There’s always this one band at a showcase festival that steals the whole show.
Often, it’s because of the music itself. In other cases, the members are naturally born entertainers. Sometimes, it concerns the band’s purposefully controversial image or their reputation in the business. But not every act can combine all these elements in one explosive package.
Battlesnake certainly know how to do it. So I caught up with the band’s drummer to find out more about the magic formula they used to pull it off.
PART 201 OF “AM I EVER GONNA SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN?” A RANDOM COLLECTION OF UNKNOWINGLY OBVIOUS FACTS ABOUT AUSTRALIAN MUSIC SCENE
When I call Nick Zammit at a very un-rock’n’roll hour on a Friday morning, he tells me the band are just looking for Hadrian’s Wall on the border of England and Scotland. “I think we’re lost. We can’t find it”, he says.
Battlesnake are on the way to Glasgow to play a show there in the evening. Two more dates after that, and they’ll be done with their autumn EU/UK tour.
Over a few weeks in September and October, they were blowing the minds of metalheads in Hamburg, Berlin, London, Manchester and Leeds, among other places. They’d already toured the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands in May, proving that both their genre and the band’s entertaining take on it are in high demand on the Old Continent.
No wonder. Once you see the Sydney 7-piece live, you surely won’t forget it for a long time. Starting with their catchy name.
As a foreigner who’s lived in Oz and heard heaps of urban legends about the deadly endemic reptiles, I want to know if there’s any particular meaning behind Battlesnake. “There are no snake-related stories,” Nick dispels my doubts. “I don’t think any band members own snakes or have any relationship with them. The name just sounded cool.”
There’s another fun element to the band’s origin story instead. Nick throws more creatures into the mix. And this time, they’re taken directly from fantasy books.
“Basically, one of my best mates I went to university with [Ben Frank, one of Battlesnake’s guitarists] wanted to start a metal band about wizards and dragons.” And who wouldn’t want to join a crazy project like that?!
Ben knew a lot of people, so the line-up was promptly put together. “And from there, we just started writing silly music about crazy fantasy stories.”
Nick uses three expressions to describe the group’s vibe: “very, very silly”, “theatrical” and “over the top”. I’d also add that their style is surprisingly melodic despite the heavy guitar elements and occasional quasi-demonic chants.
Obviously, the lyrics sung by Sam Frank, the frontman, don’t pretend to be Pullitzer-Prize-worthy. But calling songs “I Am The Vomit”, “Pterodactyl Firehawk”, “Pangea Breaker”, or “Revenge of the Witch” is sure to turn heads. Match that with Battlesnake’s hysterical stage outfits, and everything starts to come together.
On that note, I wonder whether the costumes, made by a friend of the band’s, are comfy for all members equally. I (incorrectly) assume Nick doesn’t have a problem playing in the outfit.
“I think the guys have a better time with the costumes than I do because the robe’s arms come all the way down to your hands,” he shares. “I did one show in the original costume and couldn’t play properly. My hands were getting tangled up.” So his robe has been modified by cutting the sleeves off and sewing it down to the waist.
“Billy loves climbing. So, at one of these festivals we did in Australia supporting Smashing Pumpkins, he climbed one of the massive trusses that go two stories in the air, maybe even higher. Yeah, we got in trouble for that one.”
As a drummer, he probably wouldn’t be able to pull off wearing the golden horns Sam sports on stage, either. That is – when the singer doesn’t strip down to his underwear at the gigs, ditching all the elements of the costume.
Sam is the wackiest member of the group, according to Nick. “He just goes crazy at the shows. He jumps around, yells at everyone’s faces, puts his hands up on his head like horns… He takes his costume off at the end and runs around… Yeah, Sam is definitely the troublemaker.”
And that, ladies and gents, describes exactly what I witnessed in Hamburg in mid-September. People were getting up from their seats and pushing forward to see the mayhem up close.
At one point, Sam and Billy O’Key [the keytar player who also decided to get rid of his outfit] jumped down from the stage to join the punters, soon followed by the rest of the band (except for Nick, obviously). There was stage climbing, a ladder in the middle of the crowd (God only knows where it came from) and sparks on the roof. By the end of the performance, everyone in the crowd was filming the action.
And the best part is it wasn’t even a regular Battlesnake gig. It was a 30-minute showcase at the renowned Reeperbahn Festival. So I can only imagine the hilarious havoc they wreak at their own shows when they’re not so time- or space-restricted.
That brings me to the next question. Have they ever got in trouble after a rowdy performance?
“Oh, yeah,” Nick replies straight away. “Billy loves climbing. So, at one of these festivals we did in Australia supporting Smashing Pumpkins, he climbed one of the massive trusses that go, I don’t know, two stories in the air, maybe even higher. He climbed up halfway up there and did his little star moment at the end of the night, hanging off the side… Yeah, we got in trouble for that one.”
But I also find out the seemingly random and spontaneous pandemonium on stage is partially controlled. Before every show, one of the band members scoops out the whole set-up to see what structure they can climb. It’s their version of preparation and planning. “And after that, whatever happens at the show, happens at the show,” Nick adds mischievously.
I ask him next how they all get along. In an all-male group, there are probably seven different personalities and seven different egos. It can surely get crowded at times. Plus, someone has to make sure they’re all on the same page, musically speaking.
“It’s really hard for seven people to start an idea. Too many cooks in the kitchen,” Nick admits. So it’s changed over time.
“All of our music, everything that we generate, is done by us, in-house. Being independent is quite important for us.”
Initially, mostly Ben and Dan Willington [also guitar] wrote a lot of riffs and would bring them to the band to turn them into songs. Now, Ben, Sam, and Elliott Hitchcock [the bassist] or any other small groups will get together to start little ideas with basic riffs, chord progression, and sometimes even parts of the lyrics. Then, they’ll bring that forward, and the whole band will build on these ideas.
Battlesnake are lucky that they’re under no external pressure to record new material. They’re not signed to any label yet.
“All of our music, everything that we generate, is done by us, in-house,” Nick says proudly. “There’s something cool about reflecting on the project that we know ourselves, that we’ve done ourselves. We don’t outsource anything. Being independent is quite important for us.”
For a band that is fairly new to the Australian music scene, I find it pretty impressive. From streaming platforms, I can see they officially shared their first track in January 2019. Fast forward five years, and they’ve dropped numerous stand-alone singles, an EP and two albums.
There’s an assumption in the music business that the second LP is the “difficult” one to write. Artists often want to outdo themselves by creating something bigger and better than their debut. And they end up struggling with unrealistic expectations. So I wonder how Battlesnake approached their 8-track sophomore record, The Rise And Demise Of The Motorsteeple, released in the second half of June 2024.
“It was more like a time pressure. The way the band works is very efficient and effective if we have a time constraint or set a deadline,” Nick explains Battlesnake’s creative process.
“Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll write an album and release it. By the time that’s all done, we’ve already got plans for our next album and we set that next deadline. So we’re not really trying to make it bigger and better. We’re just writing whatever we think is cool that will fit within the time constraints that we’ve set for ourselves.”
Nick’s words make me think of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, an internationally famous Australian rock band, quite prolific in songwriting. They often drop more than one record a year.
Even though that’s not the norm in the music industry, Nick agrees that sharing heaps of new music frequently, including dropping stand-alone singles, is quite important these days, regardless of the genre. It helps bands stay fresh and relevant, especially the up-and-coming ones, also teaching the AI algorithms about the band’s way of releasing new material.
We spend some time talking about the genre they rep. I have a working theory that the heavier scene has much more traction outside Australia. So metal bands from Oz tend to build a solid fanbase in Europe much quicker than on their home turf.
“The way the band works is very efficient and effective if we have a time constraint or set a deadline. So we’re not really trying to make it bigger and better. We’re just writing whatever we think is cool that will fit within the time constraints that we’ve set for ourselves.”
On the other hand, travelling overseas is not feasible for many emerging acts. Consequently, there aren’t too many influential metal groups from the Land Down Under. Except maybe for a handful who have also broken through overseas, like Parkway Drive or the already-mentioned King Gizzard. Is it only my impression?
“It’s a tough one,” Nick states. “Because there are a lot of metal bands in Sydney, for example, a lot of smaller metal bands. But they don’t really cut through everything, they don’t get big. You don’t really hear about them… Yeah, it’s weird.”
We both try to think of the reasons why.
Nick reckons it all stems from one thing. Many acts just become too comfortable in what’s already been done, replicating the same formulas and following the same rules everyone else does. Then, they sit and wait, expecting something big and extraordinary to happen without making much effort to stand out.
“Which is why I think Battlesnake is unique in that sense,” he stresses. “Because we’re a metal band, we’re a rock band, but we’re not just copying directly what our ancestors did before us. We’re trying to bring something new and fresh and to innovate in our space.”
I couldn’t agree more. No matter where Battlesnake make an appearance, they consistently get a similar reaction.
Audiences dig their slightly insane attitude from start to finish. All hell breaks loose at the band’s shows, quite literally. The group’s social media are full of little snippets of that amusing madness. And most people I spoke to after the band’s show in Hamburg said they’d never seen anything like Battlesnake before.
There’s one significant difference between Australia and Europe, though, according to Nick.
“What I find different about Europe is the scale of it. There’s so much more of a scene that accepts our kind of music and is open to it. It’s a little bit harder in Australia because there are just not as many people, I guess, to show that kind of thing to.”
You can’t argue with that, either. After all, Parkway Drive did a whole documentary about their road to headlining Wacken – one of the biggest metal festivals in the world that takes place in Germany. When I mention that to Nick, he says the band just watched that movie on tour, too. So they are well aware of it.
“I think Battlesnake is unique in that sense. We’re a metal band, we’re a rock band, but we’re not just copying directly what our ancestors did before us. We’re trying to bring something new and fresh and to innovate in our space.”
Interestingly, one of Nick’s favourite Battlesnake shows happened on the Old Continent. It was during a UK-based festival Bearded Theory in May 2024.
“It was the first day of the festival,” he recalls. “We were the second band on. We didn’t know what to expect. It was really muddy that day as well, and it was really cold. I remember going on stage, and I was freezing. I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to play drums because my body was all stiff. But that show turned out amazing. The crowd was amazing. That’s definitely a highlight.”
Before wrapping up the chat, I inquire about the band’s plans and things they’re looking forward to after returning home.
I can’t say I’m surprised to hear that “the main priority right now is the next album”. If everything goes right, it should be ready by mid-2025. So once they’re back in Sydney, they’ll hit the studio to write new music for it.
They also have two shows coming up in November (for now): in Mullumbimy, NSW and Melbourne. But I’m pretty sure their home touring schedule will fill up quickly, given that the summer festival season is about to kick off in Oz.
I’m curious as well what bands they’d be keen to tour with in the future. I mean, they’ve already supported legends like KISS and Jane’s Addiction.
Off the top of his head, Nick lists four: “AC/DC, which I don’t know if they’re still doing stuff, but that would be one of them… The Darkness would be really cool. Yeah, King Gizzard, too… And I think Iron Maiden would definitely be one for sure. You know, bands like that.”
I suggest they should add Rammstein to that list. With all the wizards, dragons, and stage-climbing vibe, they’d be the perfect opening act for the German heavyweights.
Or maybe it should be the other way around. Maybe Rammstein, Smashing Pumpkins, and AC/DC should support Battlesnake on a world tour one day.
Battlesnake are: Nick Zammit (drums), Sam Frank (vocals), Ben Frank (guitar), Paul Mason (guitar), Daniel Willington (guitar), Billy O’Key (keytar) and Elliot Hitchcock (bass).
Cover image supplied
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