Dundee Spare Snare frontman Jan Burnett has been reflecting on the impermanence of life, thanks to the recent passing of several contemporaries.
The 57-year-old Dundee lo-fi musician has become increasingly aware that underground bands from out-with Scotland’s Central Belt, can easily slip into obscurity.
That’s especially so if they didn’t find national fame before the internet.
But this realisation has been the catalyst for an important project that’s now giving a long-overlooked Dundee post-punk band their overdue recognition.
Jan is bringing the music of aaga, an experimental Dundee post-punk band from the early 1980s, to a new audience via Bandcamp and vinyl.
And today, The Courier can bring some of aaga’s original live performance videos to a modern audience for the first time.
The self-proclaimed “hoarder” of old tapes and records stumbled upon some forgotten cassettes that chronicled aaga’s DIY efforts during the heyday of Dundee’s nascent post-punk scene.
It was a time when the city’s underground music was raw, anarchic, and driven by sheer passion rather than commercial success.
How has Spare Snare’s Jan Burnett gone about preserving the music of aaga?
Jan had long admired aaga, a band that had been important to him personally and to the city’s music scene.
He recently began collaborating with former band members Steve Grimmond and Mike Kane to compile and restore the full back catalogue of aaga’s music for digital release.
The result is a treasure trove of forgotten Dundee history, available for free on January 1 via Chute Records’ Bandcamp page.
“We’ll put everything up for free,” says Jan.
“The entire back catalogue of aaga’s material will be made available digitally for anyone who’s interested.
“But we’re also creating a limited-edition lathe-cut 12” album of the band’s most iconic tracks.”
These lathe-cut records, limited to a number based on demand, are a nod to the DIY ethos of aaga’s era and Burnett’s own approach to releasing music with Spare Snare.
“I think the lathe cuts will be a nice way of preserving this part of Dundee’s musical history,” he says.
“Something to pass down. Plus, it’s a way of keeping the spirit of aaga alive in a tangible form.”
‘Questioning the system’: Honouring the DIY post-punk spirit with vinyl releases
The decision to release aaga’s music in a physical format harkens back to the post-punk roots of the band.
Jan recalls how aaga’s music was recorded in the most lo-fi, DIY fashion imaginable.
They would dub the cassettes themselves.
“Everything was done by hand,” he says.
“Copied sleeves, numbered tapes, all of it. It’s that kind of spirit that still resonates in what I do today.”
For Jan, this sense of community and the raw, anarchic energy that defined aaga’s music is something he deeply identifies with.
“It was almost a manifesto,” he says, referring to aaga’s music as a statement against the establishment.
“It was about doing it yourself, questioning the system.
“I still feel like that to an extent.
“Post-punk’s not just about the music. It’s about the attitude, the willingness to go against the grain.”
Jan himself has always been somewhat of an outsider in the music world.
Though Spare Snare has earned critical acclaim over the years, it remains a cult band – one that has never quite breached the mainstream.
“It’s kind of cool to be the coolest cult band no one’s ever heard of,” he laughs.
But, looking back on his career with Spare Snare, Jan, who works with a Glasgow bank by day, recognises that his own band’s longevity may have been tied to their ability to remain under the radar.
“If we’d been too successful too early, we might have fallen apart,” he reflects.
“Being able to stay true to our DIY roots, while not having the pressures of fame, has been the key to staying together.”
How was Spare Snare influenced?
Jan’s own journey in music began long before Spare Snare came to life.
As a teenager, he was already recording with his friend Brian Hayes, using a tape machine that allowed them to overdub endlessly.
This experience would influence his later approach to recording.
It was through this shared history of DIY recording that he first encountered aaga.
He had seen the band perform live and even shared stages with them on occasion, though they were a few years older, which at the time, felt like a big age gap.
However, it wasn’t until much later that Jan fully reconnected with aaga’s music.
After discovering that Grimmond had started following Spare Snare on Bandcamp, Burnett reached out to him, leading to a reunion and a deep dive into aaga’s tapes.
Reflecting on the significance of the release, Steve Grimmond, a former chief executive of Fife Council who is now chairman of Dundee Contemporary Arts and recently spoke of his journey, tells The Courier:
“It’s great to see these archive recordings brought together.
“They capture aaga’s raw soundtrack of Dundee in the 1980s.
“I only remember Mike’s anarchic use of sound. The Tayside Bar and the nascent post punk scene, everything in bleak black and white.
“Technology was a C60 cassette and recorder and anything was still possible.”
Jan says that aaga were very important, to the Dundee scene at the time and very important to him personally.
“Spare Snare and Chute Records wouldn’t exist without them,” he adds.
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