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Best remembered for their 1978 hit "Driver's Seat," London-based New Wave combo Sniff 'n' the Tears emerged from the remnants of the little-known Ashes of Moon, which disbanded in 1974 after failing to stir up much label interest. The individual members of the band scattered during the mid-1970s, with frontman Paul Roberts turning his attention to painting; however, following the ascendance of the New Wave, drummer Luigi Salvoni convinced Roberts to reform the group with guitarists Mick Dyche and Laurence Netto, bassist Nick South and keyboardist Keith Miller, and in 1978 the newly-christened Sniff 'n' the Tears began shopping its demo. Chiswick signed the band and issued its debut album Fickle Heart that summer, with the single "Driver's Seat" becoming a major hit in the U.S. The Game's Up appeared in 1980, but failed to make much of a commercial impact; when 1981's Love Action and the following year's Ride Blue Divide met a similar fate, Sniff 'n' the Tears disbanded.
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Driver's Seat started life one evening in the summer of 1973. The original incarnation of Sniff'n'the Tears had built up a little following on the pub and club circuit of the time and I was sharing a room in Hammersmith with a mouse and a very noisy fridge. I had stepped out for the evening when a riff started to nag, a riff so compulsive I couldn't possibly let it go. Returning to my humble dwelling I found some chords that seemed to support this fantastic riff and wrote the song. The whole thing came together very quickly. Later I discovered to my dismay that the riff bore more than a passing resemblance to one belonging to a song by the OJ's. However, the song that remained seemed to manage very well without it. I didn't do the song with the band at that time as not long after I went to France and stayed for two years. Singing in a restaurant in Paris the song had proved popular, so when I returned to London to do some demos with a band called 'Moon', Driver's Seat was among them.
The demos were for a French record company but nothing came of that. I returned to London and took up my other career as a painter. I was more than a little disillusioned with the music business, so when I had an offer to show with a London gallery I jumped at it. Around 1977, two years after the demo recordings, the drummer on the session, Luigi Salvoni, rang me with a proposal. He had kept a copy of the demos and had found that he really liked them, would I mind if he tried to get a deal on them. Luigi took the demos to Chiswick Records who would have put them out as they were. Forgoing that option he found a studio with a young engineer called Steve Lipson, who subsequently became the highly successful producer of such artists as Annie Lennox. Luigi then put together a group of musicians he knew well, recruited Bazza from Pathway to help out and we were off. As I remember we recorded Driver's Seat pretty much as we had done on the demos, but it sounded a little cluttered. Steve Lipson and Bazza worked on the track in our absence, playing around with the idea of removing the electric guitar in the verses. They put together a rough mix and presented it to Luigi and me the next day. Suddenly the whole thing gelled. At this point Luigi suggested we re-record it a little faster, with the new stripped down concept as our new approach. At Luigi's insistence we had put a lot more effort into Driver's Seat than any of the other tracks. Driver's Seat, by common consent, was the obvious single.
Unfortunately for us Chiswick found itself involved in a wrangle over distribution and the album was not released for another year. Despite bad timing Driver's Seat became a hit pretty much everywhere except Britain, where our appearance on Top of the Pops coincided with a strike at the EMI pressing plant, meaning that for two weeks nobody could buy the record. It made No 12 on the Billboard chart in the USA, charting strongly in most European countries. It has proved its durability, topping the Dutch charts for two weeks in the early Nineties. It has become a perennial.
The song has been interpreted as an ode to the joys of driving, which of course it isn't. The idea was to describe the fragmented, conflicting thoughts and emotions that might follow the break-up of a relationship. The sheer impossibility of imagining not seeing someone again who you had been so close to is pointed out in the lines 'The news is blue, I'll never remember my time with you', by the harmony vocals of Noel McCalla and Jim Nellis. Curiously I was approached by an American group recently who wanted to change that line in their version of the song. They wanted 'I'll always remember', feeling that this would be more positive. Each to his own. 'Take your place in the Driver's Seat' offers some glimmer of hope through the power of positive thought. In the end I don't mind how people interpret it as long as they like it.
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