Punk passion in Descendents frontman Milo Aukerman's DNA

IT took Descendents more than 30 years to get around to visiting Australia for their first tour, but they're making a relatively swift return.

Descendents

IT took Southern Californian melodic hardcore pioneers Descendents more than 30 years to get around to visiting Australia for their first tour, but they're making a relatively swift return.

The band were here as part of the east-coast line-up for the No Sleep Til festival in December 2010, and after earning plaudits in Melbourne and Sydney, frontman Milo Aukerman lost his voice a few songs into their set in Brisbane.

"I played the night before in Sydney and, unfortunately, in prepping for that show, I had drunk way, way too much coffee, "Aukerman says.

"So the next morning I get up and I think, 'OK, I didn't sleep at all' and so then we get on a flight to Brisbane and I get to the hotel and I say, 'Well look, I've just go to sleep here'. So I went to sleep from probably about 2pm to let's just say 8pm to try and catch up on some sleep.

"There are a lot of ways you can mess up your voice and one of the major ways is through not sleeping."

Descendents only tour sporadically these days, due in no small part to the band members' day jobs.

Drummer Bill Stevenson helms Colorado recording studio The Blasting Room, guitarist Stephen Egerton runs Armstrong Studios in Oklahoma, bassist Karl Alvarez moonlights with other bands, including the Lemonheads, and Aukerman has an unlikely career as a biochemist.

"I do plant genetics," he says. "I work a lot with DNA for example, and growing up I was just enthralled by the prospects of doing that, being able to manipulate DNA.

"It's an obsession of mine that rivals music. I have these two parallel obsessions and I just try to kind of find fulfilment from both of them whenever possible."

These days, Aukerman is happily married and father to an eight-year-old son and a ten-year-old daughter, and as he explains, his children's badgering is part of the reason he reunited with his bandmates in recent years.

"It started out ... I was kind of sneaky, I would just play it in the background and they would hear something and go, 'oh, who's that?' and I'd go, 'oh, that's me', and they'd say, 'Oh, OK, we want to hear that'.

"So I played them more of it and then all of a sudden my daughter says, 'well when are you going to play live, because we want to see you now play live?' So I said, 'well, maybe we can make that happen, maybe we can try to do that,' and that's how we got rolling again back in 2010."

Descendents have celebrated a couple of important milestones in recent months. Aukerman celebrated his 50th birthday on January 1 and last year their seminal debut full-length Milo Goes To College turned 30.

He says many of the songs from the LP are still in the band's set list.

"There's obviously the core songs on Milo Goes To College that we always play just because they meant so much to us then, they still mean something to us and we can still rock 'em, we can still make 'em smoke and burn," he says.

When asked why people should come along to check them out on this tour, Aukerman is quick to respond.

"We try to pretend that we're not old," he says, laughing. "People can judge for themselves whether we are old but we try our damnedest to not be old, to not look old and to not play old. That's part of why we're up there, is that for us it's a release and it's a way of feeling young again.

"So with that type of desperate attempt to try to be young, you have to imagine that the energy level is really high. We're kind of over-compensating for our age; we really try to bring the intensity because we've got to. That's something that's important to us, so hopefully people can come and experience some of that intensity."

SEE Descendents with Bouncing Souls, Frenzal Rhomb, Bodyjar and Disables

QLD: Eatons Hill Hotel, February 6; $78.55 + BF, oztix.com.au

NSW: BIg Top, Luna Park, Sydney, February 7; $78.55 + BF, oztix.com.au

WA: Capitol, Perth, February 10, $79.60 + BF, oztix.com.au