Anya Fogg offers her thoughts on a thoroughly infectious night in the broiling broth of the best Rock City can hold.
I‘d just played at Rough Trade with The Mic’s house band (a logistically feasible double booking) and
swept a friend up there as my plus one for the Sniffers – maybe I typecast her for the role, but as she
dropped her empty pint and unbuttoned her smart shirt, I knew it was going to be a great night for
the blonde-mulletted girls.
Image of frontwoman Amy Taylor, from the band's Instagram page (@amylandthesniffers).
The opening tracks of the support, Billy Nomates, were already stirring the viscous crowd as we
picked up some water from a clogged up bar. Like bacteria seeded on a Petri dish, swabs of drunk
rowdy men were slowly emerging before the sweat really started to pool. Jostle turned to smack
down as Jason Williamson of Nottingham’s own Sleaford Mods strutted out for a verse in their song
Mork n Mindy, a catalyst for the energy of the crowd which endured from the presumptuous
promise of Nudge It later in the show - a promise which curiously never came, but was no worse
off for it.
Frontwoman Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers hit the stage like a stink bomb, sending Rock City - mosh pit to balcony - writhing and convulsing with her infectious peroxide energy. From the opening No More Tears to the closing Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled), she barked and screamed like the next song wasn’t coming, throwing her drinks on the already sweat-drenched worshippers below.
"Frontwoman Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers hit the stage like a stink bomb, sending Rock City - mosh pit to balcony - writhing and convulsing with her infectious peroxide energy."
To be honest, I couldn’t describe the physical actions on the night too well, as I spent at least half the
time facing away from the stage, caught in the vicious riptide of an overboiling crowd, screaming
every word I knew, catching glimpses of eye contact with weird-eyelinered women between slow
blinks of flashing lights and oxygen depletion. I felt simultaneously like I was imminently going to be
punched in the face, and that I was self-diagnosed divinely invincible. Turns out both were true, as I
caught the bad end of men three times my size at every chorus, but in the blistering strobes I felt
nothing but numb, dumb elation.
Flexing as a bodybuilder and thrashing erratically about the spitting surface of the crowd, Taylor's
dynamic raw performance seemed possessed by a gallivanting poltergeist on the joyride of an un-
lifetime. In stopping the show to laugh at a T-shirt reading 'I shaved my pussy for THIS?' the tongue-
in-cheekiness of the night was not lost, despite the language barrier of her Australian accent and her
self-declaration of “sometimes I’m talkin' for ages and I realise you lot have no idea what I’m sayin'”.
"Flexing as a bodybuilder and thrashing erratically about the spitting surface of the crowd, Taylor's dynamic raw performance seemed possessed by a gallivanting poltergeist on the joyride of an un-lifetime."
After ten minutes of an ebbing and flowing “one more song!” chant, the crowd dissipated and the
curtains were drawn - only a solitary Converse shoe remained. A left foot size 7 low rise black
Converse shoe to be exact, which is important because of what happened next. Understandably
quickly, someone came to claim it, left sock ripping off the beery floor like velcro. But as he wobbled
on the barrier, someone else turned up, wearing only his right Converse too. We thought, "okay, let's
settle this. What size are you?" A unanimous “seven” echoed through our disbelief. We never did find
out what happened next. I wish all the best to the guy who walked home cold-left-footed that night.
Leaving arduously down the crowded stairs, we realised we were being bottlenecked by the merch
stand in the foyer, the queue for which extended all the way through the corridor, past the toilets,
and back up the stairs. Not only that, but the pavement outside inhabited a bootleg merch stand,
collecting, like a symbiote, those deterred by the demand inside. So if you see a sudden surge of
acrid T-shirts of this screaming woman from this boisterous night in Nottingham, now you know
why.
Anya Fogg
Edited by: Jodie Averis
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