Sitting in boxes at the back of clubs throughout Adelaide lay demos from one of Australia’s greatest rock bands, but the name on the covers wouldn’t be familiar to most.
“We were originally called Hell’s Kitchen,” The Superjesus bass guitarist, Stuart Rudd told the Weekender.
“It evoked such a heavy metal kind of image, people were kind of picking up on the wrong idea of what we were at that point.”
Two years later on the Australia Day long weekend of January 1996, the band decided to create a new brand, and what better way to debut it than at one of Australia’s biggest festivals.
“It was on the eve of Big Day Out, so we were booked as Hell’s Kitchen and we only had an hour or so to put in our band name,” he said.
“We were sitting around thinking about words that were associated with the 90s and there were all these sorts of names with Jesus and super.
“We decided to write the new band name on there and we wrote it as ‘The Superjesus’ and that was it,” he laughed.
Now 20 years on from when their debut, platinum selling album ‘Sumo’ filled up their trophy cabinet with a few ARIA Awards, the three-piece band are set to take fans back to the ‘90s with a special anniversary edition release.
As well as seeing the original album reissued on vinyl, the CD edition of ‘Sumo – 20th Anniversary’ features bonus material which includes a never before heard studio recording – a cover of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Confide In Me’.
“We had originally toyed with that song way back when it came out, we started demoing it up and it had been sitting around for ages and we hadn’t talked about it,” Rudd said.
“It was only this year that we played a show and were sitting afterwards and having a beer and Sarah McLeod said ‘you know we used to do that thing, Ruddy’ and I said ‘yeah that’s right that’s ‘Confide In Me’’ and she said ‘maybe we should have a look at it’.
“Credit where credit is due, McLeod took it and ran with it and it has come up really well.”
Celebrating the band’s milestone with a tour, Rudd said the experienced rockers were ‘amped’ about hitting the road again.
“We haven’t played some of those songs in forever so it’s going to be quite a challenge and trip doing it,” he said.
The Superjesus will be performing at the Tattersalls Hotel in Penrith on Saturday, October 20 at 8pm. Tickets are $39.80. To book or for more information, call 4744 2002 or visit http://www.thesuperjesus.com/tour.
Lauren Suttie
Lauren Suttie is the Weekender's General & Community News journalist.