Sniderman’s glam-rock persona unleashed at 60
Jason Sniderman has been frustratingly patient with his glamrock persona, Ensign Broderick.
It was nearly half a century ago, when he was a teenager, that he first imagined his alter ego taking the music industry by storm. Ensign was a cocktail of influences dreamed up in his bedroom - a dash of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust mixed with Nick Cave’s bold audacity, and a splash of Mick Jagger’s flamboyant swagger.
Sniderman envisioned the singer’s fashion and wrote entire albums complete with painstakingly designed cover art.
He was ready to make Ensign Broderick one of Canada’s glamrock gods - until he changed his mind and stowed the idea away for decades. Now 60, he’s bringing the persona into the spotlight with nearly a career’s worth of albums ready for release.
“Time is so elastic in what I’m doing,” says the soft-spoken musician as he sips white wine at a Toronto restaurant.
“I’m starting where I left off. I took a 30-year break and now I’m back.”
Over the past year, he’s released five studio albums of original material, culled from tapes he recorded as a teenager and remixed in the present day. They debuted on streaming services and appeared on vinyl with little fanfare - a quiet rollout intended to spread Ensign’s reputation through organic word of mouth rather than social media.
If it works, vinyl collectors will be telling their friends about the rich catalogue of an undiscovered rock legend who sounds like Bowie and Bryan Ferry’s mysterious love child.
“BloodCrush” became the latest disc to join his back catalogue earlier this month. Another album will be added early next year with support from Canadian indie label Six Shooter Records.
Each release carries Ensign along the chronological path in his story, starting in the 1970s and gradually moving into the new-wave era of the early 1980s. In the alternate universe of his persona, Sniderman supposes with five albums of full-length material under his belt, his fictional age would be somewhere in his late 20s. That gives him plenty of roadway to forge the remainder of his later career.
“For me I see the whole thing as a totality,” he says.
“I can see the entire arc of what I’m doing. And I can see the graceful dovetailing as the art dies down.”
Sniderman knows the record business like few others. His father was Sam Sniderman, the late founder of now defunct music chain Sam the Record Man.
Growing up, Sniderman practically lived inside the walls of his dad’s Toronto flagship store where he began stocking shelves at age five.
His dad would pay him in vinyl records instead of cash, so before his tenth birthday he had amassed an impressive collection of albums, from the Rolling Stones to Little Richard.
He devoured rock magazines of the era including Cream and Circus, giving him the notion that talent plus a colourful personality was the best way to attract girls. Even the most androgynous performers were considered sex symbols when they had a guitar in their hands.
And so Ensign Broderick sprang to life inspired by English rock stars of the early 1970s. “Ensign” was pulled from “Jensen,” the maker of his favourite car, and “Broderick” simply sounded cool, he says.