We caught up with Silent Party to find out more about the South London indie five-piece.
Releasing their debut EP ‘Fair Winds and Following Seas’ in October 2014, the band have since performed at venues including alongside receiving support from BBC Introducing.
Ahead of their new dates in London, we caught up with Michael Goward to find out more about the journey of Silent Party, their live shows and plans for 2015.
Can you tell us how Silent Party formed?
Chris and I went to school together. Apart from some dodgy school assembly performances, we’d never done anything together. Chris had some song ideas and I wanted to be involved so he sent me a CD full of demos and I wrote some vocal parts and then like a heist movie or something we started looking around our various social circles for the perfect crack team!
How have things progressed within the band since then?
We were keen from the start to spend as much time as possible trying out ideas and developing a sound in an organic way. We would jam out ideas and then take them away and demo them into some sort of structure, or do exactly the opposite bringing fully formed demos which we would then mess around with. Spending so much time in the rehearsal studio has meant our sound has changed quite a bit…a bit like in the LCD Soundsystem song ‘Losing My Edge’ we have gone through periods of lots of guitars and then thrown them away and replaced them with synths. I think we’ve found the right balance now.
Which bands/artists influence your music and have these changed over time?
There are loads of bands we all like, but we also try to bring in things from all over the place. That’s when it gets most exciting, when someone is listening to a lot of Chris Issac and someone else is listening to Appetite For Destruction for example and you try to marry the two. It’s not necessarily an explicit country/hair metal cross over, but it’s just fun to bring in certain elements from both worlds. We are shameless pop fanatics in the band too and any pop song which is heavy on the synths, whether it be Katy Perry, Taylor Swift or Girls Aloud, we can only aspire to. Nothing really beats a perfect pop song.
You released your debut EP back in October, are there any tracks in particular you’d recommend our readers kick-start things with?
Our Debut single ‘Remember Your Strategies’ and our next single ‘Taxidermist’ I think nicely show off different aspects of our sound.
In terms of a live show, what can we expect from Silent Party?
We have recently started playing with a bass synth. We wanted an immediacy and intensity to our live show. We made a decision that we wanted our audience to physically feel the music and for it to flow through them. The bass we feels hook our audiences into our sound and that leaves the guitars, drums, synths and vocals to help get them moving..it seems to be working.
Are there any venues in the UK that you’d love to headline?
I grew up going to shows at the Brixton Academy and I don’t think there’s a better venue in London and I’ve always heard the audiences in Glasgow are incredible. I live near to the Rivoli Ballroom in South London which is a perfectly maintained 50’s ballroom, I can’t think of anywhere more perfect to play.
What do you guys have planned for the rest of 2015?
We are hoping to get back in the studio in the next few months as we have lots of new tracks that we want recorded. Beyond that lots of gigs and we also just invested in some band merchandise so maybe a career as T-Shirt entrepreneurs awaits, who knows?