THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

Welcome back to the second part of my recent sit down with Jan Burnett, frontman of Dundee-formed Spare Snare, whose 12th studio album, The Brutal will be released on 12 May 2023.

You’ll have gathered from yesterday’s posting that Spare Snare are not your run-of-the-mill band.   The fact that all six members give priority to their family and work lives means any musical activities have to be planned out well in advance, something which was very much to the fore when it came to writing, rehearsing and recording The Brutal.

Spare Snare have long had the habit of developing new material by getting together in  the space where recording is taking place, and working on the songs in an organic way but things had to be different this time around as a result of them engaging Steve Albini to come over to Scotland for a week to sprinkle his fairy dust on the music in an Edinburgh studio owned and run by Rod Jones of Idlewild.

This meant that the band had to do a lot of advance work on the new songs, and so they would get together, either in evenings or at weekends on at least a weekly basis in rehearsal spaces in Dundee. This involved Jan travelling the 80 miles, often by public transport, from Glasgow where he has, for many years, lived and worked.  It was all part of a process whereby the new songs would more well beyond the state of being mere demos by the time they went into the studio.

The connection with Albini didn’t come purely by chance.   A few years ago, funding was obtained from the government agency Creative Scotland to have him come over in February 2018 to deliver a workshop for engineers/producers, after which he would work with Spare Snare over a number of days in the studio owned and run by Chemikal Underground Records.   Partly due to the time constraints, the band elected to pick out 10 tracks from their back catalogue that they felt would benefit most from Albini’s way of working and signature sound.

The project was an overwhelming success.  All those involved in the workshop were delighted with the way it was delivered and the time in the studio led to the release of Sounds, recorded by Steve Albini,  later in the year by Chute Records.  There was a great deal of critical acclaim for the new record, especially in the way that a number of long-time fan favourites had been re-imagined, and the vinyl edition very quickly sold out, leading later on to arrangements being put in place for Past Night From Glasgow to give it a re-press, complete with new artwork, in 2021.

mp3: Spare Snare – We Are The Snare (Sounds version)

Albini took his leave of Scotland, saying that he had loved the experience, and he’d certainly be up for working with Spare Snare again in the future.   Chats got underway and progress began to be made, only for things to almost derail because of COVID and the restrictions placed on travelling.  Jan worked tirelessly to keep the channels of communication open, as well as making plans and arrangements to raise the finance required for such a venture, with the aim being to have a new album of entirely new material recorded to mark the band’s 30th anniversary.

Everything did manage to fall into place and the recording sessions took place in October 2022.  The exactness of it all also meant that aspirations to incorporate brass into some of the songs could be realised, with both Terry Edwards (The Higsons, Gallon Drunk, Tindersticks etc.) and Gary Barnacle (The Clash, The Ruts, Soft Cell etc)  putting time in their diaries to come up from London to Edinburgh to play as guests.

Jan told a great story in our interview about how he came to first meet Gary;  Jan’s not one for name-dropping or the showbiz life, but he was invited to Dave Ball of Soft Cell’s 60th birthday party, during which he found himself chatting to Gary and getting on really well to the extent that he later sent him a copy of Sounds with a request that he come up to the studio when Albini flew in, one that Gary had no hesitation in accepting.

I was really surprised to learn that despite Terry and Gary both being on hundreds of records over the past 40 years or so, they had never previously met, far less worked together, so new ground is being broken on this new album.

There’s an incredible sense of pride from Jan when he talks about The Brutal.  The fact that, after so many years of working in a particular way, Spare Snare adapted comfortably to a whole new process which proved to be hugely enjoyable, both in terms of the rehearsals and the time in the studio, speaks volumes about their abilities as musicians and the fact they are very much a group of friends going back decades.

That sense of pride extends to all the band members.  Most Spare Snare records are released in a low-key manner, partly as the time constraints on everyone really restricts how much can be delivered in the way of promotional activities.  This time around, the release of the album is going to be accompanied by a week-long tour of venues in England, with Scottish dates later on at weekends.   There’s a real desire and willingness to get the album out to as wide a crowd as possible, with a collective belief that it is as strong a collection of tunes as any they have ever delivered.

So…..what is the TVV verdict on The Brutal?

In a year when there have already been a number of genuinely exciting new albums from, among others, HiFi Sean and David McAlmont, Robert Forster, Steve Mason, Gorillaz, and Everything But The Girl (and no doubt many more that I haven’t yet picked up on), the latest record from Spare Snare is a standout.

It’s a compact effort, with its ten tracks coming in at around 35 minutes all told.  I played it with a pre-conceived idea of what an Albini-engineered album was likely to sound like based on listening and enjoying his work with The Wedding Present, Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey and so on, but found myself really appreciating how different and diverse things sounded on this occasion.  I really shouldn’t have been caught out in that way given that Albini is far removed from being a one-trick pony, having worked with, among others, The Auteurs, Low, Cinerama and Jarvis Cocker, none of whom relied extensively or exclusively on guitars to make great albums.

Jan had told me a while back that Terry Edwards and Gary Barnacle were only going to be in the studio on one of the five days in which recordings were taking place, and so I was anticipating their contributions to be quite minimal.  It was a very pleasant surprise to hear them playing on at least half of the album, and on every occasion fitting in perfectly with all that was going on around them, a real testament to the way the album had been engineered, produced and mixed.

But please, don’t be under the impression that the brilliance of this record is down solely to the magician behind the desk.

Far from it.

Spare Snare have very much upped their game on this occasion. As I outlined earlier, they took a different approach in the advance planning for this album, working and preparing harder than ever before. By the time they went into the studio, they knew they had a set of very strong songs, their first new material since the release of Unicorn in 2018; by the time they came out of the studio a week later, they had very much risen to the occasion and, to this particular set of ears, delivered the performance of a lifetime.

In summary, they nailed it.

Thus far, I’ve only listened to a digital copy of The Brutal.  The vinyl will be with me shortly, and I know that it is going to be given repeated spins over the summer months and beyond till I reach the stage where I’m 100% aware of every note and every pause for breath along the way.  It’s an album I don’t ever imagine I’ll grow tired of with each listen.

Here’s 100-odd seconds of magic from it:-

As mentioned above, Spare Snare are hitting the road to promote the album’s release.

North Shields, Sheffield, Leeds, Trowbridge, Brighton and London from Monday to Saturday next week.   The fact that they all have to return to work immediately after means that the Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow shows all have to be at weekends.

I’m heading down, with Rachel, to catch the show at Wharf Chambers in Leeds next Wednesday night.  I’ll let you all know, in due course, how it turned out.

The Brutal should be available, certainly in the UK, from your local independent record store as from Friday 12 May.  It can also be ordered from this bandcamp site, along with many other great items from the back catalogue.

JC

TVV and T(n)VV have been on the go for almost 17 years, but today’s bonus post marks a first.

A few weeks back, I had the immense pleasure of chatting for more than an hour in a Glasgow coffee shop with Jan Burnett, the frontman of Spare Snare, all of which was recorded for the purposes of me then pulling something together for the blog.  Such was the extent of the chat that I’ve decided to break the piece into two parts, the first of which will cover more general areas, while I’ll return tomorrow to look specifically at the recording, release and promotion of the band’s new album, The Brutal.

The upcoming release of the new album marks the 30th Anniversary of Spare Snare. It all began back in 1992 in Jan’s bedroom in Dundee, the fourth-largest city in Scotland, where he wrote and recorded his initial songs, releasing them later on his own record label, Chute Records.   The debut 45 was picked up by the American-based Prospective Records and Jan was soon on the receiving end of an invitation to tour America and play at a music seminar in New York at the tail end of 1994.

Spare Snare quickly became a four-piece band with the addition of three more Dundee musicians – Alan Cormack, Barry Gibson and Paul Esposito – and after the tour was over they accepted an invitation to record a session for John Peel in January 1995.  The following month, the band recorded a debut album, Live At Home, on eight-track, again for release on Chute Records here in the UK and by Prospective Records in the USA.  The album was received very positively and the band was invited onto the bill for the Reading Festival in 1995 where six songs from their set were recorded and broadcasted by Peel, within 20 minutes of them leaving the stage, as part of the Radio 1 coverage of the event.  The year was rounded off by one of the songs from the debut album being voted in at #32 by the listeners of Peel’s show in the Festive Fifty rundown:-

mp3: Spare Snare – Bugs

“I’m not very good at showing off in terms of how great we are, cos I don’t do that.  I’d rather people found us, whether at gigs or through the records.” – Jan Burnett, in conversation with JC, March 2023.

Those words are very much at the heart of why Spare Snare are probably Scotland’s best-kept secret.   Thirty years in the business, with a back catalogue of eleven studio albums that have been augmented by compilations and, if Discogs is 100% accurate, a further twenty-four singles/EPs across a diverse range of indie labels, including che and Deceptive.

It’s really an impossible task to suggest where anyone new to Spare Snare should start, but probably the most comprehensive oversight of their work can be found on a release from 2021.

The Complete BBC Radio Sessions 1995-2018 contains 42 tracks, sourced from three John Peel sessions (1995, 1998 and 2001), two Marc Riley sessions (2009 and 2018), along with numerous sessions and live recordings for BBC Radio Scotland which were broadcast in 1995, 1996, 1999, 2004 and 2018.

mp3: Spare Snare – I Am God (Marc Riley Session, 2018)

It is also where you will find their take on Amazing Grace which was aired in 2007 during  ‘Good Morning Sunday with Aled Jones’, a show in which the former teenage chorister turned presenter/broadcaster mixed music and discussions about religious and ethical issues with faith representatives.

mp3: Spare Snare – Amazing Grace

One of the most fascinating things about the box set is that it enables listeners to appreciate how much the band evolved over the years.  It would have been so easy just to take what had brought them to attention in 1995 and gone down a path of churning out variants on a similar theme in the years that followed.  Things have been kept fresh and the musicians have never fallen into any sort of rut.

Here’s a link to where you can pick up a copy.

Jan is, quite rightly, incredibly proud of all that Spare Snare have done over the past 30 years.  While the band was very much the be-all and end-all in the early years, it inevitably reached a stage where being full-time musicians wasn’t a viable option.  The current line-up of Spare Snare is six-strong, with Jan, Alan and Barry still involved as they were back in the mid-90s, while Graham Ogston and Adam Lockhart have been part of things for around 20 years, with Michael Lambert being the relative newcomer, although he’s been known to the rest of the band for around a decade, so it’s accurate to describe the six-piece as being close friends with one another.  It’s now very much a situation where family and work lives take priority, and a great deal of forward planning is involved when it comes to band activities.

Our chat was wide-ranging and space doesn’t allow me to cover everything, even across a two-part feature.   I learned that Jan has always been astute in his workings with the music industry.  The band has never had a manager, but he was still able to negotiate a position where the full copyright issues came back to him after a relatively short period of time, unlike the situation most new and emerging bands find themselves in.  It’s also been one of the factors that has helped ensure the longevity of Spare Snare, where more or less everything can be done in-house, including the distribution of any new music.  Costs are kept down, and the band members are never under pressure to tour/perform to pay off any sort of debts.  Looking at it as an outsider, there really is much to admire about the way Jan and his friends have navigated their way through the business over the past 30 years.

The biggest thing to emerge from the chat was the passion that Jan has for music, going way back to before he picked up any instrument or wrote out some lyrics. He talked about his working-class parents being totally into music, but never having enough disposable income to build up any sort of collection of vinyl. Their love was to go to gigs at the Caird Hall in Dundee, to which Jan began to be taken from 1974 onwards on the basis that a ticket was cheaper than paying a babysitter.   He talked about seeing the big pop acts of the day such as David Essex and the Bay City Rollers, and later on being taken to see Dr Feelgood and Elvis Costello & The Attractions among many others – always up in the balcony as the seats were cheaper, and it was safer for a young kid to be; he’s in no doubt that this very early exposure to live music was the thing which ignited the lifelong passion.

He was just the right age for to immerse himself in the explosion in synth music at the start of the 80s.  Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Soft Cell were among his first loves, and it was the former’s connection with Factory Records that led him to New Order/Joy Division and then going back into the post-punk era.    All of these influences were at the forefront of the earliest bedroom recordings.  He’s a self-taught musician/performer/writer, someone who has never learned to read music (something, as he pointed out, he has in common with OMD), who has just been happy to pick things up and improve as he’s gone along, acknowledging fully the vital and contributions of everyone who has ever been part of Spare Snare over the years.

He’s become a self-confessed collector/hoarder of music, someone whose collection of albums and CDs now sits at around 15,000 in number across all sorts of genres, although his real passion remains towards electronica rather than guitar-based music.

Knowing all this, I ended the interview by asking Jan to curate his ‘Fantasy Festival’.   My idea was that Spare Snare would play as headliners, and that five other bands/musicians would support in the role as special guests – I thought it was a variation on the ‘Dream Dinner Party Guests’ that you often see in magazines/newspaper features.  The only proviso was that the musicians/bands had to be alive…..

After much thought, he offered the following.  Iggy Pop, R.E.M., New Order (preferably with Hooky), Soft Cell and Pet Shop Boys.   The man certainly has great taste.

You might wonder why I’ve gone into such detail and gone off at tangents today.  But all of this backstory fits into the way Spare Snare have gone about recording the new album, working for a week in an Edinburgh studio with Steve Albini, and having a couple of high-profile guest musicians join them to play on the record. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for Part Two.

JC