Eskimo Joe On Twenty Years Of “Black Fingernails Red Wine”

Two decades after the release of one of Australia’s most defining rock records, Eskimo Joe are hitting the road once again to celebrate Black Fingernails Red Wine, the album that shaped a generation, topped charts, and became a cornerstone of Australian music history with its themes of identity, politics, and human connection that still feel as powerful and relevant as ever.

The multi-ARIA Award-winning trio will perform the entire album live, in full, alongside a career- spanning set of their biggest hits, as part of a capital city tour across Australia in 2026. The shows will feature Black Fingernails Red Wine performed in its entirety, followed by a second set packed with fan favourites from across the band’s acclaimed catalogue, including hits like From the Sea, Love is a Drug, Foreign Land, and their latest single, Miracle Cure. Stu

It is shaping up to be a massive twelve months for Eskimo Joe celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Black Fingernails Red Wine.
Yeah, definitely. It’s pretty crazy to think it’s been twenty years, but yeah, got to celebrate those things.

Absolutely. I’m just thinking twenty years, that makes me feel old. I remember when the album came out, and yeah, I feel like I’ve kind of grown older with the band…
We have been pretty blessed to have a career that’s lasted most of our lives. So, yeah, it’s good to celebrate these things, and also just to hear these records or hear this record that we’ve made. We’ve made this quite intentionally to be a storyline, so it’s good to hear some of the stories that we haven’t been able to tell live.

When you take time out and reflect on the milestone, what does it actually mean to you?
Well, I think the thing that resonates most with me is just the journey of discovering song writing, production and engineering. Like, those three strings to the musician’s bow, they’re really important to all three of us. We love being in the studio, we love writing songs. We love collaborating with each other and bouncing off each other’s ideas and primarily, we all just worship at the temple of the song. Whatever the song needs is what we give it. It doesn’t matter if we come up with something that we feel is amazing, if it’s not going to work for the song, then we bin it. I think when I look back on this record and what it means, music is primarily what resonates with me the most, but then also just all the people, the friendships and relationships that were built around this record, or adjacent to this record as well.

It must be massive to have essentially the core of the band, which is the three of you, still be really good mates as well?
Yeah, it’s been a real brotherhood, but also a really functional brotherhood. We don’t fight, we’re pretty reasonable, level-headed people. We argue, we disagree, but there’s never any fighting, you know. Never any angry angst going on.

Is that hard to avoid getting swept up in the nostalgia of such a significant anniversary with this?
Well, I think it’s difficult not to use the nostalgia to bring people along for the ride. I think this album means a lot to a lot of people, and it’s a lot of memories are formed around this record, and adjacent to this record, so I think the nostalgia part is a big part of why we’re doing this tour. But I think more for us, it’s a chance to play some of these songs live that never really got a guernsey.

What are your memories of making the album?
The song writing process was fall out of Kav’s place, a little place in Hamilton Hill and we just convened a couple of days a week, just spending all day and night bashing away in his carpet-lined shed. The song writing process came pretty easily for us with this record. We wanted to try and do something a bit more of a grander scale, and a bit more widescreen than our previous efforts. I think that just came from an innate desire to conquer the world. We wanted big stages, so we wanted songs that could fill those stages. But also, we were just synchronized at that point. We were all thinking the same. We’d been in the tour van for the previous seven or eight years together, all day, every day, aligning our musical tastes and our thought processes, and so we were all just on the same page, so the song writing came really easily to us.

I remember that part and I remember just being really excited by the demos. We felt that the quality of the demos was such that we could do this record ourselves, we didn’t need a producer and we were excited at that prospect as well, so we onboarded an amazing engineer called Matt Lovell, and went to this incredible studio on the Central Coast, out near Gosford, called Mangrove, or The Grove it’s called now. Previously owned by Gary Gary Beers from INXS. That had a real magical vibe, great energy, surrounded by the forest, and big property. You could roam around on the four-wheeler. So yeah, the recording process was super enjoyable as well, just being seconded in the forest for six weeks with nothing to do but write and record music.

Did you know at the time that this was a special group of songs?
We did make a conscious decision, as we do with all our records, that we want to tell a story and take people on a bit of a listening journey, and have those dynamics throughout the record. But yeah, there was definitely a feeling amongst us from the demos and the song writing process that this is good. This is really good. So, we’re getting excited, for sure and then what Matt brought with his engineering, the sounds he pulled just made our lives and our jobs so much easier as producers and musicians.

Can you believe the legacy of just one song alone in Black Fingernails, Red Wine? It just seems to have got its own life, and continues to grow, and reach a new legion of fans all the time.
Yeah, it’s pretty special to be playing shows and our key demographic these days is generally people that rub arthritis cream into their hands at night, but it’s amazing to see the front rows, genuinely teens to early mid-20s, people just really enjoying being the new generation that have listened to their parents’ music and dug it, so now they’re coming along to check it out. It’s pretty awesome.

At the time was that hard adjusting to being the “big thing at the moment?”
I think we took it pretty well in our stride. I mean, I’ve always wanted to be an actor growing up. I studied theatre arts in high school, and performing was always something I felt comfortable doing. Kav and Joel were in bands before that, so being on stage was kind of second nature to us and we always lived in Fremantle and WA, we were so removed from the rest of the music industry that it just didn’t feel like there was a lot of pressure on us, to be honest.

If you had your time over, would there be anything you’d do differently, or are you a believer things happen for a reason?
I would one hundred percent do something differently. I would not sign a record deal just before we drop the biggest record of our life. Would have done it independently, and not had a mortgage, that would have been great. Making those decisions, it’s a tough decision whether to go independent or to go with a label. You get a machine behind you with a label, so you’ve got a greater chance of success with them behind you, but you pay for that success and you don’t earn as much money. I think, in general, music’s just so undervalued. People just assume it’s a free commodity these days, so to make money from your art is a much more difficult proposition these days. But in saying that, we never really made money from our records. We only ever made money from touring and performing live, so I think if you’re going to become a musician or an artist, you’ve got to get out on the road and play to your people.

How’s the process of actually playing the album start to end?
We have done before. We did a small run a couple of years back, I think it was the twenty five‑year anniversary of the band. So, it’s an awesome experience, like I said, to dust off some of these songs that have never seen a live stage. Songs like Suicide Girl and Reprise. Reprise was just a jam. We were a bit dusty after a Saturday night in Sydney, came back to the studio on Sunday, and we were just having a bit of a jam, and engineer Matt Lovell turned on all the mics, and we came in from the jam, and he’s like, “I recorded that, it was awesome.” So that became a track on the record. It’s never a song that’s going to transfer to a live setting at one of our gigs, especially not a festival stage or something. But if it’s part of a collection of songs that belong together, then it has a really great place, and it’s a really cool moment. It’s a moment where, as a band, we have to try and tackle, alright, how do we play this thing?

Are there any surprises for the second set?
I guess a bit of a Greatest Hits set, but also we’ll try some songs that we haven’t tried for a while. A lot of songs we’ll give a go, and they kind of get side lined, and they never really make it back. I really want this tour to feel like something fresh and exciting for us and for everyone.

Are there any sort of special vinyl releases or re‑release issues planned for next year?
We’ve got a few irons in the fire with ways to celebrate the record. That’s definitely come up in conversation, but there’s no actual thing I can announce at this point, no.

Do you think there will be new music in 2026?
We’ll definitely write a song next year. We like that pace, a song a year seems manageable, and it gives the song time to breathe. We’ll definitely keep writing.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Eskimo Joe on the following dates, tickets from https://www.eskimojoe.net/tours…