Australian punk rocker Ray Ahn embarks on long, hard journey back to Korea

Australian punk band the Hard-Ons performs at a house party in 1984. Courtesy of Ray Ahn

By Jon Dunbar

• Published Aug 29, 2026 6:40 AM KST

Australian punk band the Hard-Ons are coming to Korea for the first time in September, but for bassist-vocalist Ray Ahn, it's a return to his birth country.

Ahead of the tour, the band released a Korean-language EP, with Ahn singing four of their most memorable songs in Korean, including "Where Did She Come From?" and "Suck and Swallow."

Ahn was born in Seoul, and emigrated to Australia at age 9 in 1974 with his family. Now in his early 60s, he still plays for the Hard-Ons, a legendary Sydney punk band known for its multicultural lineup when it was formed in 1982.

The band also became notorious because of the name — which shouldn't shock anyone in Korea, where there was once a mainstream band called DickPunks and nobody ever made it weird.

For Ahn and his bandmates, who got sick long ago of having to keep justifying their name, calling themselves the Hard-Ons meant playing the music industry on a hard setting. They faced barriers where other bands might not have, and they seem to have thrived on controversy in their early days.

"Our rudeness was wielded as performance art," Ahn said. "It served a purpose at the time. We loved waging a war against censorship. We had absolutely nothing to lose as we did not care about being popular or anything. It certainly is great being absolutely unshackled by a need to say and do the right things for the sake of a music career within the music industry."

Coming from a Korean family, Ahn faced high expectations for academic achievement from his parents.

"My mum (and my dad while he was around) were '70s Koreans. They measured life by education. Every single member of my father’s and my mother’s families were/are university-educated. My father’s side is stacked with doctors. On my mother’s side, doctors, lawyers, scientists," he said. "My parents only expected both my brother and I to study at university. They did not for one second think that we’d refuse. Not for one second did I think that I would not study. To me, it was unthinkable. I really wanted to get my degree. It was written into my DNA and my family’s DNA."

Study came easy to Ahn, even though he kept playing music.

"I was playing music throughout high school and I became a professional musician by the time I became entrenched in my university studies," he said. "My parents were supportive of everything I did."

In 1987, the band signed an international deal and were expected to tour Europe and the U.S., but they delayed it until after Ahn completed his studies.

"In 1988, we traveled abroad for the first time. I missed my graduation," he said. "I’ve been a professional musician ever since."

Ahn knew plenty of other Korean immigrants, but he rarely saw anyone who looked like him at shows.

"I met one Korean kid in Sydney in 1989 at a Hard-Ons gig that seemed to be into punk music. That’s about it," he said.

In the same year, when they were touring Sweden, Ahn met a Korean adoptee who had been adopted out to a Swedish family.

"She told me that she did not feel in the least bit Korean. She was a Swede 100 percent but still, she asked me about my childhood in Korea," he said. "I felt a bit bad for her."

He still carries memories of his childhood growing up in Korea.

"My life in Korea was nothing but joyous," he said. "I remember walking through tear gas to get home with mum. The buses had to stop as there was a university demonstration. I remember my mother and I crying but on the whole, life was fantastic for me."

He added that he came from a wealthy family, and his father was a helicopter pilot for the president's security detail.

"I remember the uncovered roads. I remember small trucks driving past spraying this smoke into the air. I remember the lepers door knocking for food. I remember the 10 p.m. curfew. I remember walking around with my school friends, walking to new neighborhoods just to see what was there. We were allowed to walk around anywhere. It seemed safe. I was 5, I remember."

The last time he visited was in 1998. While he said it was great to catch up with extended family, he also admitted he was shocked about how much Seoul had changed since 1974.

"I also remember watching propaganda movies in the classroom warning us about North Koreans. We were told that North Korean military men wear three watches on their wrists as they don’t care about telling the time, they care only about flaunting wealth," he said. "I remember seeing some teenager in a dry canal, he must have fallen in accidentally, whilst riding his bike. I think he was dead. People were gathered staring at his body. I remember skating on the frozen pond with my brother during winter, down the street from my house. I remember buying a bag of loaches and taking them home with my mum on the bus. We’d release them into our little fish pond in our backyard."

When asked if he ever wondered where life would have taken him if he had never left Korea, he admitted he had.

"I think I may have ended up a lawyer like my granddad on my mother’s side. I am not sure if I would have ventured into music," he said.

"I don’t even feel that I am Korean any more. I certainly don’t feel particularly Australian. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I never felt the need to any tribe or anything like that."

Ahn's background is spotlighted heavily in the 2024 documentary "The Most Australian Band Ever!"

The 106-minute-long film talks about Ahn and his bandmates' experiences in the Australian punk music scene, while dealing with racist backlash from music fans as well as entrenched barriers in the music industry.

"Everything in the film led back to how these three immigrants fit in to an idea of being Australian, while at the same time some people would think they were the opposite of that," the film's director, Jonathan Sequeira, told The Korea Times.

"They fit into that coarse Aussie humor, while at the same time being really smart. They loved sport, played cricket, had a larrikin sense of humor that was typically Aussie. And of course, being multicultural is a big part of Australia, that a lot of people overseas might not know. Post-WWII Australia really boomed with immigration, and Asian immigration really grew in the '70s and '80s."

Sequeira said that the film's main question might be "what success really means."

"Doing it on your own terms, but also doing it well, is what matters," he said. "Everyone in the Australian underground music scene knew the Hard-Ons, even if they didn’t like it."

Sequeira described what it is like to see the Hard-Ons play live, and what we have to look forward to in Korea.

"I think the single thing is the intensity — the feeling that the band is giving everything," he said. "That creates an energy from the stage that you hope the crowd picks up on and feeds back to the band, but even if that doesn’t happen, the intensity is still there. The sweat on stage and the sweat dripping off the walls. And the volume."

Sequeira added that he is working on a sequel to the first film, titled "Harder and Harder."

"It’s about being old where the first film is about being young," he said.

"The Most Australian Band Ever!" will screen at ArtNine Cinema in southern Seoul on Sept. 11.

The Hard-Ons will play the night after as part of the Block Party music festival in central Seoul's Haebangchon neighborhood. On Sept. 18, they'll be at HQ Bar in Busan, before returning to Seoul for a show on Sept. 19 at Baby Doll, featuring the local bands ...Whatever That Means, Oysters, Find the Spot and Sweet Gasoline.

Visit linktr.ee/thehardons for more information and to reserve tickets.