Emerging from Dundee in the early 1990s, Spare Snare have spent decades building their own peculiar corner of the Scottish underground. Born out of the DIY spirit of the city’s independent music scene, the band led by Jan Burnett developed a sound that could be intimate, awkward, melodic and gloriously out of step with the rules of the music business. They even made it to the BBC studios for recordings and Peel Sessions, bringing their strange little universe into the orbit of John Peel’s legendary radio show.
Dundee is an important part of this story, so I decided to let the city take over some of the artwork for the band’s AHTR release. My method was scientific, rigorous and completely unreasonable: I took the little yellow Google Maps Street View man and dropped him at random onto the streets of Dundee. Then I went exploring, looking for places that felt right, wrong, mysterious or simply too peculiar to ignore. The resulting covers are fragments of an accidental journey through the city, somewhere between documentary photography, urban archaeology and a very low-budget teleportation experiment.
The latest cover in the series takes us inside a beauty salon. Hair, mirrors, mysterious interiors and the promise of a transformation. Whether the little yellow fellow was looking for a haircut, a new identity or simply a way out of Dundee is still unknown.
One important detail: please don’t try calling the telephone number printed on the cover. I’ve changed two digits, so the number is deliberately useless. The Instagram and Facebook contacts, however, are real, so you can safely follow those trails.
Liston to A Spare Snare Collection For Almost Halloween Time Records here.
