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This story is part of the December 3 edition of Good Weekend.
See all 20 stories.It’s 9.50pm on a Friday in September, 10 minutes to showtime at the Hell’s Kitchen music venue called Terminal 5, and the Manhattan punters are wired and waiting for the trademark fury of Amyl and the Sniffers to tear shit up. Inside the green room, however, the ascendant Aussie pub-punk band is in quiet repose. Ne’er-do-well mates come and go from the heavily trafficked backstage area. Bottles of Smirnoff and cans of Bud Light are necked. Chips are dipped. Smokes lit. A spliff rolled. It’s all quite convivial.
Drummer Bryce Wilson, wearing a cropped mullet, Parramatta Eels top and Western Bulldogs shorts, arrives from a bar downtown, proclaiming his sobriety. “I’m not wasted,” he protests, grinning. “I am not wasted!” Guitarist Declan Martens laughs, sipping a yerba mate tea and debating the set list, wondering whether they should play Monsoon Rock tonight or not. “We can push Security down,” he notes. “And I don’t give a f--- about Westgate.” Things are always relaxed pre-show, and Taswegian bassist Gus Romer, the band’s ranga raconteur, explains why. “We don’t know anything else,” he says, shrugging. “You’re like, ‘G’day, how are ya? Cool, I gotta go do this thing now.’ ”
Conspicuous by her absence is frontwoman Amy Louise Taylor. The lead singer of this band of 20-somethings is next door in her dressing room, getting changed and applying make-up, and doing her vocal exercises. She starts by pouring three fingers of water into a glass, then blows bubbles through a straw while humming in her lowest register. Next, she blurts out a stream of onomatopoeic nonsense noises, like a scat singer – Baba-dee-baba! Bloo-didi-bomba! – to make sure her voice is coming up from her lungs, not her throat.
And then? The diminutive rock demon makes her way down through a labyrinth of concrete stairwells into the pitch blackness of stage left. The walk-on song for the show begins pumping – WAP (Wet Ass Pussy) by Cardi B, featuring Megan Thee Stallion – the stage lights drop, and out she strides in her big black boots, this girl they call a punk pixie, a likeable lunatic, a cyclone with a blonde mullet, a boxer crossed with a wood sprite, and, the heir(ess) apparent to Iggy Pop.
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Taylor, 26, wears a ruched single-shoulder top of glittering gold, briefs of the same flashy fabric, and is headbanging with such recklessness that I worry for her spinal cord. Flexing her biceps, she sings through their punchy catalogue of very short songs about very big ideas, like Capital (consumerism and racism, sexualisation and taxation), Choices (reproductive rights) and Knifey (gendered violence) and the crowd of almost 3000 goes mental.
After a few years playing small festivals and support slots, Amyl and the Sniffers is now a band that swaggers into Coachella, steals the show at Glastonbury, and sells out solo gigs in 5000-plus venues, with a unique mix of cross-generational fans – teenage mohawks and pigtails mingling with the salt-and-pepper scalps of dads and mums (with their sons and daughters in tow). They’ve released two acclaimed albums, will hit the studio again in February, and if their global rise continues, sticky carpets could quickly become stadium gigs, share houses abandoned for pimped-out cribs – a future many suspect means we won’t see them much locally any more, as tours and gigs like this one become the norm.
Up for six ARIAs last week, the band won two of the biggest gongs on the night, best group, and best rock album. This week, Taylor and guitarist Dec Martens flew to Canberra as part of a music industry delegation to meet with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who took a selfie with Taylor to show his son. It’s easy to see why music experts are falling over themselves to dub the Sniffers “the most exciting live band on the planet” and Taylor herself as “the most charismatic frontperson in the world”. The hype and hyperbole are seemingly all about their authenticity – the sense that they represent something real and ready and raw.
“What’s up New York City? Real pleasure to be here!” Taylor yells in her best bogan brogue. “We live in a cesspool! That’s why it’s so important to come out and have fun. ’Cos without fun we’re f---ed, bro! Without fun, we’re nuthin! If you can’t have fun, if you can’t sweat it out, and you can’t say f--- you to all the c---s that make you feel bad, you’ve got nuthin!”
Taylor didn’t have nothing growing up, but she didn’t have much. We first meet in Melbourne for lunch in August between tours of the US and UK, at a cafe in Brunswick, and she tells me about her beginnings in Mullumbimby, counterculture capital of the country. Her parents moved there in the early 1990s from western Sydney, had Amy and her big sister Grace, and slowly transformed little more than a hectare of subdivided farmland back into bush.
Her mum worked at the post office before studying and practising psychology. Dad was a tradie – a crane driver and bottle-shop worker – who built their house out of rocks he picked up in his ute. Until Amy was nine they lived in a shed, all sharing a single upstairs bedroom, divided by curtains. Candles were kept handy for blackouts. Water seeped through cracks when it stormed. “It was really wholesome. Living off the land. I loved it,” Taylor says. “When we moved into the house and had separate bedrooms, I hated it. Maybe that’s why touring is easy – back to sleeping in shared spaces.”
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For a glimpse into her childhood, look at the lyrics of Snakes, her portrait of cane fields and billy carts, toys from the tip and rolling in the mud (“I was feral, I still am”). Brown snakes and green tree snakes were part of daily life. “They’d kill our cats and stuff. Come into the house. Come into the bathroom,” she says. “I remember once there was this python that came into the chook pen, ate a chicken. Then it was in its belly, so it couldn’t get back out through the wire.”
She liked school a little, though less as the years wore on. “I liked using my brain. But I guess I just didn’t completely believe in what it represented. It’s that feeling – ‘F--- school, f--- peers – whatever that is, that’s not me.’ ”
Music wasn’t a big part of her early life. Her mum played flute in nursing homes as a volunteer, and her dad listened to petrol-station-bought greatest hits CDs (“Best of Queen,” she says, “that kind of thing”). But she loved all-ages hardcore gigs, where she could be a social teenager without talking to anyone. Plus, she could get rough and rowdy. Taylor is tiny – 163 centimetres tall – and was even smaller then, yet the buck-toothed blonde was drawn to the energy and “consensual violence” at the front of the mosh-pit. She was captivated, too, by the idea of being that focal point for a crowd.
“It’s a room full of people, and all those people are working every day, and they decide to spend their time and money being there, doing that. I love that idea,” she says. “In some ancient part of my brain, music means nothing and everything at the same time.”
She still has a job reference crediting her as a hard-working and intelligent employee.
When she finished school, she went part-time to full-time at the local supermarket, working behind the deli counter, stocking fruit and veg, or running the register. That’s in her lyrics, too (“Worked at the IGA, Now I’m a famous c---!” ), and she still has a job reference crediting her as a hard-working and intelligent employee: “A self- starter who possesses common sense way beyond her years,” the letter reads. “She can, I believe, accomplish anything she sets her mind to.”
She enjoyed working with people of all ages and backgrounds, and the rhythm of completing menial tasks for money, particularly closer to 18. Childhood mate Mel Wilson remembers her as the loud, crazy, carefree kid who had “no shame, no boundaries”, who spent her days playing in the dirt and climbing on rooftops, the two of them taping themselves on an old camcorder, lip-synching to Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.
But she was always going to do something else, somewhere else. “When you grow up in Mullum, there’s no overseas trips, no holidays. That’s how it goes,” Wilson says. “To earn enough money to leave town is important. Amy thrived on the work. She knew she needed to do that all along – earn money to get out.”
Curiosity and ambition saw Taylor move to Melbourne at 19, excited for something new, something more. “F--- being in a small town,” she says. “There was this attitude that kind of repulsed me there, not hippie exactly, but it’s a mindset of positivity only – that love and blessings will save everything – and I don’t think that’s real. It rejects hardship.”
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She landed in the far western suburb of Laverton, not exactly the cosmopolitan centre of town. “I thought Laverton was poppin’, which obviously it isn’t. But I could get the train anywhere. I felt free, independent.”
She did a business apprenticeship at a chemical company, selling gas cylinders for $11 an hour. She went to TAFE, too, studying music business by night.
After hours she went to shows, as many as six each week, often waiting for the stage to clear so she could sidle up to the microphone and freestyle rap. “And I was like, ‘I wanna be doing that,” she says. “The adrenalin of thinking fast, free thought, f---in’ amazed at what came out of my mouth.”
The boys came later. Taylor met her Sniffers gradually, through the happenstance of live gigs and shared houses. She wants me to meet them at the pub after a band meeting. I’m expecting a dank inner northern hipster cave, but Brunswick’s Moreland Hotel, it turns out, is a bright pokie pub with a family bistro decorated in faux marble to resemble the Colosseum, the Italianate flirtation consummated with a replica of the statue of David.
Taylor preps me in advance, too. Dec Martens, she says, is 28, loves ’70s rock, tattoos, and looks like Jimmy Page. Gus Romer, 26, is “a funny c---” who plays bass and loved lockdown because he got to eat McDonald’s and watch TikToks all day. Bryce Wilson, their drummer, is 27, and “a sweet, kind, gentle, silly person” who likes AFL and NRL. Chatting together, the boys fall into an unselfconscious shtick, immediately showing me footage from last night, of them singing in the karaoke room of a strip club. “In the wise words of Kanye West, paraphrased from Dave Chappelle,” says Romer, ” ‘our life is dope and we do dope shit’.”
They wrote their first songs in early 2016 on the back of a few chords and a few more lyrics, and found their sound: short, fast, loud, funny. They picked a band name, too. The first line of Taylor’s driver’s licence reads “Amy L”, which is pretty close to amyl nitrate, the drug many of their mates were sniffing at clubs. “Doing ‘poppers’ is like a minute of dizziness and fogginess and heaviness, and you’re kind of relaxed, and then you come back and you’re all hot, and then headachey,” says Taylor. “It’s pretty much poison, but it made sense because our songs were 50 seconds long and gave everyone headaches.”
They played a few house parties, but mainly hit the stage at Fitzroy band room Yah Yah’s for 10-minute sets at 2am. Venue co-owner James Young paid them $200 and loved the DIY musicians in spite of their lack of skill. Their spontaneity is what hooked him, and now hooks everyone else.
Young was at a Friday-afternoon gig at The Last Chance Rock & Roll Bar, for instance, when Taylor sauntered off stage into the crowd, stole his cowboy hat, got on top of the pool table, ripped gig posters off the walls, climbed a pole onto the bar, then grabbed a jug of beer and emptied it into a ceiling fan. “The whole room was completely showered in beer, like a fire-alarm sprinkler had gone off,” he says, laughing. “Then she gets back on stage and this saturated crowd is going nuts. She didn’t premeditate any of that.”
They began playing festivals before going on tour with the yob-rock veterans of Cosmic Psychos. Singer and bass player Ross Knight says he saw something both new and familiar in the group. In many ways, Amyl and the Sniffers is at the vanguard of a more modern and socially conscious brand of Aussie punk –less nihilism, more progressivism – best exemplified by their mates from C.O.F.F.I.N, a Sydney northern beaches band who on the one hand have an album cover with a photo of them urinating in their own mouths, while on the other hand sing songs that challenge toxic masculinity and racism.
“The Sniffers are doing this great job of not getting bogged down in politics,” Knight says. “They’re singing about everyday problems, and those often just happen to be world problems.”
In 2018, they joined King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard on a tour of America, eventually signing a US deal with ATO Records, and Rough Trade Recordings everywhere else. They quit their jobs. Well, Romer was already unemployed, but Taylor was working at the “scoop and weigh” fruit and nut section at Coles, while Martens was stacking shelves at Big W and Wilson was working at the Woolworths next door.
A live touring act in their own right, they played 103 shows in 2019, and tried to appreciate their travels, whether shopping in the open markets of Barcelona, or getting off the train in Zurich and washing away a hangover with a swim in the clearest water imaginable.
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They became much better musicians, too, not by practice but by playing four shows a week for months on end. “You just get shit-hot,” says Romer. “You get in the pocket because you’re playing every night. And we’re not f---ing Metallica – we don’t hit the notes or the beats every time.”
Their style remained unvarnished and their own. Visually, they’re vaguely reminiscent of the Sharpies subculture of the 1970s. (Think mullets and high-waisted jeans.) Their look was captivating enough that in 2018 they were photographed by Hedi Slimane, creative director at Céline (and before that, Yves Saint Laurent and Dior Homme).
Taylor had no idea who he was, and showed up in a Big W singlet with a coffee stain on the front, which was fine by Slimane, who shot her that way, and added the pic to his long collection of black-and-white rock star portraits, featuring everyone from Lady Gaga to Keith Richards, Johnny Rotten and Joan Jett.
In 2019 they were flown to Sicily to be part of a Gucci campaign, Taylor wore the label on the runway at a Milan Fashion Week show and when they won best rock band at the ARIAs that year, Taylor thanked the fashionistas: “Cheers, Gucci, for dressing our K-Mart arses!”
The same year was also when she met the man who would – last month – become her fiancé. John Angus Stewart, 33, is a Melbourne filmmaker often spotted on stage at their gigs, roving camera in hand, who shoots various Sniffers music videos. “She was an instant creative obsession for me – that was always first,” Stewart says. “When I watch her play I’m not her partner, I’m her fan, deeply.”
She’s his fan, too. The song Maggot is an ode Taylor wrote for her new beau, about drinking together and dancing under lights and finding a new carcass (as in, relationship). “It’s about emancipating yourself from your old life,” he says. “I love how she uses such a disgusting metaphor to describe something so beautiful.”
Stewart recently wrote a feature film set to be shot in Melbourne next year, in which Taylor will take a swing at acting. She’ll be playing a drug dealer, tapping into her natural volatility. “On stage, Amy gets this chance to get out all this anger and energy and fully express that part of herself, but when you talk to her away from that she’s completely centred,” Stewart says. “It’s not duplicitous. Confrontation is a comfort zone for her.”
That much was obvious at the Music Victoria awards in 2020. The contest rules had only just changed, allowing singers to compete for best musician. Taylor won, and her recorded acceptance speech was incendiary.
“I’m really pumped and really proud of this,” she started, “because people have looked me in the eye and said I’m not a musician. And they’ve looked me in the eye and told me that our band only sells tickets because I wear short shorts. And they’ve looked me in the eye, as they sit in my green room, and they drink my beer, and said, ‘I don’t like female singers.’ Well, f--- all of you, because not only am I a musician, I’m musician of the year … and not only that, I can f---in’ do it in a lime-green bikini that I love, and green nail polish that I love, because I don’t have to cover my body to be respected, and I can wear whatever the f--- I want to wear … F--- yeah, have a sick day.”
What have they done since? They’ve blown up, blowing away festival stages, opening for Foo Fighters, collaborating with the Dropkick Murphys, and partying with Green Day. Apple paid to use their song Don’t Fence Me In at an event in 2021 launching the new iPad Mini. Taylor isn’t starstruck yet, but admits to a certain apprehension when she meets someone famous and has no idea who they are. “Because there’s a whole gap of information that I know I should know,” she says. “It makes it hard to communicate respectfully.”
These cultural blind spots are exponential, too, because Taylor is still largely that naive kid who grew up out bush, now occasionally embarrassed by her own ignorance of the wider world. The band made its US TV debut in April, for instance, playing Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Taylor had never heard of the host. You mightn’t know Seth Meyers either, but I’m guessing you’ve heard of Harrison Ford? Taylor hadn’t, until her fiancé showed her an Indiana Jones flick. “I live under a rock,” she says. “But it’s exciting how little I know, because there’s so much more to find out.”
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This naivety has bitten her in the arse, too. They opened the Sydney Festival in January, for instance, unaware the event had financial support from the Israeli government, or that a huge boycott was in effect. Some in the punk community branded the band Zionists, accusing them of taking blood money. “I’m glad we got a slap on the wrist, because we could walk away having learnt something,” Taylor says. “We made a mistake. Sometimes you just have to admit you don’t know something. But it’s hard sometimes, because I’m the centre of the tornado.”
A natural autodidact, Taylor dove down a Middle-East-conflict rabbit-hole, reading the graphic novel Palestine by Joe Sacco, listening to the Palestine Remembered podcast, and donating the band’s festival fee to the Olive Kids foundation, which supports Palestinian children. “I didn’t start reading the news until two years ago, but I’m hugely interested. It’s dope. It’s important,” she explains. “I hadn’t heard about The Troubles before either, so then I go, ‘What’s that?’, and all these puzzle pieces start clicking together. But you make a misstep and you get moral panic.”
There is territory, however, where she feels on firm footing. In late July, just days after Pauline Hanson launched a campaign to say no to an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Taylor stood on stage in Melbourne at the Forum Theatre wearing a tight black pleather onesie, and dedicated their song GFY (Go F--- Yourself) to the senator from Queensland: “This song goes out to Pauline Hanson, the racist c---. I hate that bitch.”
Or take her performance at the 50th anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival in June, when the act everyone was talking about wasn’t Paul McCartney or Bruce Springsteen or Billie Eilish but this band from Australia, and the girl on stage in a rage, in the wake of news from the US that the landmark decision protecting national abortion rights for American women – Roe v Wade – had been overturned, leaving Taylor with one thing to scream, over and over: “F--- the Supreme Court!”
We wander away from the cafe now, down a wet bluestone alley, and talk about the pandemic, specifically how the Victorian lockdowns left her feeling like a cocked and loaded gun. The band lived together during the worst of it, in a house in Thornbury with sickly green walls, which is when Taylor turned to books. “Before lockdown I didn’t read anything. I hadn’t picked up a book since Captain Underpants,” she says, laughing. “Growing up in a working-class family, I just felt, like, ‘Uni is for f---wits, school is for f---wits, and books are for f---wits.’ But reading books now is the best thing ever. There’s so much I want to know. I want to be an intellectual weapon.”
She dabbles in fiction but prefers “fact books”, veering between a treatise on fat-shaming one week to a philosophical history of humankind the next, from Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, to Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. And she shares what she learns wherever she goes.
After the concert in Hell’s Kitchen, for example, while the people around her were sinking piss, she was talking to a record company executive about a 10,000-year-old boomerang she saw once in Adelaide, and explaining to a sales manager how Australia was once home to megafauna – wombats the size of Volkswagens – and inviting the support act to join her at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. the next day, where she was excited to be getting a guided tour by a First Nations docent.
As we continue west on a busy bike path, Taylor explains how she became so thirsty for knowledge that she almost drowned in introspection, before directing all those swirling currents into music. “I was advancing as a brain. You would hope that goes hand in hand with lyrics getting a bit more vulnerable, or complicated, or self-aware,” she says. “I’d hope I’m constantly growing, even if that means I’m transformed into a completely different person.”
The upshot or output was their colossal second album, Comfort to Me, written in a National Storage locker and released in late 2021. In the liner notes, Taylor describes the creative process as partying lots but exercising more. Destructive yet disciplined. “I was like an egg going into boiling water when this started,” she wrote. “Gooey and weak but with a hard surface. I came out even harder.”
It’s important here to recognise the work of Dan Luscombe, whose experience as a guitarist and producer with everyone from Paul Kelly to Courtney Barnett shone through in creating the album’s pure guitar sound. “The Sniffers were probably destined for a devoted but small local following until they released Comfort to Me,” says music consultant and former Music Victoria CEO Patrick Donovan. Instead they created one of Australia’s best punk records, then sprinted out of the pandemic pause, touring America immediately, their buzzy shows becoming mass catharsis events. “Amy is basically the love child of Bon Scott and Chrissy Amphlett,” says Donovan. “What’s not to love?”
Such praise and recognition makes Taylor feel like part of a community, but also wigs her out. “I’m prone to paranoia anyway. I’ve had crazy people call me just to scream crazy shit. I’ve had to change my number. I’m super cautious about my address. It’s a preemptive safety thing.”
Safety seems an obvious segue to ask about Knifey, a howl redolent with feminist fury for every woman who feels unsafe walking alone at night. “Shall we perch for a bit?” Taylor asks. “Let’s perch on that bench.” It’s only then that I realise we’re in Princes Park, where 22-year-old Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered one winter night in 2018. Was the song prompted by that killing? “It was and it wasn’t,” Taylor answers. “I’ve experienced so much sexism. There’ve been so many shows where people grope me, or touch me and stuff when I’m performing. It adds up. I think I’m a pretty tough person, I love being independent, but still every night I feel vulnerable leaving my house.”
She wondered whether the song might be too heavy to enjoy playing at every show, but it’s become a favourite. “Knifey is the push-pull. I’d like to go, ‘F--- it, if someone wants to f---in’ kill me, I’d rather just be free and slaughtered, standing tall.′ But I’m not that tough, because I am still scared, like so many females are. Walking shouldn’t feel like such a dangerous thing.”
She considers her bandmates, who think nothing of stumbling home alone drunk from the pub, or chatting on the phone in a park at 3am, or crashing on the couch of a stranger. “Their world is a playground, but there’s this extra level of caution that women have to hold, and it’s heavy, and it’s not just our anxiety,” she says. “There’s the extra cost that women have to pay, to get taxis or Ubers home, but it all comes back on us because it sounds like a complaint.”
“The stupidest shit comes out of some blokes’ mouths – to Amy, about Amy, about women and non-binary people.”
The Sniffers all nod morosely when I bring this up. They wouldn’t say they’re proud to be part of a feminist band so much as privileged to understand the world –and their industry – through the prism of their lead singer. “There’s a lot of bullshit you hear on the road,” says drummer Bryce Wilson. “The stupidest shit comes out of some blokes’ mouths – to Amy, about Amy, about women and non-binary people – and they’ve just got no f---ing idea. It’s really shocking.”
They love the band ethos, too, which is a matriarchy that tries to give more opportunities to women in the industry, and not just traditionally female positions in publicity and merchandise, but sound engineers and stage personnel and tour managers.
I wonder how they feel about being silhouettes behind the star? They shrug. It is what it is. And when girls come up to them at gigs and tell them how much they love what Taylor represents, they feel a little righteous brotherly pride, too. “I think it’s dope,” says bassist Gus Romer. “I can also leave the tour bus and not get swarmed by a bunch of fans, too, which is nice.”
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There’s a theory about great art, of course, that it comes from the ability to diminish the difference between your inside voice and outside voice. Ideas are immaculate, but the moment you write them down or slap them on canvas, their perfection loses shape.
David Estcourt, a crime reporter at The Age and friend of Taylor, theorises that her inner and outer voices are in sync. “That’s why her music is so full of energy and pathos and this unique kind of intimacy, and why when you talk to her she’s quite warm,” he says. “Maybe she’s managed somehow to combine those two voices that people spend decades trying to connect.”
Maybe that’s why she can go from placid and pleasant off stage to spewing such psychotic frenzy into a microphone. Maybe that explains the meditative moment before she goes on stage, when she feels both nothing and everything. Maybe that’s why she summarises the space she wants to create at a Sniffers show in six such sweet, yet savage, words. “Be nice,” she says, smiling, “or f--- off, c---.”
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.
