Sydney pop band Bluejuice exploded into public consciousness in 2007 with their hit single Vitriol, which ranked 11th in Triple J’s Hottest 100 for that year.
My father’s favorite book was Zorba the Greek and I think there’s something in Kazantzakis’ character Zorba, that the idea of life is to undo your belt and look for trouble was something that my father not necessarily lived out, but there was something aspirational about that…
2009 saw the band release their follow-up album Head of the Hawk, which has once again seen them rank highly, taking the number 5 spot with Broken Leg.
“I don’t exactly know what that means, but it certainly means they liked the song a lot,” singer Stav Yiannoukas says.
On stage, Bluejuice are frenetic, hyperactive, fun. Stav along with co-front man Jake Stone have been known to appear at concerts dressed as toilet paper zombies, and have autographed parts of the male anatomy that ought best remain unautographed.
“It is an outlet of sorts but the whole, ‘those guys are so crazy’ thing is not actually that true. Sorry to shatter all illusions,” he adds, failing to mention that their high-energy antics once extended to Jake punching the stage in a fit of fun, breaking his hand mid-song.
Musically, Bluejuice write simple songs, with simple pop hooks designed to grab listeners and make them jump and gyrate.
“There is an art to stripping down a song to its most basic hooks and hammering them into people’s minds. Simple melodies and simple pop hooks are what this band’s about.”
While Bluejuice’s rise might outwardly seem meteoric, reality is they have been not so much hurtling as struggling towards success for many years.
“I arrived latest into the band and that was almost nine years ago now, so we’ve been slogging at it for quite some time,” he says.
“When we got Vitriol number 11 in the Hottest 100 I didn’t shy away from the idea that we genuinely deserved it, we’d worked very hard.”
But behind the outward frivolity of it all, milestones now carry a slight tinge of sadness for Stav Yiannoukas.
“I remember just a few weeks ago when we got the gold record for Broken Leg it was actually kind of emotional for me because I started thinking of my father who passed away late last year and how nice it would have been to have shared that with him,” he says.
Family is important to Stav, whose experience of growing up Cypriot in the Sydney suburbs of Kensington and South Coogee was a patsa of cultural immersion and incessant Anglicisation.
“It was all the stereotypes rolled into one. Good food, good times, some arguing, normal stuff. There’s a real love of life, a real passion for life,” he says, recalling his father as he speaks.
Stav’s father was a Cypriot-born doctor who brought his wife and two daughters to Australia in 1976, two years after the Turkish occupation. Stav was born in 1980, the only one of the doctor’s three children to be born in Australia.
“My father’s favorite book was Zorba the Greek and I think there’s something in Kazantzakis’ character Zorba, that the idea of life is to undo your belt and look for trouble was something that my father not necessarily lived out, but there was something aspirational about that, that you must live every moment to the fullest capacity. There’s something very romantic about that idea,” he says.
It is clear that Dr Yiannoukas’ work ethic and philosophy had a profound impact on his son.
“There’s nothing that I could achieve in my life in music that would ever come close to what he achieved as a doctor. I genuinely do believe that. I don’t think there’s anything that I could achieve, regardless of what accolades or what people voted for, or how popular the band became. These things weren’t ever particularly important to my father, and in some ways they’re not particularly important to me.”