MunkerPuffin

ORIGINS: Armidale, NSW

GENRE: Punk

YEARS ACTIVE: 1995-1996

 

MEMBERS:

• Luke Sunners - Vocals, Guitar
• Andrew Braid - Drums
• Kei - Bass

RELEASES:

• Demo
• 1. All That Matters
• 2. Locked Out
• 3. All About Me
• 4. Saviour
• 5. Wanna Riot?
• 6. In the Dark
• 7. The Pictures
• 8. Fake
• 9. Turning Time

SUMMARY: MunkerPuffin was a high school band based in Armidale. Two of the members went on to play in a range of Sydney punk bands in the '00s.

ORAL HISTORY:

LUKE: Back in the day I was heavily into the Beastie Boys, ever since I was a primary school kid getting a hold of License to Ill in 4th Grade, It was my first cassette tape that I owned. I had to have everything they released. Later when they dropped Check Your Head, the song 'Time for Livin' stood out to me and then later came Ill Communication with the track 'Heart Attack Man', and those tracks really stood out to me over everything else. I would then hear punk tracks on skateboarding videos and my mate gave me a mix tape in high school - it had Frenzal Rhomb's Coughing Up a Storm, and a bunch of Swedish punk bands - Randy's There Is No Way We're Gonna Fit In, Stoned's Music for Morons, and Millencolin's Same Old Tunes. Those four albums are still the best and I still have them on high rotation. 

That was it for me - I started picking up the guitar and seriously writing songs and that was basically all I did and I did it relentlessly. Then Recovery was a brand new show at the time on the ABC and Millencolin had a video clip for 'Story of My Life' on there and Bodyjar had 'Glossy Books', then Frenzal with 'Parasite'. I just thought that was too cool and it got me even more into writing songs and dreaming of starting a punk band. Andrew Braid was a drummer and we were both in music class. I mentioned wanting to start a punk band and, despite being a jazz drummer, Andrew was down. 

So we started rehearsing. The band formed from jamming on songs at my parents' place. Andrew would bring his drums and Kei was a Japanese exchange student who was staying at his house. He played bass so we formed a three piece.

MunkerPuffin was just a random name off the top of my head. Like Monkey-Bird, or to smoke weed. In some of my lyrics I would add weird words that made no sense but it just sounded good even though they made completely no sense. The singer from Grinspoon does this too all the time. So 'MunkerPuff' is not a real word but you can tell it means to smoke weed.

We recorded and rehearsed in Armidale. We had a 4 track recorder from our high school that we were supposed to use to record our music assignments - instead of that we recorded a bunch of songs! There weren't really any other bands in Armidale - I was into Beastie Boys bigtime and their hardcore punk tracks like 'Time for Livin' were what sent me into punk. Then I got hold of music from the bands Stoned and Randy from a mate and it was over. We had plans to head to Sydney but the band finished when Kei went back to Japan.

Luke Sunners (Vocals, Guitar), Noise Levels correspondence, 2025

RELATED BANDS: Ballpark, Silencer Seven, Land Speed Record, The Brozzies, RAH the Monster, Ebolagoldfish