My Life With The Victims: Ray Ahn

Back in high school one day, my classmate Peter “Blackie” Black invited me back to his apartment so that he could blast me a 7” he’d just found at one of the specialty record stores in the city.

This was 1981, I believe. I hadn’t joined the Hard-Ons yet, though I had already been a fan of Blackie’s high school project The Dead Rats.

The stylus lowered onto the wild and dramatic blast of Television Addict by The Victims. My mouth became agape and it stayed that way all the while the shock treatment crackled wildly out of those speakers. I was stunned.

“You wanna hear it again?” invited Blackie. Just in case I did not actually grasp what was happening.

“Yes. Go on”.

And there it was again. This time, we played it back even louder. The mesmerizing magic of that Victims track perhaps emboldened the two kids in that lounge room to care that little less about the neighbours – and then we played the flip side. It was proto-hard-core. The most frantic thing we’d heard, ever. It was wild. My legs moved involuntarily. My body became unmoored from the mind and I jigged and boogalooed. I was electrocuted. My being floated. The music did it.

Unbelievable.

It sounds like ridiculous hyperbole but hear me out – the two of us found a blueprint. A skeleton. A genie in a bottle. It was the greatest single ever released. When we discovered the five-track second release No Thanks to the Human Turd, our brains melted again. We were supercharged to forge our own path, in our own band. I joined Blackie’s band in January 1982 and we became the Hard-Ons.

For a long while, we knew nothing about The Victims. Even when the book “Inner City Sound” became our reference encyclopaedia not long after, the Victims were so mystical. So magical. Their blitz upon the world so unfairly yet probably fittingly brief.

We stayed entranced.

Over the years, through the wonderful network that is the Australian musical underground, Blackie and I became friends with James Baker and Dave “Flick” Faulkner. And somehow, through our friendship, I became the bass player. I was supremely overjoyed and honoured to help re-animate James and Dave’s fabled early band.

Somehow the two of them believed that I had understood the Victims’ DNA and knew its secrets. It was explained to me kindly and generously that it was not just our friendship, but my eternal love and, therefore, familiarity with the central spiritual core of the Victims that I was asked to move onto the bass for the band.

I am not sure about that - but I do believe that the magical ooze, the kernel of musical mysticism and power that the Victims spewed forth on that day after school in Blackie’s lounge room actually became embedded in our souls. And to this day, all that stuff is still embedded there. It is pure magic.

Over the years I prodded both James and Dave for the backstories. It was to grasp the genesis of the Victims' essence and their music. I find the Victims monolithic. The band stands alone above every other band as the most entrancing. Sheer brutality and velocity battled the undeniable and irresistible forces of melody and joyous autobiographical naïveté. I was shocked but later unsurprised to find that there was insane common ground with the Hard-Ons. We were all young kids absolutely dying to kick out the jams against a background of mainstream boredom, all the while with tongues firmly in our cheeks. Our bands became the supernatural rocket ship taking us away into a brilliant cultural, musical and spiritual stratosphere. It wasn’t anger. It was sheer joy. It was and is unshakable self-belief. James and Dave still have that.

Blackie and I had gotten ours from listening to them!

I can’t dissect what it is like, to be in the band of your childhood hero worship. That is too weird, too difficult, too esoteric even. All I can say is that I’d seen myself on the internet playing “Disco Junkies” and when I witnessed that, I became overwhelmed. Overjoyed. Emotional. Uplifted. And still bewildered – at how great The Victims are.

The Victims are the best band in the world.

THE VICTIMS - LAST SHOWS

With special guests Chimers

Fri Dec 1 - The Brunswick Ballroom, Melb (w/Lice Trays)
Sat Dec 2 - Crowbar, Sydney