Melbourne cult post-punk-blues band Blue Ruin celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album with a new vinyl reissue on Cheersquad Records & Tapes.

Those were mythic times. A subterranean clamour of screechy-thin guitars and doom-laden bass was seeping from Melbourne’s deepest watering holes after dark. A rich collision of punk and gothic, strange cinema, crime fiction and young blood was breeding a new culture of possibility made of guitars, poetry and menace.

Blue Ruin made that menace swing. Their cult albums Such Sweet Thunder (1986) and Flame (1987) gave Melbourne’s post-punk underworld its own strain of gothic blues steeped in booze, lust, murder ballads and troubled romance.

Now, two decades since the classic line-up’s last shows, Such Sweet Thunder is returning to vinyl via Cheersquad Records & Tapes on November 27, remastered from the original analogue tapes and pressed on limited edition dark blue & gold smash, and black vinyl variants.

The mainstay members of Blue Ruin were Ian ‘Quincy’ McLean on lead vocals and Mulaim Vela on lead guitar. McLean went on to become a central figure in the Melbourne and Australian music scene, co-founding the iconic Bakehouse Studios with his partner Helen Marcou in 1991 and both creating the SLAM (Save Live Australia’s Music) grassroots movement – an activist group that staged the SLAM rally of 2010 where 20,000 protesters marched on Parliament House in Melbourne in support of Live Music. The SLAM rally was described as “the largest cultural protest in Australia’s history”.

“We were a product of those times,” says Quincy, whose immersion in that mythic 80s Melbourne scene began at 15, slipping from his bedroom window to meet Camberwell High school friend Mulaim Vela at Bernhardt’s or the Tiger Lounge, where the Boys Next Door, News, Fiction or the Negatives would drench the walls.

“Punk had taken everything back to basics. Music felt raw and alive again. I was studying painting. Mulaim was the guy who could actually play a few things on the guitar. So we formed a band called Scrap Museum.”

That formative chapter briefly included future Bad Seed Conway Savage. Adam Learner’s bass found its groove under Mulaim’s scribbling and clanging guitar and with the arrival of drummer Phill Calvert (ex-Birthday Party and Psychedelic Furs), Blue Ruin’s distinctive, bone-rattling darkness was set in motion.

“It started out very bluesy, but there was an element of doom about it. I had a bit of an obsession with the effects of alcohol,” Quincy confesses, and “there was a real murder-ballad mentality going on. I was heavily into Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart… Mulaim was more into the Velvets, The Who, The Kinks…

“But we loved each other’s tastes too. Once Calvert joined we were throwing vinyl each other’s way, from John Lee Hooker to Astral Weeks, Morricone to Ry Cooder, Howlin’ Wolf to Billie Holiday.”

On stage, the frontman’s intense, imposing presence channelled characters from his day jobs in decaying aged care homes, and atmospheres from German Expressionist art, Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch. The songs drew on American gothic fiction, writers Jim Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut and Gunther Grass and the Valhalla Cinema’s repertoire of strange, dark indie classics. Eraserhead, Blood Simple, Down by Law…