Spare Snare has now been going for over thirty years and are considered by many (Including us at Scene Alba) to be one of Scotland’s best bands. They’ve just released a 42 track box set of BBC sessions from 1995 to 2018 and our music editor Hugh Haggerty was lucky enough to have a chat with singer/songwriter Jan Burnett about the set.
Hi Jan, it's a box set and a half isn’t it, 42 tracks!
It's a little thing, it's a little clamshell! But I’m really pleased with it. I work in an office during the day and my wife works from home due to the pandemic so when I come home I go hide for an hour and a half before tea time and this is what I’ve been doing. It's always been an ambition to get it done, get something done with the BBC.
How did it come about?
Autumn last year I found I could get the tracks for free. If I were to go to the BBC to licence them, they would ask for a certain amount of money, which we don’t have. But if you’re a label and the artist and a member of AIMS (Association of Independent Musicians) like Beggars Banquet, Domino etc they’re all members, they put money in to support a deal that if you are totally independent then you get the tracks for free, it's just the manufacturing costs.
There’s a whopping 42 tracks on there. Did you have to do anything to any of them for this release?
No, they are ‘as is’, the recordings were done with overdubs on the days. No other multitrack recordings. In fact, the gig at the original 13th Note, which is now Bacchus, for Beat Patrol was done the week before T in the Park around 95 or 96, in fact, it was 95. That was a bit of an advert for the festival and it was totally live, broadcast with no five second delay so I could've sworn if I wanted to. (laughs)
Do you have any fond memories of the presenters, obviously John Peel springs to mind because he kind of started the ball rolling?
He wasn’t at the session! It was quite common that he didn’t bother though they always used the same producer. We were lower down the ranks if you’re Blur or PJ Harvey you get who you want but it was quite nice actually working with Mike Engles, the three times [we were there] because he actually remembered us so there was a bit of a connection there.
So I never met Peel at the sessions but I met him at Reading and at a Radios Scotland thing. He did phone me up in Dundee for the first and third sessions and asked: “Can you come to do a session?” Yes!
For the Radio Scotland sessions, Vic [Galloway, Presenter] and everyone is lovely. They put you at ease and everybody is relaxed and you do your thing. You’re in, you do it, do the chat if there’s an interview. Everyone is also looking at the clock but you’ve got the best producers and engineers in Britain. They do this all the time and they’re on the clock so even if you wanted to hang out it's ‘nope! Closing up [chuckles]
It's clear that Jan and the rest of the band are old hands at these, in fact, he thinks Spare Snare have done so many that there’s possibly enough for a non-BBC session set, do you find sessions are fun to do?
Well they’re nerve-wracking! The Peel ones were good because they’re not live to air and you could do it again if you had to, though you are restricted by time. You actual recordings until lunchtime and then after that go back and mix it. They have you out about four, it's a quick day.
Whereas stuff like the different Radios Scotland shows are ‘Live’ live. They can be nerve-wracking too because you can make mistakes.
For God’s sake don’t swear Jan!
[Chuckles] Yes you want to swear! The Riley sessions were quite nervous because they were the most recent and they were absolutely live. When we did the Gideon Coe show you go in, do your soundcheck in the afternoon then before you’re actually on air at seven, or whenever he’s on, you record a track for him to play later [in the show]. So that first track actually gets played at half ten. You’re actually live at seven when the clock goes up, you chat away with him and then away you go.
Being that the band have done so many sessions would you says there are any tracks where the session version has the edge over the original version?
There’s ‘Profile Check’ on the second Peel session, that was a really scuzzy four-track recording on the Bad Jazz label with David Eringa who now produces Manic Street Preachers. That track was actually just me and Barry [Gibson, drummer] and I think it sounds much better. Which is why people need this box set! I was always aware that if we were ever going to do a set like this that we’d try and do different tracks every time so there are only two maybe three duplicate tracks.
Listening to the box set and due to the chronological order the tracks are set in, you do get a sense of the band growing?
It's a really good piece of us growing up, getting better sometimes. Or proficient! Rather than better.
Yeah, it's put together so that the Radio Scotland [sessions] are all on one disc so you get a bit of growth from the start of that until the end, that last session we did. Touch wood, we’ll be able to do some more with Nicola [Meighan] and it's a nice curve, we knew what we were doing, we’re a lot more confident, you know? We’re actually alright, when we first started we were just wee boys.
For an avid music fan that used to listen to the BBC to hear their favourite bands give something a bit special and different, there’s something I’ve always wanted to know about these radio sessions. What do they get out of them? Is it purely a promotional tool?
It's the thrill of hearing yourself on radio ultimately, that’s really nice, getting the opportunity to do different versions or [performing] with guest players and meet new people that’s what I get out of it and I think we’re all the same because it's not really for promotion. Do you really sell that many records on the back of a radio session?
Your name gets around more, I mean with [previous album] ‘Sounds’ we’d sold out the record before we started promoting it! Should’ve printed more, but you know that’s a nice thing to happen rather than the other way around.
It's another session to put on that list.
Of that list of sessions is there’s any that stand for good OR bad reasons?
Oh, a bad session would be the first Riley one, on the third track, the bass is totally out of tune! [Laughs] Partly because whoever was playing the bass didn’t tune it thinking “A bass never goes out of tune”. When we left we were given a CDr of the session, which was a big change for the BBC then because before, when you’d leave Maida Vale studios you left with a shitty C60 cassette which was totally hissing, so you couldn’t bootleg it.
But now it's the other way around you leave Marc Riley with a digital copy!
I remember going back to the place we were all staying, it was a friend of a friend’s house and we put the disc in and our jaws dropped at this out of tune bass! I haven’t changed it. It is as it was.
As Jan is a huge collector of music in all its forms (and wonderfully non-snobbish about it too) we chat about our non-Spare Snare favourite radio sessions, he asks me first to which I reply Voice of the Beehive and Teenage Fanclub although I completely get the details of the Voice of the Beehive session wrong as it was so long ago. I ask him what he is and remind him that he is sitting under three framed (original!) Smiths promo posters.
Oh! Well, I suppose the best early Smiths album is Hatful of Hollow. It's much better than the first album and that’s all Peel sessions so it's probably that.
It is interesting for a band like that, Rough Trade was pretty organised, they knew exactly what they wanted and the band knew exactly what they wanted so with the first album they were probably so pressured to get it right that they overdid it. You have the Troy Tates (The first producer of The Smiths’ debut album) that are potentially better than that album. So Hatful of Hollow is the better of those albums even though it's a BBC sessions album. Much better versions of the songs are on there.
It could also be that they toured so much that those [Hatful of Hollow] songs were absolutely nailed down whereas the first album wouldn’t have been toured so much so it would be a lot of experimentation and studio work.
So I think that doing a session when you’ve just come off a tour or played a few dates or whatever is definitely a positive just because you’re not hanging about. You know what everyone else is doing, you can trust everybody. Whereas if you’re going in and want to spend the time experimenting and doing stuff you may have a better time at a Peel session because it's not ‘Live’ live.
In the booklet there’s a picture of Barry with these two big boxes that the producer gave us and they’re filter things, we put his drums though, it was great to muck about with.
So obviously The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order they’re good, they’re interesting but I don’t think they’re as wonderful as the normal pieces. I was listening to the PJ Harvey sessions album again, it's really good, not comparing her to us but in terms of growing and changing from the first session, you can totally see the change so that’s probably the current favourite.
So where did the idea for the art design spring from?
So I dunno if you know much about BBC records, they made six or seven in a study series from the late 60’s early 70’s, you can find them on Discogs, well they have a similar layout. Jarvis Cocker also used it as the influence for his Sunday Sessions compilation recently, well what I’ve done is credit the guy, Andrew Prewett, and he’s still alive! I thought he might not be. Only yesterday I managed to get in touch with him through a Twitter BBC records fansite so they’ve emailed Andrew for me so I can get him a copy as I’ve given him a credit.
Also, the booklet inside come with some very embarrassing pictures of a young Barry and Alan! The band won’t see these until I send them in the post.
They [the box set] were due to arrive three weeks ago, no, more than that four weeks ago.
They’re made in Czechoslovakia and Germany, but there was a juggernaut crash in Germany and they had to check them all, I got an email saying they’re ok.
Two days later I got an email saying no they’ve checked them again they’re destroying them all and making them again! So that’s what you have here is the repressing. I just think there’s probably a flea market in Moscow now selling slightly burned Spare Snare box sets.
We might get big in Moscow in two or three years time and get a wee tour there.
It's been a fascinating look into what goes into a release like this and how much work it is, but I have one last important question if he ever heard back from Bruce Hornsby? (Spare Snare have a track on the set amusingly titled “Did Y’ken that Bruce Hornsby and the Range are on the Mogadons Ken?”)
(laughs) No! Um, I’d love for someone to come back and say ‘Take that thing off now!’ well it's on there now, what you gonna do sue me? But no.
Spare Snare The Complete BBC Sessions is out now on Chute and reviewed elsewhere in this issue.