[MUSIC INTERVIEW] ENFF Z NUFF – 2026 Australian Tour Interview

Subculture: Well listeners, there is a tour coming up that we are very, very excited about. We have got US rock legends Enuff Z’Nuff and Pretty Boy Floyd coming to Australia for this amazing run of shows and we thought today we would actually get Chip from Enuff Z’Nuff on the phone to chat a little bit about this amazing tour and of course about their new music as well. So welcome to the program, Chip.

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff: Thank you for having me. I hope everybody’s doing well today.

Subculture: I’m sure they are. Now, Chip, I know there is a lot of people excited out there about this tour because I’m pretty sure a lot of people out there thought they would never get the opportunity to see you guys play live in Australia again. So tell us a little bit about how you’re feeling about heading down to Australia for this tour.

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff:  Well, it’s one of my favorite countries to go to. It’s surrounded by great rock and roll fans. The trim is outstanding out there. I love your food. I love your wine. I love your women. Everything about your country is fantastic except for the spiders.

I think it’s going to be a wonderful celebration of hard rock and heavy metal. It’s a big glam slam metal jam tour. Everybody gets to come out dressed up. There’ll be tons of trim there and wearing mini skirts and dressed up in rock and roll regalia. And it’s going to be a real celebration of the MTV years, playing those songs that all those networks supported us throughout our careers.

Pretty Boy Floyd, they got quite a history as well. They’ve been playing for quite a long time. They got a lot of records. And I think there’s a few Australian bands that are going to be supporting the tour. So it’s going to be a great celebration.

Subculture: Definitely. So, of course, we had a bit of a weird time here in Australia because we didn’t have MTV in the early days. We would get all these bootleg copies on VHS of MTV video shows and everything. But here in Australia, the cassettes were the big thing when I was growing up. How difficult did that kind of make it for you guys to break into countries like Australia when we didn’t have MTV like the rest of the world?

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff:  Well, we had more than MTV. We had VH1. We had huge radio shows around the country. And radio played us all through Europe and all through the United States. So we had significant exposure in those early days with New Thing and Fly High Michelle and Baby Loves You. And then we had a lot of TV exposure, too.

It certainly helped us out a lot. And I think the same goes with Pretty Boy Floyd. I think a nice little push in the beginning. We toured arenas with those guys in the early days with them in L.A. Guns and Tesla and Slaughter and all that stuff that came out there back in the late 80s, early 90s.

So, we all had a significant run and we’ve just been lucky enough. The Good Lord Works Mysterious Ways. We’ve been lucky enough to continue to move forward, put new records out every other year. And playing our catalog to the fans around the country. And it’s done really well for us.

As a matter of fact, we just got off the Monsters of Rock cruise. Pretty Boy Floyd did the pre-show party. We went on the cruise with the darkness and Quiet Riot and Queensrite and Faster Pussycat and Zach Wild. And that was incredible. And then we did a 28-city run. I just got off the tour yesterday.

I just flew back home to Chicago. Hanging out in front of Steven Adler’s 1957 Sports Porsche Speedster. I wish I could drive that over there. Fans would love that one, but there’s only two seats I wouldn’t be able to get the fans in there. No pun intended. I think shows, though, should be very well attended.

People are chosen to see American bands play out there. We’re all going to join in and fly tours from Chicago to Australia and play four kick-ass shows in a row to small venues. They’re all like four or five hundred seat places, but those are cool to play. You’re consolidating. You’re playing right in front of your constituents.

I mean, the fans out there, they want to smell it and see it and taste it, and we’re going to bring it.

Subculture: Definitely. Chip, one of the things, too, I found here in Australia, and I’m not sure if it’s the same in the U.S., but it’s the amount of the younger generation who are into your music.

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff:  Absolutely. I remember Clive Davis saying to me a long time ago, he says, Chip, if it’s 25 years old, it’s new again.

So bands like Led Zeppelin and Queen and Pink Floyd Those bands, they passed on to generations. I mean, people, the young kids got into it. They were smitten by it. They tripped their trigger, and they passed it on to their sons and daughters.

And the new generation grabbed on to that stuff, and they had a long run with that. All the bands have had that. That’s been going on for years and years. And the new bands that are out nowadays, too, there’s some great new bands that are out there. Geese, and I love the Lemon Twigs. Yeah, Mind Scheme and 20 Spot. There’s a lot of good stuff that’s being played around the country. People are just picking up on it right now with the new generation. I’m a big fan of Rival Sons and Dirty Honey as well.

And you see these bands out there and they’re younger, but they’re a little younger than we are. And they’re causing some commotion. I think rock and roll is real prevalent right now. What we have is there’s too much product not enough demand. That’s the problem because we don’t have the networks that we had in the old days.

But we didn’t have social media in those old days as well. So I think it’s opened up a whole can of worms. And in a way, it’s really positive. Everybody gets a chance to…

Subculture: Definitely. Chip, I was going to ask about that. Because you guys are still putting out music, how difficult is it to put together a set list for a tour like this in Australia?

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff: I don’t think it’s that difficult. There’s a lot of songs. The challenge is, do we want people that would be taking breaks and going to the bathroom?

When I go to see concerts in the old days, I want to hear the songs I recognize. And most fans are going to say the same thing I’m saying. Of course we want to get the deep cuts. That’s very important. But a lot of the bands from the earliest days, from the Beatles playing out to all the way to Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, Mott The Hoople, Cheap Trick, and all the way through Bowie, all the way into the new generation of stuff that’s been out there, you know, with the Slaughters and the Warrants and the Tricksters and the Firehouses and Queensrite, and there’s so many bands, I can keep going, Poison, all of the cats, we were all swimming in the same pond, okay, MTV was playing that stuff, and we were all colorful and flamboyant. And they’ve all had to pick songs for every one of their shows that basically was the catalyst to why they were successful.

And the fans want to hear those songs. It’s important. You can’t get away with not playing the hits because it’d be a shortcut to thinking. So when you go see it, I remember going to see the Black Crows and Oasis. They were on tour years ago and they came through Chicago and Oasis hit a blistering set.

It was just incendiary. Every song he recognized and the radio was playing them and they were good. And they played a couple of B-sides too, but the B-sides were hits too because the A-sides were so compactful. And then Black Crows came on and they played nothing but cover songs and B-Sides, stuff that a lot of people didn’t know. And the fans were pissed. And they were all coming up to me, ask how’s that the sound? I went in the front of the house to talk to the fans because that’s how I am. I’m always transparent. I like being with the people.

And they were all coming, Chip, why? Why are they not playing the hits? And I said I don’t know. I love the band. That’s why I came here to check them out. I want to hear the hits too.

So it ruffled a lot of people’s feathers and hundreds of people would come up to me at the gig that recognized me, were asking me why they weren’t doing that. So it’d be a shortcut to thinking for me not to come out there to your wonderful country that embraces hard rock and heavy metal and not play the most recognizable songs we have in our catalog. That being said, though, I’ll mix it up and I’ll put some of those Beatles songs in there from our album Hard Rock Night. So, the whole set will be chock full of hits. And I think people will be pleasantly surprised when they come out and see the rock band that’s out there. No four or five guys underneath the stage playing. It’s just four of us up there kicking ass, playing I’d be a liar if I said no. I guess I’m a liar because I always believe I never seen an ending to the band.

I always thought I was going to be the four of the original guys. We’d all be out there playing. I had no answer. We lost Derek in 2004. We lost Ricky in 2007. Of course, Fox left the band in 1993 to join Vince Neil and Motley Crue’s guys and Steve Stevens and that certainly shook me up a little bit. But At the end of the day, I seem to be on trajectory with Donnie and I get a lot of great songs and we said we weren’t going to stop. We always made records for ourselves. We’re very selfish that way.

And I think all the good bands are probably would say the same thing. You write the best songs you can and you make a great record and you put your best foot forward. You go out and you play the songs live in concert and hope to connect. So I thought that we’d be doing. I never envisioned anything, honest to God, from the very first day. And I’ve said it in early interviews, too. I see this band going forever. Here we are in the last man standing. Donnie’s got a little solo career. He’s on a little Stephen’s, what’s it called? We’ve got cool record records. He’s got a solo record coming out.

It’s going to be solid because he’s still a quintessential singer of my generation. Guys like Stephen, Tyler, Robin Xander loved him. But here I am. I’m in the front there singing all the songs every single night. The fans have spoken. Most of them hail what we’re doing. The set list is just chock full of good songs.

And we come out there and we’re colorful and flamboyant still. We’re a good looking band still. We’ve been lucky. We stayed away from the cocaine after all these years. Stayed away from the hard booze. Not that we don’t embrace that. We like people having a good time partying. But for us, if we want to put on a good show, it’s got to be milk and cookies and fruit roll-ups, okay? We just got to really watch ourselves. Because we’re singing and playing every day. I just did 28 cities in 34 days with Enuff Z’Nuff. That’s a lot of gigs right there. And we weren’t on a tour bus either.

We flew over from Chicago to Miami after a couple of shows to start off in the Midwest. And then we did the Monster Rock Cruise. That was three gigs on there. And then we flew from Miami all the way to… Baltimore and jumped on a tour and traveled in a sprinter on the whole gig. Every single show.

There’s no bus this time because we knew that the prices were difficult. It was challenging. That’s why we’re trying to keep the prices down on this concert here because we see the other shows that are around the country and how significant it is and how tough it is for the fans to be able to go out and pay. Three, four, five hundred bucks for a ticket. Some people paying a couple thousand bucks to go see their favorite band. You can come on this show right here, this Glam Slam Metal Jam Are You Pretty Enough Tour and see some of your favorite music. Hear some of your favorite music. See some of your favorite artists out there playing for a pittance of that money because we want to keep the prices down. We want to do this specifically for the Australian fans because they’ve been terrific to us throughout our career.

Subculture: Definitely. Now, Chip, I love to do a little bit of a deep dive into bands when I’m about to do an interview, and one of my other passions is cinema. I was really, really intrigued to find out that your first single, Fingers On It, was used in a movie in the 1980s called Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. Tell us a little bit about that. How did your track end up being used in the movie, and did that help get the band’s name out there in those early days?

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff:  Well, this guy named John McNaughton was directing the film, and he had a producer, a guy named Steve Jones, and Steve Jones, wonderful friend of mine to this day, who’s, he actually still doing movies, as a matter of fact.

And he reached out to me and said, we’re shooting this movie.

It’s a real low budget. There’s no big stars in it. At the time, there wasn’t, obviously, Michael Rooker, who’s a huge star right now, who was in the movies. He was starring in there as one of the killers. And we’d like to add one of your songs in there. And we were doing a record called 1985.

We were at Star Trek’s recording studio in Crestwood, Illinois. A cop loaned me $500 to go in the studio at 2 o’clock in the morning to start recording the record. And Donnie and I went in there and recorded Catholic Curls Day by Day and Fingers on It as the songs that we recorded for that record.

And we were finishing up the record and Steve Jones asked if he could hear some of the material. And I sent him the record. The record’s called ‘1985’, by the way. We call it 84, but we call it 85 because that’s when it was ready to go. And we couldn’t get anybody to even pay attention to us.

But there’s a couple of radio stations in Chicago that grabbed onto the first single, which was… Catholic Girls, and I started playing it, and it caused a little commotion. I guess that’s how Steve might have heard about it. And we sent him the record, and he picked up, him and John McNaughton sat down, and they picked Fingers on it as the first single.

And that really, it really, it caused a lot of, it elevated our perception instantly, because it wasn’t a big hit. It had a lot of, strikes against it here in the United States because it was such a dark film, and they couldn’t get a rating on it. So Germany and Europe started playing it and it was a smash hit out there, and it really did good for us. And it really helped us because four years later, we were in the studio recording our debut record, which had the songs, New Thing and Fly, Michelle, and the European people heard about us. Not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure.

If you watch that movie, it’s so lifelike and it’s pretty frightening. But it was a great film. It was shot well. Eight millimeter, I think they shot it on. And as soon as that record, as soon as that movie came out, we started getting a little bit of commotion and getting some action.

But it wasn’t until 1988 when we went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. And Skid Row was in the studio recording the record, and Sebastian Bach had the look of the world. He was like just a rock and roll god. His demeanor and his disposition is just oozed rock star.

And the band came in the studio, and they were great, by the way. They recorded some fantastic stuff with a guy named Michael Wagner, who produced a lot of different bands. And we were in there recording… Some of the stuff, and at the same time, Doc McGee, who was managing Skid Row at the time, him and his brother, they both said that they liked what they were hearing from us in the other room, so… I guess we weren’t doing any of the songs up to 1985 record, but evidently he was smitten by our sound and he thought it’s something special and he turned on the ADCO records and ended up signing the band. And then 1985, during a time where we had a little break in our career, the first two records went gold and we were still $775,000 in debt. And we didn’t understand it, so we went to the record company and asked them, how can we be in such debt that we sold a million records on our first two albums? They said, well, you got tour support and videos and hotels and this and that. And before you know it, they had numbers fudge where we were so dead, there was no way we could get out of it.

So we filed a Chapter 7 as abandoned. That’s when Mike Davis discovered us and signed the band. And right after that record came out, there was a change in the garden of music business where Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nirvanas, Alice in Chains all came out. Great bands, by the way, from Seattle.

And most of the bands that I’ve mentioned previous in this interview took an ass whooping – the Motley Crue’s and the Poison’s and the Cheap Tricks and all of us we had to take a backseat because MTV had a meeting and said, we got a new style of music we’re going to start pushing this music called grunge.

So everybody took a break and that’s when that 1985 record came back into fruition. A guy heard me on Howard Stern’s show with Donnie talking about what our next move was going to be because we were leaving Arista Records. And he said, this guy that called said, his name was Dean Brownroot… he worked with an independent label, and he says, I’d like that. You got any records in the can that you’d be interested in putting out while you guys are looking for your next deal? And I had the 1985 record with the song Fingers on it from Henry of a Portrait of Serial Killer holding up my couch legs.

I’m serious. Two two-inch tapes. And he decided to think, so it’s four two-inch tapes, because only three songs, two-inch tape. That’s how you record back then. It was no pro tools or anything in those early days. And I said, yeah, I got a record. It’s called 1985. And I brought that to the studio.

I baked the fucking tapes. And I didn’t know anything about baking tapes, but we had to bake these two-inch tapes, and then you’d put them on a two-inch machine and you’d play them and you’d be able to transfer quickly without the tapes oxidizing and losing any parts. And there you go.

We had 1985 ready to go, so we were able to put it out there. Obviously, it didn’t come out in 1985, but… It came out in the mid-90s and people were smitten by that record. It did really well for us and sold quite a few copies when people were buying records.

And that helped us and then enabled us to get another record deal. I’m telling you, I got stories and they’re all true. No fictitious stuff there. It’s all transparent about what happened to enough stuff back and forth and all the things we had to go through. All the beatings and the black clouds have been following us.

But for some reason, the songs, we’ve written the songs about everyday experiences that we went through and perhaps people have as well. And they just seem to catch on. And more than anything, our rock and roll.

Subculture: Well mate, I am so excited to be able to head out and see the band when you hit Melbourne. I know we are running out of time, so I guess to finish off, is there a special message you would like to give your Australian fans before this tour?

Chip – Enuff Z’Nuff:  Well, we came out there a few years ago, right before everything shut down. Every single city we played was jam-packed. We were out there with Kip Winger and a bunch of other bands, and they’re faster pussycat. And the tours always were really well attended every single show because the Australian people are honest and they’re transparent and they love rock and roll, and they support their favorite bands. I’m grateful I get a chance to come back there again.

This will be the third time coming to Australia. The first time I was there, when the whole country shut down, I was sitting in a restaurant in Melbourne, and I never read the paper out there, and I happened to pick up the newspaper, and I seen… A story on it said the Prime Minister of England saying, if you’re a foreigner, don’t come to our country. I was telling the guys, guys, after this tour, we’re getting ready to go to Italy. In Spain and France, we’re going to have this big tour we’re doing in Europe after the Australian run. It looks like we’re not going to be able to go anywhere. And the guys in the band were like, oh, no, we’re going. That’s a bunch of crap. You don’t believe what you’re reading the paper here in Australia. And lo and behold, that Australian paper was right because we were stuck in Australia for three or four extra days. We couldn’t get a flight out. We eventually did. When I landed in Chicago, I realized that they were shutting everything down. I just got here just in time. Otherwise, I’d be living in Australia for the last couple of years, okay?

I’m telling you. And it wouldn’t be a bad thing because you guys have a wonderful aesthetic out there. The food’s fantastic. I love going out to the zoo out there and seeing all the cool people. Elton John’s band was out there last time we were hanging out with those cats. You know, there’s good people that come around there and all they want to do is have a good time. And that’s what we’re about. That’s what we’re bringing. We’re bringing a rock and roll show, Pretty Boy Floyd, enough stuff together. You get all the glam, you get all the color, lipstick, the makeup, all that stuff you’re going to get.

Yeah, I might not be wearing it, but I will at the end of the night when I meet the trim that’s out there that comes to these shows that want to hang out with the band because there’s no rules or regulations when it comes to Australia. And that’s what I love about that country.

It’s all about turn it up to 10 and rock out for everybody. And let’s have a good time and celebrate our lives together.