Ok so through the 90’s us British music lovers were awash with bands who provided a poppy 60’s influenced sound that made all our lives something special for a very short period of time. Then there were bands like the one I’m writing about today who found fame in the charts with a sound like no other band. Yes that sound was pop but looking back now it was a British version of power pop and had an American tinge surrounding full-blown fuzz guitars and Beach Boy harmonies.
I would like to introduce Silver Sun.
Writing a pure pop song under 3 minutes is a very hard thing
to do. The Undertones did it with the simply perfect Teenage kicks some 18
years before Silver Sun came on the scene but to have a whole album crammed
with 3 minute pop perfections was a tall order but the band did it with their self-titled
debut in 1997. Ok so not all songs are
under the three minute mark as some waver slightly over but I have to hand it
to them for perfecting an album that constantly gave me an ear worm through
1997. I still credit Silver Sun for making me buy my first fuzz pedal for my
guitar and every song I would write sounded like a cross between Slowdive and
Iron Maiden (I don’t even like Iron Maiden!).
As I’ve said before their self-titled debut album was pop
perfection in my eyes. With tracks like Lava with its distortion and harmonies
to the softly sung Yellow Light we found a band who could write very, very
catchy singles and to top it all off create an album that sounded like a best
of compilation. British music was
booming at this place in time and Britpop had reached it's middle age in 1996 and
this is when bands started to find their own sound and Silver Sun were a prime
example to this fact. They had a sound like no other band of the time, I used
to like to call it “Mono vocal guitar stereo” as they had a knack of making
their songs sound one dimensional but introducing other instruments in wide
stereo, sounds great on headphones! So
with the release of the album they released four singles with it and each one
just jumped of the shelf when I wondered into my local Our Price (a now defunct
record shop for the non-British reader). The single covers saw a retro 50’s/60’s
sci-fi landscape of giant ants, Band members and an overly tanned television
presenter.
The band toured
behind the album throughout 1997 and 1998 supporting most of the bands that we loved at the time and released their second album Neo Wave in late 1998.
With this release they scored their biggest hit Too Much Too Little Too Late
which was a cover of the Johnny Mathis song.
And then they were dropped by their record label. Yes that’s right we
hit the dreaded year of 1998, the year that the Britpop balloon finally popped and
most record labels washed their hands with their bands. But unlike most bands Silver Sun continued to
record throughout the 2000’s with the albums Disappear Here, Dad’s Weird Dream
and the latest album A Lick And A Promise in 2013.
I like to read other blogs about Britpop and the music
scene around this time and while some are fantastically written I have the
feeling that they actually didn’t live in Britain over this period. Maybe it’s just me and maybe I was a music anorak
back then but I seem to remember things slightly different to what im reading.
Yes Silver Sun were a small band but they had a major impact on the scene at
the time and were quite prolific with the music papers and the radio. I even
remember my local record shop running out of copies of the single Lava on its
first release and I even used to play it at my local indie night when I used to
DJ for a local pub and I always got a great reaction when I played them.
So when you read about "The greatest Britpop band that you’ve
never heard of" just take it with a pinch of salt and enjoy the music as it was
intended. YES there were bands who didn’t make it and bands that also remained
small but ALL of them contributed to the scene and helped paved the way for the
bands of today.
Silver Sun shone brightly for the time they were in the
public eye and helped a fledging music scene to rise above and put Britain back
on the map and show the rest of the world how it’s done. You might not regard
Silver Sun as Britpop but let’s just split the word up shall we?
Brit Pop……… I rest my case.
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