The Sunday Painters occupy an unusual niche in Wollongong music history.

Records from the 1980s band sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. They have fans around the world. A label in the United States is keen to re-release all their EPs and albums.

Yet it's likely most people in Wollongong have never heard of them, let alone heard them.

It's not really surprising, given all six of their releases - from 1980 to 1985 - were very small runs (a cassette release totalled just 100 copies). So there were never too many albums or EPs out there to begin with.

And, if you were to buy one, well you'd have to get into a bidding war with record collectors around the world willing to pay several hundred dollars for a three-track EP.

And their music - a mix of full-on electronic noise, rock, discordant pop, classical, punk, jazz and whatever else they wanted to play - was probably too out there for Wollongong in the 1980s.

"Not even Wollongong," admits band member Peter MacKinnon.

"We would find the same when we played in Sydney or Melbourne. I remember one gig we did and at the end of the set, we tended to do a fairly full-on number that would go completely off. At the end of it there was just stunned silence from the audience.

"We were the support for what was essentially a pop band. The audience was there to see this pop band and we came out and just played this completely off the wall, almost wall of noise music and they just didn't know how to respond to it."

MacKinnon formed the band with school friend Peter Raengel in 1979 with third member Resident (born Dennis) Kennedy joining in 1982. While there was a number of other musicians who played with the band during the 1980s, this trio was the longest incarnation of the band.

MacKinnon and Raengel met in Year 5 at Wollongong Primary School and went right through Wollongong High School together.

"It was while we were in high school, we each bought a $30 Kmart guitar and just started playing in his bedroom through a little amp.

"We started playing music in high school with a friend, and then after high school, decided to form a band. A friend of ours who was at school was the one who called us the Sunday Painters.

"It was after one the Impressionists, it might have been Monet, who was sometimes called the Sunday Painter because he had a day job and that was what it was like for us.

"We had day jobs and this was something we did on the side."

While Raengel had a musical background - having learned piano as a child - MacKinnon pretty much worked out how to play guitar himself. That approach no doubt adds to the unique sound of the Sunday Painters.

"I don't really consider myself a musician as such," MacKinnon said.

"I don't think I'm good enough. We used to joke that the reason we played our own material was that we weren't good enough to be a covers band."

The band was very much influenced by the punk scene of the late 1970s - in terms of the DIY attitude, the socio-political songwriting and the embrace of creative art.

The releases would be recorded themselves and put out on their own Terminal Records label. The covers were works of art - one EP would come with three different covers, another featured an individually made and coloured cover for each of the 250 vinyl EPs. A cassette release featured Raengel's bloodstains on each of the 100 copies.

On top of this, every single release was hand-numbered.

For friends MacKinnon and Raengel, it was about doing what you wanted to do. About "just making sounds and seeing where it led us".

"Peter and I never had any ambitions that we were going to make a living out of music," MacKinnon says.

"We never thought we were going to be that approachable that we were going to be able to make money out of it."

But others have managed to make money out of the Sunday Painters, mainly those selling their recordings online for between $200 to $300 a pop.

"There are people who are making more money from them now than we ever made at the time we sold them originally," MacKinnon laughs.

"I've got some [copies] of the first single and a few copies of the first album that have never been sold. I haven't bothered to flog them because it's something Dennis and I need to talk about in terms of how we're going to do it.

"Should we be putting them up surreptitiously on eBay and see how much we can get for them? It'd be like 'wow, we finally made some money out of this album'."

Today, it's easy for a band to get their music heard around the world.

All they have to do is post it online.

But in the 1980s it was much harder - to listen to a band you either had to have a physical copy of their album or know someone who did. Add to that, the fact Sunday Painters never released more than 500 of any record - and in some cases just 250 - the odds of any of them winding up overseas seems slim to none.

"In terms of pressings of albums, we're only talking in the 100s that were ever pressed," MacKinnon said.

"For some of them we didn't have a distributor, but we found some of our stuff was ending up in other countries.

"Peter got contacted from Germany, the UK and the US. Some of our stuff used to get played on university radio stations in the US back in the day.

"So it was filtering out there."

Some of those vinyl releases ended up in Boston, where Michael Train was a college radio DJ. A friend named Chuck sold underground rock in the US and would put together compilation tapes of bands to introduce his buyers to bands they'd never heard of.

"Most bands as sonically inventive as they were don't have the pop smarts to get all their ideas into tight songs," Train said.

"And they had emotional range too - from tenderness to fury in a beat."

Driven by a desire for more people to hear this band from Wollongong, Train initially planned to release a double CD of the Sunday Painters himself. He eventually turned to friend Kevin Pedersen, who runs US indie label What's Your Rupture, for help.

The result will be the release of the band's first three EPs as one album early next year, along with a bonus download of a live show. The two Sunday Painters albums will follow later in 2015.

Train said it seemed apt that a US label was re-releasing the songs from an Australian band.

"Given how determined Peter Raengel and the other Painters were to get as much music as possible from the far side of the world - New York, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Ohio - and then turning it into something new, it feels right that a New York label should now be involved," Train said.

"It reminds us that the best art freely crosses borders."

The news of the re-releases pleases MacKinnon, partially because it means he'll be able to own copies of all the band's stuff again.

"We're pretty chuffed that there's this interest from overseas," MacKinnon said.

"Again I'm certainly not expecting to make any money out of it. That never was the point of the exercise."

The band itself never really broke up but rather "petered out" (an apt descriptor for a band with two Peters) in the early 1990s. MacKinnon reckoned the last gig was at the Star Cafe in Port Kembla in 1992.

Marriage, children and work took over and, while MacKinnon never played in another band, he would go over to Raengel's house to jam. The two were such close friends that MacKinnon said there would hardly have been a week since they were 10 they didn't see each other.

"That was right up until the Wednesday before he died," MacKinnon said.

Raengel had been working in Chatswood and commuting from Wollongong, a trip MacKinnon believes contributed to his death in 2007.

"He had an aneurysm a few years before he died which he survived, but he was having seizures on the train going to or from work.

"I told him he just needed to tell work to shove it and when he did give them notice, they finally allowed him to work from home," MacKinnon said.

But by then it was too late - Raengel passed away six months later.

"There's still not a week goes by where I don't think about him and don't miss him," MacKinnon said.

He also thinks about the Sunday Painters and when the older MacKinnon looks back at what the younger MacKinnon was playing, he reckons it sounds crazy.

"But to be honest I thought we were playing some crazy stuff even then, in the sense that we didn't think we sounded like anyone else," he said.

"These days, it's probably me being a grumpy old man, but if Triple J's on in the car and a piece of music comes on, I'm going 'oh that reminds me of something that was made 30-40 years ago'. I'm doing that a lot.

''I find that when I listen to our stuff I never think 'oh that sounds like someone else'. So it's clear we were doing our own thing.

"Whether we were ahead of our time, well, that's for others to judge."