Hoolie snatches big gig opening for The Trews
The Hoolie Snatch will be the opening act for The Trews on Tuesday, March 13. Jen Kees, lead singer, from Toronto; Eric Walker, guitar, from Ottawa; Mike Smith, bass guitar, from Toronto, and Pat Maloney, drums, from Ottawa will bring their blues-influenced rock sound to Fanshawe College's Forwell Hall.
Maloney, who also serves as the VP of entertainment for the FSU, said opening for The Trews is the biggest gig of the bands young career.
“It is a really good opening spot,” Maloney said. “I appreciate the Trews. I really like what they do, they are a really hard working band and they have ‘the all members of the band sing thing,' which we do as well. So that is really cool, it is a huge show, The Trews are huge.”
The forming of the group happened after Maloney met Walker's mother at a past job. After Walker's mother was raving about Walker's guitar playing, Maloney checked out Walker and Kees playing in an electric-blues-jam session.
“They were awesome,” Maloney said. “They happened to be moving to London as well, and they had a house and an extra bedroom. So I moved in and we started the band.”
Maloney said people often misinterpret the meaning behind the bands name.
“It is not a sex thing which most people think, it is a drug thing,” Maloney said. “If you are in a line and sitting on a couch, you start passing the joint along and our singer Jen would always sit in the middle and instead of passing it back to the first person after it passed everyone, she would take a hoot of the joint, and that is where it started, The Hoolie Snatch.”
The Hoolie Snatch list rock, psychedelic, and funk on their Myspace page (www.myspace.com/thehooliesnatchband) as their style and musical genre but according to Maloney the band is heavily influenced by blues.
“Comparing us to bands probably fifty years ago would be the best way to go,” Maloney said. “We are more older school, progressive rock, like Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin. Really blues rooted, stripping it down by taking rock n' roll and taking all the new-wave production. We try to stray away from the pop-punk, alt-rock garbage out there today.”
Each member of the band is well-schooled musically. Maloney and Walker are students in the Music Industry Arts (MIA) program at Fanshawe, Smith plays double-bass in the University of Western Ontario orchestra and Kees has a degree from the University of Ottawa in the classical soprano vocalist program.
Maloney said that he and the rest of his band mates are looking forward to pursuing a career in music post-graduation.
“We are all for it,” Maloney said. “We are all musicians and we are all doing this for real.”
Maloney along with some other students in the MIA program and various other local bands created a music company called Home Road Projects, to help promote the local area music scene.
“We are just trying to start a strong local community of bands,” Maloney said. “The past shows that we have done went well. We started at the London music club, and we packed the place, then we moved it to the Salt Lounge because it was a bigger venue and had about three-hundred people there. The Home Road shows are going really well, it is all independent, so it is really awesome.”
