­mer Wayne said in response to my quip about ‘Sin­ga­pore being a ster­ile place that doesn’t nur­ture tal­ent’, “We were doing very well here before we got banned”.

The three band mem­bers, going by the noms de rock­band of San Singer, JBoss and Wayne Thun­der, enjoyed suc­cess in Sin­ga­pore between 1997 and 2000 as The Bored­phucks, a name which guar­an­teed them a tor­rid time with local author­i­ties — it’s not pro­nounced as Phuket is.

As with most ban­nings and clam­p­downs in Sin­ga­pore, the author­i­ties came down hard on The Bored­phucks when some­one ‘lodged a complaint’.

Appar­ently some peo­ple were offended by the band’s use of vul­gar­i­ties on stage.

“Yah, we said ‘Kan­inabu­chow­chee­bye’ on stage, at a con­cert, and then there was a riot, so they banned us…

We were twenty year old boys, and to fine us and ban us for say­ing that is just… fuck­ing ridiculous”, said San, the lead singer, almost wistfully.

At our record­ing of the mrbrown show pod­cast (con­ducted at Wayne Thunder’s family’s flat in Pung­gol), The Suns’ enthu­si­asm for their music appeared infec­tious, as they talked twenty some­thing to the dozen about their days in Mel­bourne and how they scored gigs at pubs and in small coun­try fes­ti­vals. How­ever, as San Singer describes, Sin­ga­pore­ans take a lit­tle bit more to warm up to them.

“The Bangla work­ers were body-surfing… show­ing rock signs and hav­ing a really good time”, he said, recall­ing their New Year’s Eve con­cert on Orchard Road as part of the New Year’s count­down festivities.

“We should tour Bangladesh!” added bass player, JBoss.

The tone of the pod­cast inter­view was helped a lit­tle by Wayne’s father, (Mr Thun­der) who’s a fan of mrbrown’s (and who inter­rupted the record­ing by ask­ing if we were ok with drinks — you can hear the ‘yes, thank you uncle’ quite clearly).

Clearly proud of the boys suc­cess, Uncle spoke a lit­tle at the end of our ses­sion about The Suns’ suc­cess and how dif­fi­cult it was to change Sin­ga­porean par­ents’ mindsets.

Chang­ing the Sin­ga­porean mind­set about suc­cess in the music busi­ness was another mat­ter — as Wayne puts it, “Sin­ga­pore­ans hear a band play and go ‘I dunno the song they are play­ing’ and they rather lis­ten to a cover band.

“They don’t appre­ci­ate bands that play their own music”.

You can lis­ten to The Suns’ inter­view on the mrbrown show pod­cast: [rss feed][sub­scribe with iTunes]