The Perfect Gig: Blood On The Stage & Hair On The Floor

From their home-job mullets to their three-chord riffs, Amyl & The Sniffers are a purely Australian proto-punk, pub-rock throwback; bluntly antagonistic, gleefully violent and impossible to look away from.

"I find the beauty in the filth," sneers frontwoman Amy Taylor on Pleasure Forever, a song packed with coarse, brattish heat that's equal parts '70s Western Sydney and 21st-century Saint Kilda. It’s not beautiful, but it is irresistible. It takes less than 20 minutes to listen to everything Amyl & The Sniffers have recorded, but since forming in early 2016 they’ve become one of Melbourne’s biggest live draws.

Guitarist Declan Martens admits the reaction has been surprising “considering none of it was planned out”. “We didn’t even plan to make an EP,” he continues. “We never planned to be a band. It was just one of those gung-ho things. We never planned to play a gig.

“I mean Amy — I reckon Amy probably for months had been planning to make a fucken sick band,” he jokes. “But with me? Nah. I wasn’t expecting even to start another band. None of this has been planned.”

You can’t fault the results. Bands plan and god laughs, and making it up on the fly has been working a treat. But with growing exposure and industry types kicking down the door you have to wonder if pressure is mounting for them to refine their approach. “Not really pressure,” says Taylor. “We probably think about it more. Before we definitely didn’t think about it, we just thought, ‘Let’s just put it out.’”

Truer words. The genesis of Amyl & The Sniffers’ debut EP Giddy Up — conceived, written, recorded and uploaded in an afternoon by a handful of housemates after work — became a twice-told tale in less than two years. Their second EP Big Attraction, released almost a year to the day after the first, was hard proof it wasn’t a fluke, even if they mostly wrote it because it’s hard to play full shows with just four songs.

“It was one of those things,” says Martens. “When we did our second EP those songs were all written just so we could fill out a set that we were getting booked for. And now it’s, like, planned, and [about] how we want our music to sound. I feel a lot more pressure... It used to be like, ‘Whatever you got, we’ll just put it together. We’ll just throw it together and no one’s gonna give a fuck so long as we’re making noise.’”

Plenty of people gave a fuck, and in three months Amyl & The Sniffers went from a ten-minute, 2am slot at Yah Yah’s — “supporting Dumb Punts, I think it was” — to playing with legendary Runaways rocker Cherie Currie. They’ll start 2018 opening for Foo Fighters, with their debut album slated for mid-year. In between, they were one of the most hotly anticipated and sorely missed acts at BIGSOUND 2017 (more on that later), played Meredith and Cherry Rock, and terrorised the country with Cosmic Psychos. They’ve come up fast.

Surprisingly, they don’t feel this has translated to a distinguishable fanbase, as yet, although they’ve developed a pretty close relationship with the fans they do have.

“There’s a couple of parents,” says Martens. “But as far as young people go we haven’t really got a fanbase, I don’t think. I’m still waiting for an Amyl gig where everyone’s got a mullet. We haven’t had that yet, but hopefully one day. That’s what I want.”

“We got to cut a mullet once,” says Taylor.

“That’s my favourite thing, is cutting mullets after a gig,” shares Martens. “And then you see them like next time you play and they’ve changed their haircut.”

“Yeah, there was these two blokes that came [to a Brisbane gig],” says Taylor. “One had a mullet and we cut the other bloke’s mullet. And then they came when we played with the Psychos and they both had hats on. I was like, ‘Boys! How ya doing?’ I took both their hats off and they were bald underneath. I was like, ‘What happened?’ and they’re like, ‘Awww, our bosses weren’t happy.’”

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, we’re not sure what somebody asking you to give them your haircut on the spot is. But we’d argue that having people rock your ‘do is a good step towards a dedicated following. “They’re always wasted, though,” says Martens. “They’re always wasted and they’re goin’, ‘Aw, can you cut me a mullet?’ Yeah, if you can get me scissors.”

Fair warning, Martens sounds like he doubles as the band’s hairdresser to some extent, but maybe approach with caution if you’re thinking of commissioning him at the pub. “That bloke looked like he’d just had half a session of chemotherapy,” says Taylor, describing the finished product as “tuppy”. “We got bored of it after three minutes.”

“Yeah, at first everyone’s like, ‘Aw, sick!’” says Martens. “Everyone’s getting their [phones] out for their Instagram stories and then after ten minutes of cutting someone’s long hair everyone’s like, ‘Ah, fuck this! I’m going back inside.’”

“They’re the best, though,” says Taylor. “One of those blokes, every time we play in Brisbane he chucks his jocks on stage. This one time he chucked his jocks on stage... I chucked ‘em back in the crowd and some old Oi cunt thought it was my undies so he was sniffing ‘em and putting ‘em in his mouth.”

“That was crazy,” adds Martens, a little incredulously.

“I talked to the bloke after,” says Taylor, referring to the jocky tosser, “and he was like, ‘Yeah I’ve been wearing them all day skating, they’re so sweaty and disgusting.’ And that bloke just put ‘em in his mouth!... He’s done it twice. I don’t know how he takes ‘em off, ‘cause he’s always wearing jeans. So he must just, like, fucken wedgie himself and break ‘em through the bum. And then whip ‘em up.”

“They’re really ripped as well,” says Martens. “I remember the first time he did it and I saw them on stage, I was like, ‘What the fuck?’”

“I don’t know what he — like, was I supposed to keep them?” asks Taylor. “I don’t know. If he goes for the third time I’ll keep ‘em. I’ll frame ‘em. But two’s not enough. Anybody can do two.”

But it’s not just dirty knickers and willingness for a trim that people bring to the party. With a name like Amyl & The Sniffers, and their proud ratbag reputation, it was pretty much guaranteed people would eventually come bearing ‘gifts’ relating to their namesake.

“All the time,” confirms Taylor.

“All the time?” asks Martens. “You reckon?”

“Fucken, like one out of five gigs.”

“I wish they brought more,” says Martens. “I remember the first time I did it on stage it was our second-ever Sydney gig and they just shoved it right up all of our noses, and then that’s when you realise how hard it is to play on amyl. It’s actually really hard. I’ve learned to play drunk, but I haven’t learned to play on amyl yet.

“You get really hot and you slow down, and then it wears off and you’re like, ‘Woop, there ya go. Back into it.’”

Another hot tip if you want to make friends at a Sniffers gig: don’t stand in the corner and bob your head. “I don’t know,” says Taylor, when asked how she gets Melbourne’s famously stiff crowds moving. “I like it when people are violent, though.”

“I really like a mosh,” agrees Martens, “otherwise I feel like we’re not doing really well, you know what I mean? I think it’s partly — the people who are moshing don’t care how you sound so you can just fuck up as much as you want to. But I think if by the third or fourth song people aren’t moshing, then I’ll sort of tell people to have a go at each other.

“But, I mean, we’ve played a Sunday afternoon gig where no one’s moshing and it’s just — you just have to get through it. We’re hungover, everyone else is hungover. I think that’s probably the biggest hurdle for us to come through is knowing that people aren’t going to mosh at certain gigs, you know what I mean?"

Crowdiness has been going the way of the muscle car the last few years, certainly in Melbourne, and Taylor and Martens both admit they prefer interstate energy — although they mention The Bendigo, The Croxton, The Pier and Old Bar as local faves.

“Yahs Yah’s kick a lot of people out,” says Taylor. “They’ve kicked Declan out like six times or something now. When we’ve been playing.” (“And Bryce,” laughs Martens.) “The crowd’s good but they just don’t like us, I think. The security didn’t like us.”

“We’ve played Cherry Fest and that was really good,” adds Martens. “There was blood on the stage after the set, which was good.” Ah, anybody they knew? “Yeah, yeah, we knew whose it was, it was a mate of ours.”

Taylor mentions an added benefit of coming off stage looking like a bare-knuckle boxer is that it keeps the creeps away. “I was wearing a white top and I got a tram home that night, and this old bloke who was fucked off his face was sitting next to me being like, ‘Do you want to get married? Can I get off the tram with you?’ I lifted out my shirt and I was like, ‘Don’t try me, cunt,’ and he just shut up... It looked like I’d just went and stabbed somebody.”

Turns out there’s only one thing more dangerous than Amyl pits and it’s not drunks wielding scissors. The biggest injury to hinder Amyl & The Sniffers to date had more to do with not stretching their knees pre-gig than diving wild-eyed into the crowd.

“I’ve torn the cartilage in it,” says Taylor. “I’ve got to get an operation. I just squatted and I felt this rip in my knee. It was the first song of the set when we played in Brisbane before BIGSOUND and I was like, ‘That fucking hurts!’ But then I just did the rest of the set, stayed out ‘til 3am and then I couldn’t sleep ‘til, like, 7am. I was crying in the backyard of some stranger’s house and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m in heaps of pain, I’m such a pussy.’ It got to, like, three days and I still couldn’t walk and I was like, ‘I’ve got to go to the doctor.’

“Amy had a viral infection, too,” shares Martens.

“It was, like, the worst week of my life,” Taylor continues. “And the boys would go out all day every day partying, and I just had to sleep on this stranger’s couch. But at least it was warm... It’s so easy to whinge. The water in Brisbane tastes like bicarb soda as well, or like balloons? I don’t know, I think it tastes like balloons. And it tastes like bicarb soda in Perth. So I was drinking all this balloon water. It sucked.”

Unfortunately, the incident meant they had to cancel the rest of their tour, including their BIGSOUND showcase and two Sydney dates, but it hasn’t hurt their prospects any. As Martens says, “It doesn’t really matter. Keep ‘em keen. Tease ‘em.”