Drivers Seat

The Zoo Crew has got "Driver's Seat" by Sniff 'n' the Tears turning over on the turntable right now, pulled straight off the debut album Fickle Heart, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks riding along with us at THE ZOO, you already know this one has a little more going on under the hood than a simple Saturday-night cruise. Paul Roberts, the singer and songwriter who has been the one constant face of the band, has said more than once that the song is not about driving at all. On the band's own telling, it is about the scattered, conflicting thoughts that follow a breakup, the strange business of trying to get back in charge of your own life when somebody you were close to is suddenly gone. The line about never remembering your time with her is not a shrug. It is the sound of somebody talking himself into moving forward.

The way the tune got written is one of those rock and roll stories that still sounds like a late-night pub tale. Back in the summer of 1973, Roberts was sharing a ground-floor room in Hammersmith with a mouse and a fridge that would not shut up. The mouse was scratching under the appliance, the fridge was humming like a bad generator, and sleep was not going to happen. He stepped out for a walk, and a riff started nagging at him. He came back, found chords to sit under it, and the song came together fast. Later he realized that riff sounded a little too close to something by the O'Jays, so he set the riff aside and kept the circling acoustic guitar pattern. That pattern, with its odd little rhythmic twist, is what gives "Driver's Seat" the push you feel in your chest. He has described the words as coming from the bewilderment after a split, confused and fragmented, but still looking for the light. Jenny shows up in the lyric as the woman with another way of looking at life. The title, he has said, just means take charge of your own destiny. Do not let other people decide the road for you.

That early version sat around for years. Roberts had a band gigging the London pub circuit as far back as 1973 and 1974, the kind of rooms where a good song could earn you a following and not much else. He had wanted to call the group The Tears. The manager, noticing that Roberts had hay fever and was always sniffing, suggested Sniff 'n' the Tears instead, and the name stuck. The band could not land a deal. The guitarist got called up for military service, the manager drifted toward another act, and Roberts packed it in and moved to France. In Paris he signed with a French label, sang in a restaurant where "Driver's Seat" went over well with the dinner crowd, and talked the company into letting him cut demos back in England. Drummer Luigi Salvoni, who had been with a funk and R&B outfit called Moon, rounded up players including guitarists Loz Netto and Mick Dyche, and they put the demos down more or less live in a day at Pathway Studios. Nothing much came of the French deal. Roberts, already a working painter, went back to London and picked up the brushes.

Then the phone rang. Salvoni had kept a copy of those tapes, played them again a couple of years later, and asked if he could take them to Ted Carroll at the indie label Chiswick. Roberts, whose painting had just landed on the cover of the Observer colour supplement, said yes. Chiswick would have put the demos out as they were. Salvoni wanted a proper album. They went into the studio with a young engineer named Steve Lipson, cut Fickle Heart in a couple of weeks for well under ten grand, and then waited more than a year for it to come out. On "Driver's Seat" the first pass sounded cluttered. Lipson and the engineer from Pathway stripped the electric guitar out of the verses, and the track suddenly opened up. Salvoni had them cut it again a little faster. Guest player Keith Miller dropped in the Moog solo that still floats over the groove like heat off the highway. Noel McCalla and Jim Nellis handled the harmony voices. Salvoni pushed the song as the single from the start. Everybody else was a little surprised when it worked.

Britain nearly missed it. The band got on Top of the Pops as a last-minute stand-in, and then the EMI pressing plant went on strike. You could not buy the single for four or five weeks. Roberts later told Mojo it was a pretty massive hit everywhere apart from Britain. In the States it climbed to number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1979, and it did serious business in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The band that toured was mostly hired hands. Roberts and Salvoni were the core. They opened for Kenny Loggins in theaters, then for Kansas in arenas that held ten thousand and more. Just before that American run, the whole backline got stolen in Indianapolis. Custom guitars, the lot. They hired and bought gear as they went, and the show stayed on the road. Salvoni bowed out before the tour, uneasy about the management plan. Paul Robinson stepped in on drums. Somewhere in the middle of the Kansas dates they started getting encores, which is not the usual story for an opening act that sounds nothing like the headliner.

The song refused to stay in 1979. In the early nineties a European car-stereo commercial put it back in front of a new crowd, and the thirteen-year-old single went to number one in Holland. Films and television kept finding it. Roberts has painted the band's album covers himself, a habit that goes back to the beginning, because the painting career never really stopped. He was born in Tiverton, Devon, in 1948, raised in Wales by artist parents, and studied at Newport, Cardiff, and Goldsmiths. By the mid-seventies he was showing in London and Paris. Music interrupted the gallery schedule, not the other way around. The first Sniff 'n' the Tears had already come and gone before Fickle Heart. The second version was born when a drummer would not let a good demo die. They kept recording, on and off, across the decades that followed, and in later years Roberts and original guitarist Les Davidson have taken the songs out in a stripped acoustic setting, "Driver's Seat" included, the way a couple of troubadours might tell it in a small room.

That is the record we are spinning for the Zoo Freaks, a pub-circuit song that survived a mouse, a noisy fridge, a French label that went nowhere, a pressing-plant strike, and a stolen backline, and still sounds like somebody deciding to take the wheel. You can read Roberts's own account of Fickle Heart, and the track list that leads with "Driver's Seat," on the band's official site at Sniff 'n' the Tears. The band keeps a page going on Facebook, where the acoustic shows and the old catalog still get a mention. We did not turn up a working official Instagram or X account that we could stand behind, so we are leaving those off the rider. No separate fan site turned up that we could vouch for either. The official pages are the ones that still talk about the album and the song. Drop the needle, Zoo Freaks. We will be here when the next deep cut comes around.