How Sunnyboys Are Writing New Classics & Revisiting The Old

As iconic Australian rockers Sunnyboys prepare to revisit their seminal 1981 self-titled debut album in full for the first time ever, bassist Peter Oxley has had the opportunity to re-immerse himself in the music from the band's early years. And he's been quite impressed, particularly with the output of the band's frontman, his younger brother Jeremy.

"I've been listening to it closely and I find myself thinking, 'Wow, it is a really great record'," he admits. "Some of Jeremy's guitar playing is amazing and he's just 18 years old! I was 19 or 20, but I always think of his blazing talent and how good he was as a guitar player, particularly the melodies that he wrote for both his guitar and his vocals — it's totally amazing, really, for a young fella."

"We've got some actual music down on tape, and it's good!"

As well as playing Sunnyboys from start to finish, these impending shows will include other material from the band's '80/'81 era, a time when the younger Oxley was rife with inspiration and pumping out killer tunes at a rate of knots. "It was funny because, at the time, Jeremy's songwriting was developing so much that he'd go, 'No, no, no, those songs are dated now,' and I'd be going, 'This is a killer song, man!' and he'd go, 'No, no, I've got this better one'," Oxley laughs. "It was pretty fast back then — when we'd be trying to get a setlist together there were a lot of songs.

"Somebody recently sent us a cassette of the first-ever show we played and there's three or four songs on there that didn't even make the demo stage, and they were some quite good songs. We need to relisten to those and see what can be made of those songs at some point.

"It's really interesting, but to me it doesn't matter when a song is written: a song is just a song — they're suspended in time somehow. If it's a good song it doesn't matter if it's written in 1980, there's no reason that it can't be restored or played again now as a new song. It's not a new song, it's just a song."

And excitingly for fans who've either rekindled or developed a love for Sunnyboys in the five years since the classic line-up reunited, they've recently been working on their first new music together since the '80s. "We've got some actual music down on tape, and it's good!" Oxley enthuses. "At the moment we're just collecting songs that we think would be worthwhile to record and we're just doing demos, with everyone putting on their bits and pieces. We haven't recorded everything properly yet, we're just taking it slow and steady like the tortoise and the hare. We might just do a four-track EP on vinyl, just something for fans and for posterity."