Hoodoo Gurus fans, they're coming to Down Under - and they need your help

Ahead of their Australian tour, which launches in Thirroul, the singer sat down with ACM's Illawarra Mercury to talk lyrics and the strange name behind their debut album that's now 40 years old.

The name Stoneage Romeos would be familiar to anyone who likes slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges, after all it's name of their 1955 short film, it's also the name of the Hoodoo Gurus debut album.

To celebrate four decades since the album's release, the Gurus are heading to Anita's Theatre on November 13 to kick-off their Back to the Stoneage Tour, but more about that later.

When this album was released in 1984 it stood out among the synthesised pop songs of the day.

The brightly coloured album cover featured a giant t-rex, flying dinosaurs and a cave woman, it was a nod to the 1966 b-grade movie One Million Years BC.

The songs, well, Faulkner admits you probably couldn't get away with writing some of them today.

There was necrophilia (Dig It Up), a volcano sacrifice (Leilani), comparisons of convicted Japanese war criminal Hideki Tojo to Cyclone Tracy (Tojo) and suicidal pilots (I Was A Kamikaze Pilot).

"There's a couple that I think if I wrote this one today, I might get in trouble," he said.

"Leilani is clearly very close to the wind as far as cultural sensitivity. If you took it seriously, but luckily it's such a ridiculous scenario that it's not a serious statement of anything other than Hollywood B-movie sensibilities.

"We certainly had trouble in Japan providing those two songs, Tojo and Kamikaze Pilot ... they thought it was insensitive at the time."

Political correctness aside, the album went on to attract a cult-like following among Gurus fans and during their upcoming tour it'll be played in full, followed by other massive hits from the band - we're thinking Bittersweet, 1000 Miles Away, Come Anytime and What's My Scene.

Back to that short film, Faulkner's love of slapstick comedy started when he was a young boy and Australia still didn't have coloured TV shows, so he and his family watched old black and white re-runs of shows from the late 1950s and 60s.

"I've got about a dozen Three Stooges DVDs in my collection," he said, but he's still missing the one that counts - Stoneage Romeos.

"I keep looking for it and I can't find it."

As the Gurus prepare to kick off their Back to the Stoneage Tour in the United States in September, Faulkner admits he never thought the band would be still playing today.

"The fact is we didn't plan past that album, we just thought we're going to make one record in our lives and this will be it so let's put everything into it. Lo and behold we got the chance to make another one and another one after that," he said.

"That's how we've always gone from moment to moment, record to record, without sort of having any sort of career plan."