US Power-Pop Legends Enuff Z’Nuff On Tour This November
US power-pop legends Enuff Z’Nuff and Sunset Strip icons Pretty Boy Floyd have teamed up for a double assault on Australia this November with the ‘RU PRETTY ENUFF’ Tour. A full-blown celebration of hooks, hairspray, melody and unapologetic rock ’n’ roll excess. For fans raised on MTV after dark, battered cassette tapes and choruses bigger than their hair, this tour is pure old school rawk brought roaring back to life. Still led by the unmistakable song writing and melodic power that made them stand out the first time around, Enuff Z’Nuff remain one of the great cult bands of the glam and power-pop era. Tracks like Fly High Michelle and New Thing still hit with the same swagger and soul decades later, proving why the band’s influence has stretched far beyond many of their peers. Chip Z’Nuff talsk to Rob Lyon about the tour.
It’s fantastic news that Enuff Z’Nuff and Pretty Boy Floyd are coming back this November. I think for a lot of us, we probably thought that may not ever happen again?
Well, it’s certainly a good surprise for everybody, and it’s a nice treat. You get a couple of glam rock bands that come out there, play four or five shows. Small venues. We consolidated the tour. There’s a couple of Australian bands that’ll be supporting us as well. It’s a big, nice potpourri of good rock and roll music from the MTV era. Here we are, forty years later, still touring around the country. It’s a miracle!
From last time you were out here back in 2023, do you have a lot of good stories, memories, and great moments from that tour?
I certainly have. First of all, I’ve met tons of friends out there. My buddy James, he comes out all the time to see us play, and he’s just a wonderful constituent and a great friend. But he brought a lot of people with him. He told everybody about the tour. And that last one was good because you had Faster Pussycat on there. Steven Adler from Guns N’ Roses, brother, he came out there as well. Jamie Adler, who books all kinds of bands, and they brought their A‑game. The bands that were on the bill were fantastic. Oh Wednesday 13, they’re absolutely terrific. It was a good package. I think Eclipse is on there as well, too. They’re very good.
It was really a celebration for everybody and the venues were packed, but they weren’t arenas and stadiums. We were playing nice, good rooms that the fans out in Australia know about. Your food is outstanding, by the way. I just love it. Great entrees. A lot of pasta for me out there, which I normally don’t even eat. But the carbonaras were outstanding. The fans came out every single night to celebrate the rock and roll and heavy metal of our careers, and then afterwards, we hung out all night. I did all those meet and greets, I met hundreds of people. It left a really good memory in my mouth, and that’s why we said, let’s come back again and do this, and give them a longer show, because the last time was like five or six bands. Nobody was getting more than a forty‑minute set. I think now we’ll be able to really focus on the Enuff Z’Nuff’s catalogue, and Pretty Boy Floyd as well.
When you look at your career, you’ve got a career stacked full of hits. Even if you are playing for an hour or an hour and a quarter, how do you consolidate all that into that amount of time? Seems like you’d need three full hours.
Right, of course, we could play for hours and hours. The way I look at it is the same approach I take if I’m going over to Japan or Europe. We pick stuff that the fans want to hear, their favourite ones from the early days, and you’ll get Fly High Michelle, New Thing, In the Groove, and Indian Angel off that first record. But we’ll go over and we’ll do Heaven or Hell, and perhaps Baby Loves You off Strength. And maybe something off Animals with Human Intelligence as well. We’ve been doing Love Train on the last tour. It seems to get over very well and then we’re just trying to mix it up with Enuff Z’Nuff‘s records that have come out in the last ten years. Some newer stuff, some stuff off our album Hard Rock Night, which is all Beatles songs. People seem to love that record, and it’s done very well for us.
It’ll be like a potpourri, like I said earlier, of our catalogue, and it’s quite an illustrious one. I think Pretty Boy Floyd’s taking the same approach, too. They’re bringing all the hits with them, and they’re going to be glammed out, and they’re much more colourful than we are with lipstick and makeup and eyeliner. We just come out there wearing leathers and jeans, and we’re just bashing them out every single night. I think it’ll be a nice little package, you get a little bit of colourful, a little flamboyance of each band, for one night, every single night. All those different cities we’re playing, Adelaide, great. Always loved Melbourne, one of my favourite places to go. I talked to the guys in Pretty Boy Floyd, though, and Steve and the gang, they’re ready to go. We just did a show a couple weeks ago together here in the States, and they sounded great. So I think everybody coming out, nice tickets, a good price point. It’s not four hundred or five hundred dollars to go see your band from the MTV era. We’re making it where it’s going to be very doable for the fans to come out and see the show and celebrate with us, and I promise I’ll be hanging with everybody every night.
Sounds awesome. Do you cover much of the new albums like Xtra Cherries and Finer Than Sin?
Yeah, we certainly will. We’ve been playing a couple songs off the Xtra Cherries record. Most notably Heavy Metal, which was the first single and that gets over like gangbusters every single night. You know, the Xtra Cherries record’s a special album for us. I’m going to bring some over with me, too, for the fans, because it features members of Journey, Cheap Trick, Guns N’ Roses… Steve Stevens is on the record. The guys in Nelson are on the record, as a matter of fact, along with Trickster’s Steve Brown, who also plays with Def Leppard. So it’s a nice collaboration with some good rock and roll pals on that record. We do play a few songs off it. We won’t be focusing on that record. We’re focusing on the career of Enuff Z’Nuff from day one.
There’s some great songs on Xtra Cherries. I love Heartbeat. What does that one mean to you?
It shows a different side of the band. It shows I got some balls, because normally an Enuff Z’Nuff’s record’s not going to start out with a pop ballad like that, but it’s a beautiful song, without sounding modest. I think a good performance. It’s real, it’s stripped down, it’s only just piano and my voice. But it seemed to work really well, and it showed a different side of Enuff Z’Nuff, and that’s why I put that song Heartbeat on the very first track of the Xtra Cherries record.
Must be great playing with mates as well. Were they all obvious choices for those particular songs? When you wrote them, did you have particular people in mind that you wanted to join you on those ones?
No, I didn’t. When I was making the record, we used to be with Frontiers, and on this record we’re on Cleopatra in the States. And the president of Cleopatra, a real smart guy, Brian Pereira, says to me, you know, on this next record you’re doing for us, I think you should try to get some of your friends to come in there and collaborate with you. I thought, it’s not a bad idea. You know, the hip‑hop guys have been doing it for years and years, and it seems to work for them. So I just made some calls. The first track I got was from Steve Brown. He’s a great songwriter and wonderful singer. He had a good, beautiful song and I thought, well, maybe we’ll track that and see how it goes, and then from there I just started calling people. Obviously we had Dax Nielsen from Cheap Trick playing drums on the whole album except for a couple of the songs, and he’s always been a nice addition, and he really fits in well with us because he knows that aesthetic.
But Steve Stevens, I just reached out, he reached out to me on Instagram, saying he heard us on Little Steven’s Garage Radio, fabulous program they have here in New York. He wanted to know if we were still recording, and I said, yeah, we’ve been putting records out every year. Since I’ve been fronting the band, we’ve put out, I think, seven albums in the last nine years. I said, we’re doing another record right now, and I’d love to have you play guitar on it. Steve says, send me over something. He was in Vegas. I sent him over a track, and he immediately got back to me, said, man, the rhythm section sounds killer on this. I love the arrangement. He goes, let me put some guitars on here, and before you know it, he’s played all the guitars, all leads, all the colour parts, and he even helped arrange the song for me. So it’s always nice when you reach out to your bros and they’ve got ideas. The Stones have been doing it, Beatles have done it, a lot of bands have done it, it’s not like I’m inventing the wheel. I just think it’s nice that when you can make a record and you get guys who aren’t in the band to come in there and contribute, sometimes magic happens there, and I think we captured a little magic in the bottle on that one.
Have been really pleased with the fan reaction to that album as well?
Well, we went through our first… I think the record company made a couple thousand copies of it just to see how it would do, and we sold them all out. We’re in our second pressing now, so I think that the fans have spoken. It’s done pretty well for us. Nowadays, a band can go out and sell ten thousand records, and it’s like selling one hundred thousand albums, that’s how the record companies are looking at it right now, so it’s a different world. A lot of streaming, we probably get a couple million streams on Spotify every year, Deezer, iTunes, Apple Play, and people are getting records differently. What’s more important, I think, for Enuff Z’Nuff is we can go out on the road, and we can meet the fans, and we can sell our records on the road. In the old days, that was taboo, because record stores would not be happy with that, because that’s what they’re trying to do. They want to sell records, and they want to keep the electricity on.
Nowadays, you can go see any band that’s out there, and there’s bootleg records, and there’s vinyl at the shows where fans can purchase them, and that’s pretty special, because nowadays I think it’s direct‑to‑consumer. And that’s why we’re bringing the show to Australia — direct‑to‑consumer. You guys want to hear good rock and roll, you want some American stuff right in your face? We’re gonna bring it for you every single night. And there won’t be five guys underneath the stage playing with us — it’ll just be the band. And I think that makes it even more exciting. Real rock and roll show.
Absolutely, sounds really good. Is it still important for you to keep being creative and keep delivering new albums?
It is for me. You know, it’s a labour of love. Most of the bands that are out there, and I talk to my guys in different groups too, fantastic guys, guys like Zakk Wylde, who I just seen recently, or The Darkness, for instance, or even bands like Lamb of God or The Struts, we’re all making records for ourselves. If it passes the test of time, then we turn you guys on to it. But there’s a love for the music, first of all. All of us got into music because we liked playing, and then later on we realised, well, there’s a value to it, and it’s up to us to find that value.
What’s the next challenge for yourself? Is there anything you’re looking to do or explore that you haven’t done previously?
Yeah, I want to do a Beatles record with all B‑sides. The last Beatles record we did was Hard Rock Night. It was on Frontiers, and then from there I just said, you know what, I think we should do another one where we have a little bit more control of that record. Because that Hard Rock Night record came out, and we sold out immediately, and we can’t get any copies of it. We can’t even do anything with it except play the songs live in concert. So I want to do something that I can really sink my teeth into that’s a little different, most people haven’t ever done it, which is a Beatles record with nothing but B‑side songs. Songs that weren’t hits. They’re known, but they weren’t big hits and do it rocked out, you know, real aggressive versions of songs. I’m not going to tell you any of the songs, because I don’t want anybody that’s watching this to pillage my ideas. But I promise you, you’ll be pleasantly surprised, because the first four songs I’ve recorded, it sounds like Oasis meets Cheap Trick, and they fight in an alley, and it’s Enuff Z’Nuff at the end of the day. Really rock solid. Of course, there’s some new material on the horizon as well, but I think that’ll be the next thing for us, and that’ll come out in 2027. But we do have a live record that comes out in September of this year on Cleopatra Records, and it’s called Live at the Whisky A Go Go. It has all the hits on there, so I’m pretty excited about it. First one will be singing lead on all those songs, so quite a challenge. It’s a great record. And you get all the songs from the past, and the ones we’re doing in concert, so it’s the only thing that we have, a live record out after all these years.
It’s been great talking to you and we can’t wait for November to roll around and bring on Enuff Z’Nuff and Pretty Boy Floyd.
It’s going to be exciting, I’m telling you. We’re going to bring all our little ammunition that we have for those shows, and like I said earlier, we’ll probably get a chance where Enuff Z’Nuff can play a little over an hour, hour and a half, which would be real nice and Pretty Boy Floyd, they got a good live show as well, and they love Australia. So it’s a nice package, and I’m glad there’s going yo be a few Australian bands on the bill with us, because we always love sharing the stage with new acts. God bless you, God bless Australia.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Enuff Z’Nuff and Pretty Boy Floyd on tour on the following dates, tickets HERE…
