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| Have I mentioned Roberts painted all the album covers? |
The Hit
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”
“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”
Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:
“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”
That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…
The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.
Roberts had recorded those demos with, among others, a drummer named Luigi Salvoni. The latter continued music after the first Sniff ‘n’ the Tears line-up, joining a band called Moon. When that band disbanded and left Salvoni looking for something to do, he dug up those Sniff demos and listened to them again. Thinking he heard a hit or two in the mix, he called Roberts and asked his permission to shop them to a UK independent label called Chiswick Records. Roberts said yes to the Salvoni contacting Chiswick, and Chiswick agreed the marketability - though they asked that the band re-record the material from the demos. The line-up that recorded not just “Driver’s Seat,” but the whole of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears’ debut album, Fickle Heart included: Loz Netto (guitar); Chris Birkin (bass); Alan Fealdman (keyboards); Salvoni (drums & percussions), Roberts, and a guy named Keith Miller as a guest keyboardist; per Vintage Rock, Chiswick only signed Roberts and Salvoni, while everyone else made session rates. In other words, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears was barely a band when “Driver’s Seat” became an international hit.
The overnight success both opened doors - e.g., tours in Europe and, in 1979, the States, opening for Kenny Loggins one month, then another in front of “prog stalwarts” Kansas - it also pulled the band apart one member at a time. From RiffRaf:
“Sniff 'n' the Tears went from playing nightclubs to touring Spain and Germany, but some of the band members weren't prepared for that type of lifestyle. Birkin and Fealdman left the band. Then Salvoni quit right before a three month tour, opening for Kansas and Kenny Loggins in the States. He felt it wasn't the right kind of tour for Sniff 'n' the Tears.”
Roberts confirms that last sentence on Sniff ‘n’ the Tears’ official site, and expanded on the same earlier(?) to Vintage Rock:
“I think it’s more important to build your own audience. We should have headlined clubs rather than playing coliseums to someone else’s audience. A journalist in LA rang me to ask why we weren’t playing a club because she had no intention of going to the LA Spectrum for a Kansas gig.”
The turnover was such that Roberts recorded Sniff’s next three albums - The Game’s Up (1980), Love/Action (1981), and Ride Blue Divide (1982) - with a variety of line-ups. They didn’t land any more hits, failed to generate much buzz, and probably sucked to market what with all the chaos - i.e., would New Kids on the Block have worked if they had new kids on every album? - so Chiswick dropped them after Ride Blue Divide and the band broke up in 1983…
…until the early 1990s, when “two highly successful advertising campaigns in Holland and Germany” snuck “Driver’s Seat” back on the charts in both (think it went as high as No. 3 on the Dutch charts). So, Roberts got the band back together again - or, rather a band given that the only returning member, guitarist Les Davidson, had played in a prior incarnation of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears - toured Holland and Germany, and put out an album in 1992 titled No Damage Done (unremarkable on one pass, but see below*). They’d get other little bumps later in the decade when “Driver’s Seat” snuck into the Boogie Nights soundtrack, and again in 2013 in Anchorman 2. Think of it as a fascinating trinket only some people can see…
And, honestly, it just kind of keeps going like that, if without “highly successful advertising campaigns” providing momentum. While Sniff ‘n’ the Tears is mostly an acoustic act built around Roberts and Davidson today, Roberts used the name to continue to release material - e.g., 2002’s Underground, 2011’s Downstream, 2017’s Random Elements, and 2020’s Jump; none of which, for the record, I listened to* - as well as putting out a pair of solo albums (1985’s City Without Walls and 1987’s Kettle Bell Blues…which I also haven’t listened to). As he tells a variety of sites - e.g., Athens Calling and Blurt Online (and the same shows on the official bio) - Roberts continues to record music and do some light touring, because an audience still exists for the sound. He gives a nice where-are-they-now/state-of-affairs toward the end of the official bio:
‘Unable to resist the lure of music making I've continued working on new records in my own home studio, unconstrained by the imperatives of commerce and enjoying the wonders of new technology. Happy to say, Les Davidson, Nick South, Richard MarcAngelo and Paul Robinson who all served time in the original band, all play on the new albums. Along with long time partner in crime, keyboard player Robin Langridge. These albums, Underground, Downstream and now Random Elements have been hugely rewarding to make and I commend them to you with pride.”
To pick up a stray note from up above, Roberts also paints. He does so in the photo-realist style and well enough to stand up one-man shows at a London gallery (this comes from Blurt) from 2003-05, but he also talks of growing burned out by the art scene - i.e., “I have become somewhat disillusioned with the art world which I think is now just another branch of celebrity culture, not much more interesting than fashion and with a lot of the same principles.” Whatever I think of his music*, Roberts casually drops all kinds of compelling thoughts into the later interviews I read, for example:
“Reality television, the Internet [and] the media in general [tell us that we] are part of a community, a global community, a consumer community. Countless books and magazines advise you on how to be a better, more beautiful or more successful person. A mirror is held up to us which says you are what matters, you are starring in your own movie, you are whatever you think you are. It’s bullshit, but we want to believe it.”
About the Sampler
* First and foremost, seeing how Roberts' brain works convinced me I should spend more time on his music. And, after reading some interviews, I’m more curious about the new stuff than the old.
Second, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears are fucking hard to pigeon-hole into any one genre. Wikipedia wimped out and reached for a grab-bag - e.g., “rock, pop rock, progressive rock, glam rock, new wave, soft rock” - but I’d call progressive rock the only one really comes out of bag intact. And even that feels wrong. Based on what I listened to - a couple “best of” compilations, plus Love/Action and Ride Blue Divide (Spotify didn’t have the first two, or…) - it makes more sense to categorize by the time they played, i.e., when the 70s tripped into the 80s. Post-disco, for sure, and heavier than the singer-songwriter stuff, but also before the FM rock of the early 80s (e.g., Foreigner, Journey), but still lousy with 80s pop rock production touches - especially on Ride Blue Divide. That said, the thing about Sniff ‘n’ the Tears being hard to peg probably counts as the biggest take-away.
I wound up leaving the sampler at 14 songs (…why?) - e.g., the hit, the Fleetwood-Mac-meets-Dire-Straits numbers like “Looking for You” and (with a little more funk) “The Thrill of It All,” and, hopefully, “Poison Pen Mail” (because that one’s pretty good) - but I wanted to pull most of the sampler from actual, hey-day albums. Or post-hey-day albums.
From Love/Action: “The Driving Beat," “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” “For What They Promise,” “Without Love” and “Snow White,” all of which show some promise and have some damned good elements - notably, the “gritty” vocals Vintage Rock talked up.
From Ride Blue Divide: the title track (which sounds close to Love/Action), and then a succession of wild hairs, from (for me) worst to best: “Trouble Is My Business,” “The Hand of Fate” (so, so 80s), the shuffling switch on that with “Roll the Weight Away” and, possibly the best of the entire oeuvre I sat through, “Gold.”
The question that hangs over every one-hit wonder is why they managed only the one hit. With Sniff ‘n’ the Tears, I’d put it down to a combination of not quite fitting any sound that was coming or going, failing when they tried, and enough, if not all of them not particularly caring about it. As implied above, it listens a little like two musical eras tripping over the other, but, honestly, that’s what makes it interesting.
That’s it for this one. I can’t speak to how many people could name the artist, but I think just about everyone will recognize the next song. Till then...
“…a few acoustic guitar strums and then pow, the musical gas is punched in the form of a single gunshot-styled snare drumbeat.”
“This revs things up instantly as the drumming intensifies and cocksure electric guitar riffs join in, followed by a set of gritty vocals that sound simultaneously guarded and vulnerable, all underscored by punctual synthesizer blips.”
Finding that description of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears “Driver’s Seat” on Vintage Rock spared me from trying to describe a song I still haven’t wrapped my head around. None of those adjectives - e.g., “gritty,” “guarded” and “vulnerable” - match what I hear in the song, but doing 91 of these posts has helped me appreciate the struggle of translating music into words.
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears landed a pretty damn big hit with “Driver’s Seat,” one big enough to lift the album it was on into the Top 40 on the Billboard (the single peaked at No. 15 on the singles chart), and it took them to a place or two…which, it bears noting, didn’t jive with expectations for some key members of the band. One, however, soldiered on, and for long enough to get some of those wayward members back into the fold. Circling back to Vintage Rock:
“Lyrically, the song is about picking yourself up after a breakup. Musically, it started as a riff; behind the riff was a revolving chord sequence. I abandoned the riff when I realized it was a bit similar to something else, but the acoustic pattern was unusual and led to a certain propulsive tension that suited the fragmented state of mind implied by the words.”
That’s Paul Roberts talking, who seems like exactly one of two people that you really need to pay attention to for this one…
The Rest of the Story
Sniff ‘n’ the Tears started in England’s pub rock scene, circa 1973, playing mostly night clubs. The band’s name came from Roberts - who had wrote a band named “The Tears” into “a dystopian novel” he’d “attempted" - and the band’s manager, who added the “Sniff” to the name as a nod to Roberts’ struggles with hay fever. They knocked around that scene for a year or two, gigging, even recording a dozen songs to shop as demos, but nothing took beyond some paying work. With what looked like nothing but deadends ahead, having a guitarist check out to join the military was all it took for that first line-up to disband. Roberts, for his part, relocated to France to “pursue his painting” according to a 2012 post on blog titled Riff Raf, a theory that, without confirmation, seems entirely reasonable in the grand scheme.
Roberts had recorded those demos with, among others, a drummer named Luigi Salvoni. The latter continued music after the first Sniff ‘n’ the Tears line-up, joining a band called Moon. When that band disbanded and left Salvoni looking for something to do, he dug up those Sniff demos and listened to them again. Thinking he heard a hit or two in the mix, he called Roberts and asked his permission to shop them to a UK independent label called Chiswick Records. Roberts said yes to the Salvoni contacting Chiswick, and Chiswick agreed the marketability - though they asked that the band re-record the material from the demos. The line-up that recorded not just “Driver’s Seat,” but the whole of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears’ debut album, Fickle Heart included: Loz Netto (guitar); Chris Birkin (bass); Alan Fealdman (keyboards); Salvoni (drums & percussions), Roberts, and a guy named Keith Miller as a guest keyboardist; per Vintage Rock, Chiswick only signed Roberts and Salvoni, while everyone else made session rates. In other words, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears was barely a band when “Driver’s Seat” became an international hit.
The overnight success both opened doors - e.g., tours in Europe and, in 1979, the States, opening for Kenny Loggins one month, then another in front of “prog stalwarts” Kansas - it also pulled the band apart one member at a time. From RiffRaf:
“Sniff 'n' the Tears went from playing nightclubs to touring Spain and Germany, but some of the band members weren't prepared for that type of lifestyle. Birkin and Fealdman left the band. Then Salvoni quit right before a three month tour, opening for Kansas and Kenny Loggins in the States. He felt it wasn't the right kind of tour for Sniff 'n' the Tears.”
Roberts confirms that last sentence on Sniff ‘n’ the Tears’ official site, and expanded on the same earlier(?) to Vintage Rock:
“I think it’s more important to build your own audience. We should have headlined clubs rather than playing coliseums to someone else’s audience. A journalist in LA rang me to ask why we weren’t playing a club because she had no intention of going to the LA Spectrum for a Kansas gig.”
The turnover was such that Roberts recorded Sniff’s next three albums - The Game’s Up (1980), Love/Action (1981), and Ride Blue Divide (1982) - with a variety of line-ups. They didn’t land any more hits, failed to generate much buzz, and probably sucked to market what with all the chaos - i.e., would New Kids on the Block have worked if they had new kids on every album? - so Chiswick dropped them after Ride Blue Divide and the band broke up in 1983…
…until the early 1990s, when “two highly successful advertising campaigns in Holland and Germany” snuck “Driver’s Seat” back on the charts in both (think it went as high as No. 3 on the Dutch charts). So, Roberts got the band back together again - or, rather a band given that the only returning member, guitarist Les Davidson, had played in a prior incarnation of Sniff ‘n’ the Tears - toured Holland and Germany, and put out an album in 1992 titled No Damage Done (unremarkable on one pass, but see below*). They’d get other little bumps later in the decade when “Driver’s Seat” snuck into the Boogie Nights soundtrack, and again in 2013 in Anchorman 2. Think of it as a fascinating trinket only some people can see…
And, honestly, it just kind of keeps going like that, if without “highly successful advertising campaigns” providing momentum. While Sniff ‘n’ the Tears is mostly an acoustic act built around Roberts and Davidson today, Roberts used the name to continue to release material - e.g., 2002’s Underground, 2011’s Downstream, 2017’s Random Elements, and 2020’s Jump; none of which, for the record, I listened to* - as well as putting out a pair of solo albums (1985’s City Without Walls and 1987’s Kettle Bell Blues…which I also haven’t listened to). As he tells a variety of sites - e.g., Athens Calling and Blurt Online (and the same shows on the official bio) - Roberts continues to record music and do some light touring, because an audience still exists for the sound. He gives a nice where-are-they-now/state-of-affairs toward the end of the official bio:
‘Unable to resist the lure of music making I've continued working on new records in my own home studio, unconstrained by the imperatives of commerce and enjoying the wonders of new technology. Happy to say, Les Davidson, Nick South, Richard MarcAngelo and Paul Robinson who all served time in the original band, all play on the new albums. Along with long time partner in crime, keyboard player Robin Langridge. These albums, Underground, Downstream and now Random Elements have been hugely rewarding to make and I commend them to you with pride.”
To pick up a stray note from up above, Roberts also paints. He does so in the photo-realist style and well enough to stand up one-man shows at a London gallery (this comes from Blurt) from 2003-05, but he also talks of growing burned out by the art scene - i.e., “I have become somewhat disillusioned with the art world which I think is now just another branch of celebrity culture, not much more interesting than fashion and with a lot of the same principles.” Whatever I think of his music*, Roberts casually drops all kinds of compelling thoughts into the later interviews I read, for example:
“Reality television, the Internet [and] the media in general [tell us that we] are part of a community, a global community, a consumer community. Countless books and magazines advise you on how to be a better, more beautiful or more successful person. A mirror is held up to us which says you are what matters, you are starring in your own movie, you are whatever you think you are. It’s bullshit, but we want to believe it.”
About the Sampler
* First and foremost, seeing how Roberts' brain works convinced me I should spend more time on his music. And, after reading some interviews, I’m more curious about the new stuff than the old.
Second, Sniff ‘n’ the Tears are fucking hard to pigeon-hole into any one genre. Wikipedia wimped out and reached for a grab-bag - e.g., “rock, pop rock, progressive rock, glam rock, new wave, soft rock” - but I’d call progressive rock the only one really comes out of bag intact. And even that feels wrong. Based on what I listened to - a couple “best of” compilations, plus Love/Action and Ride Blue Divide (Spotify didn’t have the first two, or…) - it makes more sense to categorize by the time they played, i.e., when the 70s tripped into the 80s. Post-disco, for sure, and heavier than the singer-songwriter stuff, but also before the FM rock of the early 80s (e.g., Foreigner, Journey), but still lousy with 80s pop rock production touches - especially on Ride Blue Divide. That said, the thing about Sniff ‘n’ the Tears being hard to peg probably counts as the biggest take-away.
I wound up leaving the sampler at 14 songs (…why?) - e.g., the hit, the Fleetwood-Mac-meets-Dire-Straits numbers like “Looking for You” and (with a little more funk) “The Thrill of It All,” and, hopefully, “Poison Pen Mail” (because that one’s pretty good) - but I wanted to pull most of the sampler from actual, hey-day albums. Or post-hey-day albums.
From Love/Action: “The Driving Beat," “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” “For What They Promise,” “Without Love” and “Snow White,” all of which show some promise and have some damned good elements - notably, the “gritty” vocals Vintage Rock talked up.
From Ride Blue Divide: the title track (which sounds close to Love/Action), and then a succession of wild hairs, from (for me) worst to best: “Trouble Is My Business,” “The Hand of Fate” (so, so 80s), the shuffling switch on that with “Roll the Weight Away” and, possibly the best of the entire oeuvre I sat through, “Gold.”
The question that hangs over every one-hit wonder is why they managed only the one hit. With Sniff ‘n’ the Tears, I’d put it down to a combination of not quite fitting any sound that was coming or going, failing when they tried, and enough, if not all of them not particularly caring about it. As implied above, it listens a little like two musical eras tripping over the other, but, honestly, that’s what makes it interesting.
That’s it for this one. I can’t speak to how many people could name the artist, but I think just about everyone will recognize the next song. Till then...
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