"Enjoying being a Sneak" ~ Michael Smith

The Drum Media - 1st October 2002

 

Once upon a time in Melbourne, a young singer songwriter named Andy Grant met a very successful songwriter and guitarist named Phil Buckle and struck up a creative partnership that resulted in an album of material that sounded nothing like the stuff Buckle had become famous for writing. It was a good thing, edgy and contemporary, so they called it Sneak.

This was back in 1999 and since it was more Grant's project than Buckle's, the latter was happy to take the back seat so the music had a chance to be heard rather than be swamped by unnecessary preconceptions. Sneak released a couple of singles/EP's, "Everything Is Green" and "And Another Thing" (FMR) and then things got a bit wobbly.

"We've had two guitar players come and go, and a bass player, and a keyboard/sound designer. We were with Festival Mushroom till the end of 2000 and they had their 'cleaning out of the closet' and we went along with The Mavis' and Deadstar, at which time we decided to persevere nonetheless, but we lost Phil (Buckle) and we gained Glenn, who is our mystery man because he's appeared nowhere but on our EP, just to keep the songwriting and musical momentum going, out of which, our good friends at Jive came and saw our EP launch and over the next few months we courted each other to get us to here."

So Sneak have just released their first Jive single "Feel Like I Do", from their forthcoming debut album, "Still Life Moving", which you can expect to surface around March next year. These days, the core of the band is Grant and guitarist Peter Robinson, whose survived all the incarnations from the inception of the live Sneak, along with drummer Ricki Rae.

"As a band it's transformed as well," Robinson explains, "Apart from members, we went through musical changes. The EP, we went through a stage where it ended up being very heavy, but I think we needed to go through that to get to where we are now."

That "heaviness" was inevitably in some ways a result of being dropped by a label, an expression of their frustration. As Robinson suggests however, the music has evolved in another direction.
"Funnily enough it's the direct opposite now," adds Grant. "It's all positivity now. All we want to do is just bein that classic, honest tradition of rock 'n' roll, just get up there and enjoy ourselves for one, make a racket like nothing that's gone before, and let that be absorbed into people's consciousnesses as well. We want to get out and gig! We just want people to enjoy the music that we make. It's a pretty simple ethos."

After the mysterious Glenn left, the band decided to work as a four piece for a while and then, instead of going with their original vision of a twin guitar band, they recruited keyboards player and occasional slide guitarist Jonathon Bara, the most recent addition being bass player Anthony Dawkins. It's Robinson's rather unique approach to guitar however that has really given Sneak its most substantial aural colour, as he explains.

"I use different tunings on the guitar, actually not knowing what the chords were. They're just shapes, it was just creating the sounds and notes and things and putting the melodies over the top - I have no musical knowledge - but just going back now and analysing what I did, it's all Major 7ths which is a beautiful really open-sounding thing. That's where it's all come from and that's in a lot of our songs. It's a really up sound."

"Resolution is probably a key word for the music that we make," Grant adds. "Those beautiful chords have just allowed me to smile. I've also moved out of Melbourne to a semi-rural area and it's seriously cleared my head. I'd felt my songwriting had come to a point where I was feeling squashed by the city. Now I live near the Yarra River, so it's an almost spiritual, quiet place. We'll give Enya a run for her money is the logical progression!"

 

 

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