‘Me and the Girls’: why the music world needs Amy Taylor right now
Amy Taylor bounds onto the stage with the biggest smile in the venue. She commands the room with a magnetism that generations of frontmen would watch and feel inferior. Behind her, her band looks at her with pure love as the singer of Amyl and the Sniffers combines raging punk power with palpable joy in a way no one else does. The entire room is in her hand, but then she makes it clear who she’s there for; “This one’s for the ladies,” she shouts as suddenly the screams in the room are higher pitched as she dives into ‘Me and the Girls’.
Sitting on their new album Cartoon Darkness, ‘Me and the Girls’ perfectly summarises Amy Taylor’s powerful and necessary position not just in punk but in music. Being the only woman in her own band, yet putting out a song so vibrantly and joyously feminine, is a microcosm of it. It’s clear that the men in the band also set an example that others should be following, giving Taylor space for ‘girlie’ topics and sharing wholeheartedly in her enthusiasm for it.
“You and your boy band, ugly and hairy / Me and the girls look snazzy and hot,” she sings on stage, her blonde hair curled into a gorgeous 1970s flicked out look, her outfit tight and tiny, as my friend next to me, with her own bleach blonde locks and finest garms puts her arm around me and chants along, loud.
Male rock fans probably don’t realise how rare this moment is. Sure, sometimes we get token girls-only moshpits. Sometimes, we get statements about looking after each other in crowds. Sometimes, we get obvious, slap-you-around-the-face feminist tracks. But ‘Me and the Girls’ is casual and conversation, as if Taylor is our mate talking in the same silly, bratty tone that empowerment takes when you’re surrounded by a group of girls. She’s not just making space for us by being there in the way that women in male-dominated fields get burdened with the role of being a role model; she’s also not just feeling for us, but she’s there with us, talking our language, giving us a theme tune.
However, Taylor being a girl’s girl is nothing new. I first discovered her through a viral video of her dancing around singing ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ by Peaches with her band of Aussie rockers behind her and fell instantly in love with her energy. However, more so than fun, Taylor is also a necessary mouthpiece who is not afraid of saying things, saying them in a way that demands men listen while allowing women to feel seen and heard.
“Me and the girls, we want free abortions / You and thе boys can’t even get waxеd,” she sings, throwing that punch into a verse about wanting to party with her mates as if it were nothing, hitting her crowd with some politics just in case any of the boys forgot the deal.
It’s the same story on ‘Knifey’, the field attack on the patriarchy held on their 2021 album Comfort To Me. I feel my friend’s arm around me again, this time standing still, joining the chorus of shouts in the room as all the women sing, “All I ever wanted was to walk in the park / All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars / Please, stop fucking me up.” But this is a fighting song, as Amy Taylor turns the blade onto the men, singing, “Out comes my knife, out comes my knifey / this is how I get home nicely.”
Again, it’s a perfect encapsulation of Taylor’s vibe and exactly why we need her. In interviews, she talks about the song and about how, for a “scantily clad lady” like herself, the world is terrifying, leading her to sleep with a knife under her bed for a while. She holds out her hands to women everywhere, voicing this shared fear we all live in. She uses her platform not just to highlight that fact but to create space for it in the enduringly masculine punk world. Then, she gives us a song that makes us feel tough, that emboldens and empowers us rather than just dragging our collective anxiety to the surface and making a token display of it.
It all comes down to Taylor’s philosophy, one that’s admired not just by her fans but by her bandmates, too. “Amy has such a healthy relationship with anger where it’s therapeutic, and it means she has so much space for joy at the same time,” guitarist Dec Martens told Far Out. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, seeing a woman commanding such power but refusing to fall in line into the typical tough and cold role that punk usually demands simply because it’s the tone the men set way back when.
No, Taylor is having too much fun for that, and all the girls were having fun too, shaking our shit, singing about teeny bikinis, screaming our societal rage out and calling our best mates “snazzy and hot”, dancing in this space she makes for us where our fears are met with fight, and our joy is prioritised because that’s truly punk. She’s a beacon for women to love and men to learn from. In short, “Me and the girls are gonna go party, You and the boys can shut the fuck up”.
