Discipline: Band

Seven or eight chaotic years into settling in Australia, maybe I finally had a little breathing room, because I started wondering — what do Sydney punks even do for fun?
Just googling “Sydney punk shows” turned up basically nothing useful. One day Miyoung dug all the way through Facebook and found something — info on a punk show happening at a pub near UTS in the city.
I called up Edang, and Miyoung and I headed to the Valve Bar. Edang got there first and was already sitting at the bar with a beer, waiting for us. Seeing him decked out head to toe in full punk gear, sitting there quietly, gazing off into the middle distance three or four meters ahead like he was lost deep in thought — it felt like he was saying, yeah, this guy’s been waiting for this too, missed this too, of course he has. Once the show started, the playing was as sloppy here as it is back in Korea, and the kids doing the slam pit and old guys like me hung back a bit, soaking in that raw, unpolished noise. If smoking had been allowed in there and a haze of cigarette smoke were hanging over the ceiling too, it would’ve been perfect… During the gaps while the next bands set up, everyone spilled outside in a mob and a loud, chaotic conversation broke out.
I jumped into the mix here and there too, saying “I’m Amuro, I’m Amuro” probably a dozen-plus times. As I kept saying it had genuinely been hard to find this place, an old punk about my dad’s age who introduced himself as James asked for my email, and from then on started sending me an updated list of every punk show happening in Sydney, every week.
And it was only after I’d made Facebook friends with a few of the punks there that show listings actually started showing up on my own timeline.

From then on, I chased down shows every weekend — Newtown, Sydenham, all over. Not long after, word came that there was going to be a punk picnic at Sydney Park, so the four of us — me, Miyoung, Edang, and Via (Edang and Sharon’s daughter) — packed an esky full of beer and headed over. Under the chimney at Sydney Park, the place was packed with punks, clustered in twos and threes, knocking back beers. I was still out there making the rounds introducing myself, and the moment I mentioned I played drums, eyes lit up — makes sense, since drummers are always in short supply here just like in Korea, good or bad doesn’t matter, if you could sit down and bang out a beat, you were a drummer. Supply never matches demand, so it’s extremely common for punk drummers to be juggling two or three bands at once.
A tall, skinny skinhead came up to me.
“Hey, you play drums?”
“Yeah, I can play pretty much anything except blast beats.”
“I’m Manuel.”
“I’m Amuro.”
“Want to start a band together?”
“Sure.”
And just like that, a band was formed.
The following week we booked a rehearsal room called Soundwork in Marrickville and tried playing together for the first time. Haha. He was terrible. Didn’t matter. Watching him show up with his own original songs and play guitar dead seriously despite being bad at it — there was something great about that.
After rehearsal we went into town for a round of beers and talked about punk, skinheads, Colombia, Korean punk, back and forth. Over the next few rehearsals, Jose joined on bass, and after four or five different singers came around wondering if they should give it a shot, Ben joined. The week after that, Oscar joined on guitar, and four or five songs came together fast.
No point overthinking it — we brought everyone into the office and recorded five songs. Not a real studio: my desk just happened to have a cheap USB audio interface on it. Drums went through an electronic kit, bass and guitar both went in direct with effects layered on in software afterward, and vocals got wrapped up on a $20 AliExpress microphone. Around then Jose left, headed back to Colombia, and Mick came in.
During a cigarette break, the five of us were talking about what to name the band, and landed on taking the first letter of each of our home countries — B for Barcelona, A for Australia, C for Colombia, K for Korea — spelling out BACK, and after playing around with it a bit more, it became The Back ups.

Jonghee dropped by the practice room.
We talked about We Are the Punx and everything, and then he asked if I could step in for a while — Sanghyeon, Rux’s drummer, couldn’t keep playing with the band due to some personal circumstances.
Hm, honestly I thought, oh, this could be fun, so after a few rehearsals to roughly get in sync we started playing shows. Rux had a completely different vibe from Half Brothers.
Half Brothers was pop-punk, something like the Toy Dolls, while Rux was street punk through and through. Even the atmosphere of the shows was different, and so was where the songs put their weight.
Back then Juhyun (of Galaxy Express) was still on bass, and Gunwoo (now the YouTuber Minimal Yumok) was on guitar. We shot the “Hanmaeum” music video together, played the Korea-Japan Oi Festival, and put in a lot of work playing club shows.
We also got a few chances to play rock festivals, and I got to go up there. Not quite ten thousand people, maybe five thousand? — the crowd surging together like one single organism. And the drums, even though they’re at the very back, are also up on the highest riser, so I get this view from up there that honestly only I get to see: the band and the crowd fusing into one, this real marbling of interaction unfolding in front of me. Anyway, that show on Pentaport’s sub-stage was — how do I put it — a genuinely special experience for me, the kind where I thought, is this the feeling I’ve been raising all this hell trying to get to, all this time?
We also went to Let’s Rock Festival — Jonghee and the organizers went back and forth arguing over our set time before we even got on stage. We’d decided to open with “Ruckus Army,” with a drum intro, and Jonghee asked if I could just keep repeating the same pattern until he gave me the cue. Sure, okay, I said, and started —
Duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak……. I kept playing that for over a minute, and this guy wasn’t giving any cue, he was just staring out at the crowd. I must have played it for at least two minutes.
Why, was it because the stage was so big? Playing the same pattern over and over, I started losing track of which bar I was even on, whether I’d counted to three or to five, my legs started giving out, and right as I was thinking, god damn it, would you just start already, the cue finally came.
Three, four, in my head, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, and then the guitar and bass came in and the whole place went off. It was still daytime so the crowd hadn’t fully filled in yet, but I could already feel that surging energy from down below rolling right back up to me.
We were about to launch into the second song, “Our Life, Our Stage,” when Jonghee announced into the mic, “Alright, last song.” Huh? All the other members were like, huh? Everyone just stared at Jonghee, like what are you talking about — turned out the organizers had only given us 15 minutes total, setup included. No matter how unknown an indie band we were, that was pushing it. Jonghee, pissed off about it, went, fuck it then, I’ll make it even shorter — and we played just two songs and walked off.
Playing EBS Space Gonggam turned into another special experience. Even now, if you dig up the old footage, you can see just how tense and clueless I looked.
But once my wedding came around, I had no choice but to leave Rux too.

Back when I was doing live-club auditions and playing shows, some kid asked if he could come back to my place and have a drink with us — why not, I figured, so I brought him home and we drank all night.
His name was Donghyun. At first he thought I was older and kept talking to me formally for a good while, and he seemed to be getting a little uncomfortable about it.
“You guys can drop the formal talk with me — I’m way younger than you.”
“Huh, how old are you?”
“I’m still in high school.”
“What? No way — your face doesn’t look anything like a high schooler, you look three or four years older than me.”
“I’ve always looked like this, hahaha.”
We ended up calling him “the Farmer.”
A few years later he went off to college, started his own band, and we ended up playing shows together.
He was in a skinhead band called Captain Bootbois, and at some point they asked me to play drums for them.
I already knew the songs since I’d recorded them, but actually rehearsing and playing shows with them, Captain had a whole different energy of its own — the way the songs built up their power was genuinely pretty good.
That rousing, chant-along Oi! melody style actually resembles early punk more closely than anything else out there. In Hongdae, different genres drew different crowds, and even the venues each scene played were slightly different.
Captain moved with the GMC crew — bands like Samcheong Reeducation Camp and Knockdown — and that naturally became my way into knowing that whole crowd.
Half Brothers ran with the skate-punk crowd,
Rux ran with the street/pogo-punk crowd,
Captain ran with the GMC hardcore-punk crowd,
and then there was Town Hall Records, doing old-school hardcore, moving in its own separate orbit entirely.
In this tiny neighborhood, people kept clustering around whoever they clicked with, and little by little the scene split into factions — that’s how things were shifting.

I’m a leftist — an old-school leftist — but I’m fine talking to anyone about anything. Right-leaning, left-leaning, doesn’t matter, I’m all for meeting up, arguing it out, even fighting a little over it. The only ones I’m not interested in are the far-right and the far-left.
There’s no getting through to them. They don’t have opinions, they have doctrine. In the world of “the extreme,” anything that doesn’t fit the ideology they’ve already built is treated as the enemy — there’s zero flexibility in that.
Instead of wondering why someone thinks the way they do, they just write you off as an idiot — so there’s no room for actual discussion at all. It’s just a waste of time. How are you supposed to talk to someone whose whole brain runs on black or white?
Here’s an example. Out of ten Trump policies, I agree with four and disagree with six. That’s a personal call. You’re allowed to like some things and dislike others, personally.
So does 4-to-6 make me a leftist? And if it were 6-to-4, would that make me a rightist?
The “extreme” crowd wants it 10-to-0 or 0-to-10, nothing in between. Isn’t that just stupid? How can you possibly agree with 100 percent of some stranger’s policy platform? It feels like a cult to me. Blind devotion.
If I say 4-to-6, they treat me like some kind of fence-sitting bat. I’ve never seen brainless fuckers this brainless.
“The far-right is just plain simple-minded, and the far-left just won’t stop whining” — that’s my firm political identity, plain and simple.
Skinhead identity has been slapped with a far-right frame by the media, but the skinhead thing I actually knew never meant that in the first place. Still, with this particular GMC crew, all I ended up seeing was that faded, dark side of skinhead culture.
Who the hell pulls seniority and age rank in the 21st century, you idiots.