Mistletone

Every new song has to start somewhere. The first new song in 13 years by Melbourne band Snout began with a hunger strike at a detention centre, writes Jo Roberts. (Read Jo’s story via TIM magazine below).

Download Turn All The Lights Down Low by Snout from Mistletone’s Bandcamp via the link above, and pay what you choose. All proceeds will be donated to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) protects and upholds the human rights, wellbeing and dignity of asylum seekers. They are the largest provider of aid, advocacy and health services for asylum seekers in Australia.

Turn All The Lights Down Low by Snout

Dripping language finessed to remove the distressed from their pants
Lay in wait fascist seeds when you need a ride home from the dance
And you’re making me laugh with that neck of giraffe on your plate
Rotten roast you’re the toast my election night host and my date
Oh
Turn all the lights down low

Well philosophy’s fine and it’s right for the times that’s for sure
And a flexible spine is the look to unhook any door
But it’s ever so hard for the grownups to stop chasing votes
Complicated big world for the people who come here on boats
Oh
Turn all the lights down low

Always up in the night getting fit for a fight i can’t win
And the sweet Labor right so polite with a kick to the shin
Oh,the advantage of height in a person so slight is not wise
How i crave, how i crave some integrity, save me from lies
And when you think that they’ve loved you all that they can, no no no
Oh
Turn all the lights down low
Credits:
released 13 August 2013
lead vocals, bass- ross mclennan
guitar, b vocals- greg ng
drums- ewan mccartney
produced by james fitzpatrick, paul martin, and snout
mixed by james fitzpatrick and snout
mastered by simon grounds
promotion- mistletone records
cover photograph by steve mccartney
thanks to sydney road community school

all participants have provided their time for free.

SNOUT RETURN TO ROCK THE BOAT

Every new song has to start somewhere. The first new song in 13 years by Melbourne band Snout began with a hunger strike at a detention centre, writes Jo Roberts.

ROSS McLennan is a pedant. Especially, he says, when it comes to “clarity and truth”. It’s no wonder then that the Melbourne singer-songwriter and his partner, Denise Becker, have been long-time supporters of asylum seekers. The double-speak surrounding what has become one of the bleakest chapters of human rights in Australia is endemic, to the point that the term “illegal immigrants” — despite its inaccuracy — has been dressed up as fact through fear mongering and sloganeering.

Becker spends a lot of time visiting asylum seekers at the detention centre in  Broadmeadows in northern Melbourne, near where she and McLennan live with their two young children. It was there in April that 27 Tamil men began a hunger strike. They were among 55 recognised refugees refused visas after ASIO, without explanantion, branded them a threat.

It was during the hunger strike that McLennan began writing the song that would become Turn All the Lights Down Low.  Curiously, the song very early on presented itself as a Snout song, the band that McLennan fronted from 1991 until they disbanded in 2002. Never mind that since Snout’s demise, McLennan has recorded three critically acclaimed solo albums of symphonic, choral, other-worldly pop. Turn All the Lights Down Low came into the world, as an upbeat, hook-laden, ‘60s rock-infused, jump-around-the-room Snout song.

“I was pretty happy when I wrote it and I thought once I’d done it, I thought it was a Snout song for two reasons,” explains McLennan. “When I used to write for Snout it was always in mind of a cultural kind of thing, where you’re existing in relation to your audience and you’re trying to write things that enhance people’s lives, as full of shit that might be. Its purpose is to connect. The thing that enables you to write things like that is the idea that you might have a chance to connect to people like that.

“That sort of fed into the idea that if I did it as a Snout song, I could burn up the last bit of goodwill [for Snout] on this message.”

The message, loud and clear, is politicking at the expense of human rights.  Take verse 2, for instance:

Well philosophy’s fine and it’s right for the times that’s for sure
And a flexible spine is the look to unhook any door
But it’s ever so hard for the grownups to stop chasing votes
Complicated big world for the people who come here on boats

“It’s a human rights issue that’s close to our hearts, and I think it’s just that sense of frustration,” says McLennan. “It’s not even just about refugees, to me it’s about being a fairly pedantic person and being hung up on clarity and truth.”

Which, let’s face it,  isn’t a bad thing to be hung up on.

“Not at all,” concurs McLennan. “It can be quite upsetting though; any thinking person looking at the level of debate, you could sit there all night going ‘but this doesn’t make sense and that didn’t make sense and that person didn’t answer that question and now they’re just scapegoating that person’.

“I don’t think of myself as being able to really debate these things, but to be able to get something that I feel has nailed it in some kind of, loosely speaking, poetic way, makes me feel better. I like a good metaphor. I’ve said all the things I wanted to say in a way that amuses me and it makes me feel a lot better, and hopefully it’ll do the same for some other people.”

It’s not the first time McLennan has written about Australia’s xenophobia. On his first solo album, 2003‘s Songs From the Brittle Building,  there was John Howard the Actor (in which he empathised with the well-known Australian screen star for sharing his name with the then-PM), while on 2008‘s Sympathy For the New World, he responded to the 2001 asylum boat sinking tragedy that claimed 353 lives (including 142 women and 146 children) with Now, about Siev-X.  That horrific episode represents the largest loss of life of any capsized Australia-bound asylum seeker boat, a tragedy darkened all the more by still uninvestigated claims of two naval vessels allegedly discovering, then abandoning the scene, leaving potential survivors to drown.

McLennan has heard the stories of some survivors first-hand. He can barely finish a sentence when trying to speak about it; somewhere in the back of the throat, words are still caught by horror and disbelief.

Perhaps it’s part of the reason why Turn All the Lights Down Low allows him to vent. To this song he can bring musical levity without demeaning the gravity of the song’s heart. For instance, the song title itself has a couple of meanings. One refers to the flattering lighting favoured on date nights.

“Imagine you’re on a date with Tony Abbott. Do you really want the lights up nice and bright?,” asks McLennan. “Soft lighting is the key.”

“Also in the back of my mind is a mourning thing, like a half-mast thing. During the writing of the song I wasn’t thinking about it as clearly meaning that, but it does mean that for me now.”

The song was recorded with Snout’s most long-term lineup, McLennan, drummer Ewan McCartney and guitarist Greg ‘Soul Train’ Ng, who have united for the all-too occasional reunion show over the years.

But the recording has, excitingly, opened the door to the potential of a new Snout EP.

“There’s talk, there’s whispers, about doing something more substantial later,” says McLennan. “We have this idea of doing an EP, just for fun, and we’d probably put [Turn All the Lights Down Low] on there. It sort of freed up a lot of songs. Because I write lots of stuff and I write lots of different kinds of things and a lot of them just sort of languish because I think ‘well, that’s a Snout song and I’m not in Snout any more’. But you know, having got together and actually thought about the idea of new material, it does open the door a crack. We’ll see what happens.”

Snout play the Rock the Boat show with the Basics (featuring some guy called Wally de Backer on drums), Joelistics, Even (acoustic) and MC Alan Brough on Thursday August 22 at the Northcote Social Club for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Adam Bandt’s election campaign. Tickets here.

Turn All the Lights Down Low is available for purchase at the Mistletone Records Bandcamp here.
All proceeds go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.