Oz thug rock: the sound of 'complete disregard for authority'

The first words Amyl and the Sniffers address to the crowd at the Lexington in London come from their bassist, Gus Romer. “How ya doin’, cunts?” he asks. Over the next 45 minutes, they approximate that sentiment into guitars thrashed rather than played, drums beaten rather than struck. Singer Amy Taylor pours whisky down the throats of the front row, sings about 70s snacks, losers and balaclavas, and needles her crowd with an assortment of insults and provocations. With her tiny frame and grown-out mullet, it’s a little like watching a cross between Dolly Parton and Jimmy Pursey.

A few hours earlier, sitting in the downstairs bar, Taylor explains Amyl and the Sniffers’ MO. “If the crowd isn’t up for it, we try and shove ’em into it,” she says. “If you’re gonna get shoved, you’re gonna shove back.” She laughs. “But it’s all tasteful.”

She and drummer Bryce Wilson seem quietly amazed to be here, and on their way to LA the following day. Back home in Melbourne, it’s not like they’re living off riches. “I managed the nut stand in a supermarket,” Taylor says. “I’d fill it, clean it, mop, sweep. Now sometimes I work on the packaging line at a whisky factory, which is cool because you leave work smelling like whisky at 3pm and people think you’re drunk on the train.” Wilson’s still in the supermarket. “Bryce is in the fruit and veg department, so you ask him about any apple and I reckon he’ll help you out.”

At the heart of that is a serious point. Taylor explains: “Sometimes we’ll get passing comments: ‘You’re fetishising the working classes.’ No! It’s how we’re employed – we’re not fetishising anything.”

Amyl and the Sniffers are part of a long lineage of Australian bands – a uniquely Australian heritage – who’ve mixed blue-collar pride, ribald humour, a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude and roadkill guitars, a lineage stretching back almost 50 years and encompassing blues bands, hard rock bands, metal bands, punk bands, garage bands. It goes back to Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs in the 1960s, through Coloured Balls, AC/DC and Rose Tattoo in the 1970s. It branches through punk bands like the Victims and the Scientists and garage bands such as Psychotic Turnbuckles and Cosmic Psychos. Amyl and the Sniffers aren’t the sole representatives today – you can lose yourself for hours following YouTube links of this stuff: the Chats, Drunk Mums, the Mess Hall, Stork, the Unknowns, Aborted Tortoise, Pist Idiots. You might call it, for want of a better umbrella term, “thug rock”.

But why has it bloomed for so long in Australia? “I think it’s the complete disregard for authority. That seems to be an Australian thing,” says Bob Spencer, who’s played guitar with three crucial Australian bands: Skyhooks, the Angels and Rose Tattoo. “We don’t like authority figures and, to a large extent, those on larger incomes – the white-collar workers – represent authority, and we just don’t like it. Some people have put that suspicion down to our convict beginnings. Well, I didn’t have convict beginnings – my parents came here from Europe. But it permeates through the culture, the total suspicion.”

The musicians share an attitude that deflates seriousness. “Caring too much about your songs or instruments will only make things harder for yourself or your band,” says Eamon Sandwith, singer and bassist with the Chats, whose song Smoko became a viral hit last year. “If you do something with the least amount of effort possible, it’ll most likely turn out a lot better than it would’ve if you had tried really hard on it. That’s worked for us, anyway.” Or as John “Mad Macka” McKeering of Cosmic Psychos – the godfathers of the new generation of garage punk bands – puts it when asked to describe the shared attitudes of thug rock bands: “Not giving a shit about anything. Not giving a shit how your music sounds.”

The need to be hard and fast and tough came from the origins of the Australian rock scene, which wasn’t in dedicated music venues. “In the 70s, when the ‘Australian sound’ formed, it came out of the pubs, which were rowdy, noisy places,” says writer Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway – The Untold Story of Bon Scott. “To get heard and get people’s attention, you needed to play loud. To make money, you needed to play regularly, so it was tight. It was music that didn’t have a lot of subtlety, but it was well played and powerful. Stripped-back, straight-ahead rock – as it should be.”

“I witnessed many fights at gigs,” Spencer says. “Far too much testosterone not reined in. Things were quite hairy – and they were also extremely fertile. Even through my last three years at school I was playing every weekend at least every Friday and Saturday, if not doubles and triples on Saturdays, quite often Sundays, sometimes doubles on Sunday, and sometimes during the week as well. And this is when I was at school. There were gigs everywhere, and I think it’s one of the things that gave rise to the Australian sound. We played a lot, so we had a lot of opportunity to hone our skills, fine tune what we were doing. I see that as a thread through Midnight Oil or the Saints, the Tats, the Angels, AC/DC. We needed to be able to deliver at the gig right then and there.”

That thread unspools to today’s bands. Wilson of Amyl and the Sniffers describes them as a “pub punk” band, and Taylor says “the music that came out from the 70s and 80s seemed so much more sunburned and fucking raw. I would say we try and take from that aspect of it more than anything.”

According to both Spencer and Mad Macka, the originator of this strand of Australian rock was Lobby Loyde, who started playing music in the 1960s, but became prominent in the early 1970s first with Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, then Coloured Balls. “In my opinion, our music started with him,” Spencer says. “He seemed to have embodied a whole lot of different things. He’s maybe not the greatest musician who ever lived, but he embodied a lot of stuff, from the blood and guts and viscera to the beauty.”

Loyde’s eureka moment – the point at which some observers date the detonation of tough, aggressive Australian rock – came at the Sunbury pop festival in 1973, when Coloured Balls played a track called GOD (Guitar Over Drive). Shortly before his death from lung cancer in 2007, Loyde described its genesis: “We were all off our heads, no one could sleep, so I said, ‘Fuck it, we might as well be playing.’ It was 3am and I told [sound engineer] Frenchy to turn everything on and he goes, ‘We might as well record it.’ … So we turned everything on and went for it. Songs were going for 20 minutes, we woke everyone up, the dawn happened when we were playing all this feedback, it was fantastic. As the dawn cracked on the hill all our feedback was going crazy, it was almost tribal, man, I really felt I was almost levitating! I looked out and it was almost like the three shepherds scene – I was waiting for the sky to split open; it was awesome.”

Forty-five years on, and the young, tough Australian bands no longer play 20-minute songs, but some things are still like the 70s. Amyl and the Sniffers for example, are proud of their mullets (“We all usually cut each other’s hair. And you can’t fuck it up with a mullet. I think they look tough and they look good,” Taylor says). They still drink enormous amounts (“But you can’t drink amyl,” Taylor explains. “Somebody died the other day doing that”). And they still love those original groups. “Our biggest influence is from 1970s Australian bands like AC/DC and Rose Tattoo,” Taylor says.

At the end of Amyl and the Sniffers’ 45 minutes at the Lexington, pints having hurled through the air, mosh pit having been incited, Romer again addresses the crowd to bid them farewell. “See ya later, cunts!”

• Big Attractions and Giddy Up by Amyl and the Sniffers is out now on Damaged Goods.