SKUNKHOUR are celebrating the 25th anniversary of release of their influential, self titled debut album with a series of shows in Melbourne, Adelaide and Byron bay. The legendary alt-funk kings of Australia will be rolling out an 8 piece band to play their eponymous release track for track, to be followed by a greatest hits set.

Back in 1992, the Sydney live music scene was in upheaval. Cover bands were  getting more gigs than real bands. Clubs and underground rave and RAT parties were drawing tens of thousands of pill-poppers away from the live music every  weekend. Grunge suddenly made every Oz rock act pre-’92 look prehistoric, so every record rep in town, and every other city in the rest of the world, went psycho trying to sign the next Nirvana.

Into this chaos and flux came a trio of killer young players, brothers Dean and Michael Sutherland, on bass and drums respectively, and mate Warwick Scott on lead guitar.

They called themselves Skunk, played a razor-sharp brand of funk, with a bunch of other influences mixed in, and quickly established their own little space in the fractured Sydney scene. Guest vocalists and freestylers would join them on stage, laying down lines and rhymes. No one else in the country was doing this sort of stuff at the time.

The band’s earliest songs, along with the band itself, started taking a cohesive shape when Scott and the Sutherland bothers met another pair of brothers, Aya and Del Larkin, who shortly joined on vocal and MC duties respectively, late in  1992. And so Skunkhour was born. Within a few months, the new line up would be recording its self-titled debut album.