Cirrus@Austlit

Kuckles is a Australian band which emerged out of the vibrant music scene which had been established in Broome, Western Australia, as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s (long before the town had access to television). The band actually formed in Adelaide (South Australia) in 1981, however, when a number of Broome musicians moved to the city to study at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) in North Adelaide. Kuckles comprises Jimmy Chi, Stephen Pigram, Mick Manolis Mavromatis, Gary Glover and Patrick Bin Amat. After recording an audition tape titled Milliya Rumarra (1982), the band won a trip to Germany to perform at the Third Annual International Cologne Song Festival in 1982.

The Kuckles repertoire, which comprised various genres - including acoustic, calypso, country, reggae, church music and rock - effectively helped create a distinctive "Broome sound." Some of the band's original songs have been included in Jimmy Chi's musicals Bran Nue Dae and Corrugation Road, with the band members also being involved in the early workshopping of the stage musical. The band's three principal writers - Chi, Manolis and Pigram - have together created the songs that have since become national icons in the Indigenous community. In the 'Introduction' to the joint Currency Press/Magabala Books (qq.v.) edition of the libretto, Peter Bibby writes: 'Kuckles itself was a band defying the odds, for Broome is such a long way from anywhere that it might as well be anywhere... But far though it might be, the old pearling port has a musical tradition as potent as the brews and brawls of its past... Kuckles was a kind of rambunctious nursery, five men making music without thinmking that one day the world might hear their work as a spiritual/rock/reggae opera' (p. vi).

Each of the band members has performed with other Broome musicians in all of the stage productions of Bran Nue Dae. In 1993, for example, Steve Pigram and Patrick Bin Amet formed the Saltwater Cowboys with Alan and Philip Pigram, Duncan Campbell, Sue Irvin and Chong Lim to back the production of Bran Nue Dae then being toured around Australia. Jimmy Chi and Mick Manolis have also been involved in another band, Bingurr (which means 'moonlight' in Bardi), while Steve Pigram is also associated with the bands Scrap Metal and The Pigram Brothers.