racket

“Did you see how my racket scratched my back?”

And with the grace of a dancer and the force of a quarterback, he whips his racket over his head to connect with the ball in a perfect serve.

The Aussie quartet is gathered on a recent afternoon around a Griffith Park picnic table, where a small herd of little kids makes a racket on the grass nearby.

There’s also the crazed racket of “Motorbike Song” and the alluring ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone by a wistful music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart.

At those first club performances, it was largely an older crowd turning out, no doubt connecting the Sniffers’ racket to their memories of early punk rock.