The roots of Spare Snare’s 30-year, 12-album career are in Dundee’s West Port Bar.
“Playing cover versions,” says the band’s founding (and then only) member Jan Burnett.
“My friend Graham mimed, while I pressed play on the four-track recorder and shouted along to Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. That evolved into doing my own songs, which evolved into the first single in 1992.”
Live music beginnings
Raised in a tenement off the Perth Road, Burnett’s parents couldn’t afford a babysitter, so they took him to concerts at the Caird Hall as a child in the mid-‘70s.
He wasn’t exactly a star pupil at Harris Academy, but hanging around in the music room and playing with the instruments and tape machines, he found his calling.
His first music project which caught on was Shandy on the Rocks as The White Leather Club in 1992.
A raucous, punky remix of Jimmy Shand, he sent copies to labels in America, who asked for more. At the end of the year his first solo single as Spare Snare was created, which John Peel loved.
One of those US labels, Prospective in Minneapolis, offered to put out some music and invited him over to tour.
The group Burnett put together quickly included Adam Lockhart and Barry Gibson, both still members, and the rest – via a publishing deal with Steve Lamacq’s Deceptive Records and a nationwide tour two years later with fellow Scots the Delgados – is history.
“I was really impressed by the fact they were in the NME, they’d put out a record and they’d toured in America,” says Graeme Ogston, the Snare’s guitarist, who joined in 2000.
Dundee roots
He was working in Groucho’s Records and playing in a Dundonian band called the Hate Foundation, while Burnett’s day job was at the Virgin Megastore.
One day Burnett was in Groucho’s and happened to mention he needed a guitarist for some upcoming dates, and Ogston replied that he’d be interested.
A week later he was invited to join, and within days he was onstage in Manchester. Soon after he was at Maida Vale Studios in London, playing the band’s last John Peel Session before the broadcaster’s death.
“They were an inspiration, really, for a band who’d gone and done everything themselves,” says Ogston. “It impressed me, that as a band from Dundee they hadn’t had much of a helping hand from the music industry.
“In those days you made a demo and sent it off, and a record company might be interested in it or not, but Jan bypassed all that.
“He got attention from the music press and got gigs all by himself. he’s always had vision for what he wants and a DIY ethic, and even now, with the new record, he did it all off his own back.”
New album
The imminent The Brutal is a raw but beautifully melodic indie record, filled with particularly wry lyricism.
Featuring horns by Gary Barnacle and Terry Edwards, session players for the Clash, Madness and many others, it was recorded in Leith with sometime Nirvana producer Steve Albini.
The Snare first worked with Albini when they and Creative Scotland brought him to Scotland for a series of production workshops, the results of which became their 2018 album Sounds Recorded by Steve Albini.
“We wrote and rehearsed for the new record for 10 months,” says Ogston. “When we got to October everything was absolutely spot on, because we only had five days with Steve.
“That’s why we’re really pleased with it. It was good to see him again, he was happy with it – the last thing he said was, ‘see you on the next one’.”
With day jobs throughout the six-piece band (Burnett works in IT for a bank in Glasgow, Ogston is BBC Scotland’s Dundee reporter), their recording sessions and tours are what they do with their annual leave. Yet it’s so much more than a hobby.
“I have to use the art side of my brain, and if it wasn’t Spare Snare, it would be something else,” says Burnett.
“I always have to do something, I’ve always got a project on the go, because it keeps me going. Plus I’m really stubborn. If the band disbanded or we all died off and I was the last one standing, I’d still be making records.”
Spare Snare’s new album The Brutal is released on Chute Records through Republic of Sound on Friday May 12. The single Ring to Me is out now. They play Beat Generator, Dundee, on Saturday, May 20. sparesnare.bandcamp.com
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