Juice - May, 1996

Get it on
Snout are ready to dominate you. Chris Johnston explians why.

On the road with Snout, in humble style, to a gig that never happened. The venue was Geelong's Deakin University. The Melbourne threepiece - Greg Ng (guitar), Ross McLennan (bass; the songs), and Ewen McCartney (drums) - are bottom of the bill to Even, Pollyanna and the Hoodoo Gurus on the tailend of a large interstate tour. Just out of Geelong the rain comes, shrouding the outdoor gig in a bad electrocution vibe. After a lengthy wait in a uni-room with food and windows but a ban on using the Guru's exclusive glassware Snout are cancelled, but the rest of the show goes on. Back in the car. Lift the rider with tomato juice and cider. Go home. Drive.

Greg: "I know how to flick the 'on' switch. I could have flicked it on tonight if the vibe was right... throw the 'on' switch and that's it, forget it. If the on switch is on, it's on."
Ross: "We've got other switches. We've got all kinds of little switches. We've got the 'get fucked' switch. And there's the 'lets-have-a-really-strange-gig' switch..."
Greg: "You need a hunchback to turn that one on. It's, like, a really big lever..."
Ross: "It requires lightning...
Greg: "And a skylight above to view the lightning storm..."
Ross: "But really, there's something good about every gig. Although last night in Bendigo I'm not so sure. The main problem was I had this mass production of saliva due to eating before the gig, and I was chocking on my own saliva. I couldn't finish the lines. It was most embarrassing. I had to spit onstage. It was very Tim Rogers."

Snout is a unique partnership. You have to look carefully at the people. McLennan is 30. He's the brother of Link from the (now deceased) Meanies. The original Snout released an EP (Cleans and Brightens) and an album (What's That Sound) in 1993 and 1994, then McLennan's guitarist and drummer left. He found Greg, 21, who owes as much if not more to The Stones Roses and Primal Scream as he does to George Harrison and Jimmy Page, and drummer Ewen, who used to be in Ripe, a band with a brilliant melodic drone. Together the three did the Night and Day EP last year and have a new album due which includes live favourites "Matter Baby" and "Winning Smile", and "You're The Right Kind", which even Ross admits is "ten kinds of song in one." The B-sides to single "Cromagnon Man" revealed Snout's affection for a deeper groove, a tripped-out low-fi hiphop groove.
Ross: "I like hiphop. I'm not as broad as
Greg: But those r'n' b basslines. That's what hooked me in."
Greg: "It's pathetic that music of all fucking things can cause division. It's supposed to unify. One nation under a groove, man. You know? For music to be factionalised is fucking crap. I want to speak about that. You know? It's music. Every note played you can get something out of. So I love hiphop and electro and house and jungle, all of it. You can't deny how a piece of music can make you feel."
Ross: We're really personal about it. I am anyway. It's the one thing that keeps me from going nuts. That's why I started writing songs, to cheer myself up. I know what I have to do to live."
Greg: "Ross and I have found that hiphop and stuff merges really comfortably with what we're doing. We've tapped into the essence of each and found that the essence is the same as other influences like The Beatles, The Jam, The Kinks, whatever.... The signs are there for all to see. It's a whirlpool. Black groove, white groove, black groove, white groove. You know? It's beautiful."

Their pent-up whirlpool of sound is kaleidoscopic in the extreme. McLennan's bass playing and songwriting is at the very core of this; they both move in many directions very quickly, too quickly sometimes it seems, before a hook or a riff or both scream out of an accelerated groove-chaos to drag you under once again. So a kaleidoscopic lens of mingling colours, yes, but psychedelic, no. Snout are too sharp and way too uptight to ever drift for too long. In a way they subvert their 60s influences (McLennan, yet another Beatles' obsessive, knows exactly what they were doing on the day he was born in 1966) by cutting and pasting them very brutally within what they are actually doing. More brutally, even, than keen supporters You Am I, and therefore more mischieviously.

There's an undertow with Snout. The music is energetic and driven but the lyrics are often paranoiac and doubting.
Ross: "I am basically paranoid. I view everything in the worst possible way. I'm so paranoid about technology, surveillence and the media, I just am. One the one hand it makes me sound like a fuckwit but on the other I'm aware that I'm a paranoid person. I measure it out, to some extent. So it's hard to talk about my lyrics because they're kind of patchy and kind of like freudian slips, do you know what I mean?"
Greg: "Ross's lyrics are amazing to me. The only parallels I can draw are not musical. It's kind of futurist. The Italian futurists. Movement and stuff. There was a painting I saw, of a dog, and it's all kind of legs and moving back and forward and machines. Like beat writing. Automatic writing. Just the movement of the prose, in itself.
Ross: "We're not limiting ourselves to trash culture. A lot of bands keep it dumb. They don't want to be intelligent because it might alientate somebody. It's important to have a little bit of artistry. That's not to say we contrive to be artistic, but...."
Greg: "There's a great rythmn in Ross's lyrics and his style. It's not so much garbled as spat out, streams of consciousness, but it makes sense. Nonsensical words, but it comes out in a wail. Rythmically it's just so stylish."
Ross: "That's good. Like Pete Shelley? Or John Lennon?"
Greg: "Yeah."
Ross: "...Trying to get a lot of ideas across. Make the words fit. "Homosapien" is amazing. It's such a good song. That's definitely the biggest influence behind "Cromagnon Man". It's kind of about identity. And body odour. We have to alter ourselves to be what we have become."

The bottom line is: when Snout are being Snout, they all feel more alive. The bottom line is: it's just another rock story.
Ross: "For the last two years I've had really bad recurring problems with, like, compulsive obsessiveness. It's always lurking, threatening to ruin your life. Being onstage is a saving grace. You feel like you can do anything up there. We can't stay in a box for long, you know? We're almost using the music as a tool to feel really, really good. We can talk about the things that make us sad but the rush of adrenalin when the drums start to roll in the buildup is the best feeling..."
Greg: "You can see the mania taking hold. I mean, like, what else makes individuals pucker their fucking lips up and let loose with their arms and shake their hips, you know? It's pretty depraved really. You certainly wouldn't walk around the street like that."
Ross: "We're indulging ourselves in importance up there, as well as expressing ourselves. Not that we want to be dominant over people, but it's the insecure person's way of saying 'hey, I'm OK.' Except we're saying 'hey, we're the greatest.' But you know, there's still the next day, getting up and having a cup of tea. So we deal with the downside when it comes."