Silencers - Scottish knights in search of a global sound

The history of rock isn't made up solely of the resounding names of its main protagonists, but also of the tortuous struggles of those who worked hard to earn a bit of the spotlight, scattering here and there along the way, with modesty and tenacity, small gems of precious worth that today would be well worth rediscovering. Scotland's Silencers provide a telling example. Initially made up of Jimme O'Neill, Cha Burns, Martin Hanlin and Joe Donnelly, the band could in truth be almost entirely traced back to the figure of O'Neill alone. It was he who would carry the project forward over the years with extreme tenacity, dealing time and again with defections, the resulting lineup changes, label turnover and the search for ever more elusive funding.

Their birth, dated 1985, came about when O'Neill and Burns left a previous band, Fingerprintz. At that time it still wasn't clear which main path music would take in the years to come, and the road taken by Silencers, which can be broadly summed up as an original attempt to merge blues, folk and synth-pop electronics, was probably not the wisest choice commercially, nor drastic enough stylistically to give the band an immediately distinguishable identity - and yet it yielded a number of particularly fine moments that were unjustly ignored or are now largely forgotten.

Anyone who today, defying adverse fate, decides to (re)listen to them, paying attention to the lyrical content as well as the musical side, might be surprised by the recurring emergence of mystical-religious and epic-chivalric themes. These two aspects actually merge in the theme of the eternal struggle of good against evil, in a constant, fervent tension toward the longed-for victory of love and justice over hatred and injustice. This is not, however, an isolated phenomenon, but concerns at least two other bands geographically and chronologically very close to Silencers: U2 and Simple Minds. The famous manifesto of this sentiment became the much-celebrated "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" by U2, the same band who, in the full mystical fervor of "In God's Country", declared themselves nothing less than "burned by the fire of love". Simple Minds, for their part, issued their own blessing urbis et orbis with the earworm "Let There Be Love", hoping for the definitive conquest of the world by love ("Love will conquer anything", sang Kerr). It's worth specifying that this is not the saccharine, sugar-laden sentiment pumped into us intravenously by the exhausting, single-themed recycling of Italian melodic song, with its trivial phenomenology of the couple hermetically and morbidly sealed off from every outside stimulus. Quite the opposite. We're talking here about love as a universal cosmic principle, in whose ranks one might well be prepared to fight. So testified Simple Minds, releasing, two years after Silencers' debut album came out, their own "Street Fighting Years".

This chivalric calling, shared in various ways by the three bands, probably stemmed from the legacy of the courtly tradition of the British Isles, but was given fresh relevance by the political situation of those years: three countries (England, Scotland and Ireland) destined for an often uneasy coexistence, with the Irish IRA still striking hard and Scottish nationalism - never entirely dormant - not yet satisfied by the establishment of an autonomous parliament under homegrown Blair in the wake of his election as prime minister (which in any case wasn't enough to prevent the 2014 independence referendum). And so our two Scottish bands looked with particular empathy at the dramatic events unfolding next door in Ireland: hence U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" finds its counterpart in Simple Minds' "Belfast Child", from their "street fighting" years, and in Silencers' "Bullet Proof Heart" (the surname of whose leader, O'Neill, might indeed betray an Irish origin).

In such a climate of political friction, deep-rooted nationalisms had no qualms about anchoring themselves to the pretext of three different interpretations of the same faith: the religion of love for one's neighbour, which should only have united, thus ended up dramatically dividing as well. It's no coincidence that O'Neill had to reckon with his own courtly vocation by tackling the theme of religion being exploited for warlike ends in pursuit of temporal objectives.

In the Silencers, however, there is an important distinguishing feature that sets them apart not only from the two bands already mentioned, but from the musical landscape at large: in their hands, the theme of the sacred rises to an unusually global dimension, transcending narrow local borders and drawing freely on religious spheres that are geographically very far apart.

The debut: early attempts to fill the silence

Having made this necessary general introduction, we can now move on to a detailed listen through their discography.

Their debut work, A Letter From St. Paul, dates from 1987, and by this point the peculiarity of the title will probably come as no surprise. Listening to it, there's a certain sense of familiarity, and perhaps it's precisely to the album's credit that it so fully distils the musical "essence" of that place and that period. Some comparisons made at the time with Big Country (we'd point, for instance, to "In A Big Country") are probably on the mark, but it's also natural to think of Simple Minds, given the epic cast of the sound. Indeed, something particularly similar can be found, for example, in the muffled, stretched-out guitar chords of the intro to "Once Upon A Time"; however, Jim Kerr's band at that time was, on the whole, so heavily marked by the use of keyboards and synth electronics that it had, in substance, little in common with the compact walls drawn by the lavish guitars of A Letter From St. Paul. On the whole, this is more the "other side of new wave", the one that relied primarily on stringed instruments, like the early U2. Indeed, it's the guitars that are the great protagonists of the Silencers' debut, in their essential monumentality and harmonic splendour.

The album's opening track, "Painted Moon", is a perfect calling card for the band, as it immediately reveals the pervasive ambiguity that will characterise them throughout: simple, light, immediate melodies diluted across substantial instrumental passages, resulting in rather long tracks polished with the utmost attention to the sounds employed. We speak of "ambiguity" because a band of this kind immediately runs up against an unavoidable obstacle: it can sound too simple for the listener with high expectations, and at the same time too pretentious for the one with low expectations, thus finding it rather difficult to pin down a loyal audience of its own.

In any case, it is and will always be the refined sound that is the Silencers' winning card, capable of rescuing the fortunes of their songs even when the melodies prove too weak.

This doesn't mean, however, that the occasional song doesn't turn out perfect from every angle. On this debut album, that's especially true of "I See Red", a track that grabs you from the very first listen, with its sprightly, energetically fizzy melodic line and O'Neill's explosive, youthful "soft-punk" vocal delivery.

With such an ace up their sleeve, one might have thought the band would go a long way. Unfortunately, things didn't quite turn out that way, and the censorship imposed by British radio over its awkward references to drug use certainly did nothing to help the song reach a wider audience.

The other standout track is the title track, and not by chance, given that it's an instrumental piece (it really is a shame that the Silencers, with their innate instinct for instrumental work, didn't make more tracks of this kind, remaining instead so hopelessly drawn to the more immediate, easy-listening song format). The track still sounds rather mysterious, magical and fascinating today, and makes the best use of those epic guitars used throughout the album, whose signal always seems to come "from afar". That sense of distance is heightened here by the "Morse-code effect" used to give the composition its rhythmic backbone, seemingly alluding to an unusual method of transmitting the Pauline letter.

"Possessed" is also relatively interesting, with the instrumental arrangement playing a distinctly greater role than the melody, while the blues version of "Painted Moon" already signals the direction the Silencers would move in later on.

This first album turns out, in certain respects, to be genuinely "silent": there are still many "gaps" left to fill across the different spectrums of sound, and this seems to be hinted at by the album cover, with the musicians' small grey-toned silhouettes suspended in the nothingness of a vast white background.

The glory years: lavish productions and lush musical explorations

The task of beginning to cover the sonic paths still left unexplored would fall to the second album, A Blues For Buddha, released the following year. The Silencers were not (initially) an independent band, but operated within an RCA that at first believed in their potential, which allowed them to work with top-tier producers. Enter Flood, at the top of his game that year thanks to the glory of U2's "The Joshua Tree", whose talent as producer and sound engineer had already allowed him to contribute to some of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds's masterpieces. Over the course of his career, he would go on to boast credits on genuine landmarks of the '90s (Nine Inch Nails's "The Downward Spiral", Smashing Pumpkins's "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness"), as well as, in the following decade, collaborating with Sigur Ros, a-ha, Editors…

Indeed, the stylistic shift the Silencers made in the space of just a few months between their first and second album is truly astonishing, almost like the leap from craftsmanship to industry. Just to draw a comparison that only holds from this particular angle, one might recall the dizzying leap made in that same brief span of time by Joy Division, in their sudden shift from the guitar-based sound of "Unknown Pleasures" to the dense, eclectic sonic range of "Closer". And the residual new wave of their first record is entirely left behind in one drastic burst of energy.

The cover art of the new album is once again highly significant of its musical content: the band members appear as tiny dots at the edge of the image, on the shore of a vast sea that stretches immensely behind them. It is the sea that constantly produces sounds as it ripples its waves, but it is also the unpredictable carrier of objects dragged ashore by its currents, coming from the most disparate and distant parts of the world. And it is by listening to its whispers born from silence, and gathering the glittering jewels it carries to shore, that Silencers and Flood achieve the kaleidoscopic chromatic shimmer of this work.

The first moments of “Answer Me” serve precisely to test and warm up the sound, but after its very first cries, it quickly grows comfortable with itself and launches enthusiastically into an elegant, sinuous ballad for strings, a sort of Prince “Raspberry Beret”, purged however of its Beatles-esque elements and brought back instead to a philologically correct Celtic origin. The lyrics already begin introducing us to the band's typically chivalrous tones (“Will you… sing to a God of love, fight someone else’s battles”).

The second track, “Scottish Rain”, opens under the banner of acoustic contemplation: motionless, Silencers and Flood observe the sounds rising out of nothing, letting them communicate freely with one another and blend together. Only once the mixture is achieved can the slender sung melody begin, though it almost seems like a pretext for the final round of tonal fine-tuning set up in the instrumental coda that follows it.

Unfortunately, in their relentless balancing act, Silencers all too often fail to resist sitting on the comfortable, reassuring side of the average listener: the following “The Real McCoy” plays exactly this role, and, as usually happens with bands “on the fence”, it's the weakest tracks that end up rising to the detestable status of “fan favourite”.

The structure of the title track, on the other hand, reveals the secret behind the title of the whole album: the acoustic blues accompanying O’Neill’s vocals gives way in the final section to a static, vibrating sound with an ambient-music flavour, evoking pagodas and mystical Eastern landscapes. The song's lyrics, which open in decidedly eloquent fashion (“We’re running guns to a holy war, for soldiers of the soul”), are probably meant to denounce, in a rather original way, the fading of spiritual values in an increasingly material world. This time, however, the expression of that contrast is not entrusted to a Pauline epistle. In a now globalized world, it can even happen that the “lament” addressed to the founder of an Eastern tradition - here taken as an emblem of universal spirituality - is voiced through the musical form that is the very epitome of depression, the blues (“Teach our kids to sing a blues for Buddha, the dollar is our king”, the lyrics say).

Rarely aiming for true dramatic pathos (an exception being “Bullet Proof Heart”), the emotional message conveyed by Silencers should be read “in the abstract”, in the general idea underlying the composition, rather than in the concretely expressed tones; in fact, the structure remains clean and suspended in mid-air rather than weighing heavily on the heart. Just as the blues style on offer here is itself entirely abstract: it's really almost a folk song, where the mournful singing of Black America is rendered only at a stylized level, in the delicate cadence of the chorus. Between folk, blues and ambient music, Silencers here achieve, quite unassumingly and far from any blaring fanfare, a delicate and gentle example of fusion.

Next comes another of the album's most successful tracks: the climax of “Walk With The Night”, a song that had every chance of breaking through but was never given its due. It's an unstoppable crescendo that begins with a whispered, solitary intimacy and ends in a solemn performance from O’Neill, pushed almost to choral grandeur. Coldplay could have made a fortune with material like this - just think of their hugely successful “Fix You” - yet the visionary, chivalrous lyrics offered here by Silencers are an entirely different matter: amid minarets gleaming with electric light, ghosts rise again from distant ages on moonlit nocturnal battlefields.

But the album's greatest masterpiece is probably “Sacred Child”, in which Silencers manage to pack in absolutely everything, in a swirling, unbridled mixture of styles. It's not just a whirlwind of musical styles, but also of languages - themselves different sounds to be blended together. It begins with a kind of African tribal dance, then alternates between English, French and Spanish. The guitars drive the entire track with a sparkling rhythm, and are distorted until they almost become Celtic strings. This is one of those sweeping, perfect songs that simply won't let the listener stand still. Amid so many syncretic elements, it's the intoxicating rhythm of Celtic dances that triumphs, interwoven with Black blues harmonicas. But in the end, what does this convulsive, impetuous whirlwind mean? Perhaps the exaltation that flares in the heart of the “love warrior”? Or does the array of languages perhaps allude to the convergence of international crowds within the crusading armies? O’Neill, or the characters he plays, indeed describe themselves as “soldat d’amour”, as well as “soulful knight”, “enfant de la guerre”, “Sun child”. And yet the noble, chivalrous element must contend with the temptation of a desire for conquest for purely utilitarian ends (“Et je suis le rois des voleurs”, “La tierra es nuestra. And I don’t care what you say”).

The still-youthful freshness and fertility that characterize the second album give way to a mature band (perhaps at times a little too mature, risking a slide into mannerism) on the third record, Dance To The Holy Man, from 1991. The dance of “Sacred Child” has now become that of a “Holy Man”. Once again Silencers manage to secure (albeit only for the first few months of recording) a heavyweight producer: John Leckie (the man behind the masterpiece “John Lennon And The Plastic Ono Band” by John Lennon, can also boast having produced George Harrison, Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, Wings, Simple Minds, Radiohead, Suede, New Order… which is no small feat).

The “Silent Ones” thus open their “adult” dance with an album opener that couldn't be more exhilarating. The muscle-warming is handled by the captivating ethno-folk premise of “Singing Ginger”. Then comes the fantastic “Robinson Crusoe In New York”: yet another example of white musicians' repeated attempts to reread Black blues in their own way. And how better to pull it off than by turning it into a frenetic electronic dance with an almost Bowie-esque flavour? The idea behind the move may not be new, but the stylistic results achieved are genuinely impressive. It's the development of “Sacred Child” pushed to its most extreme, almost Pollock-like outcomes. Indeed, the album's cover art, created by O’Neill himself, with its schizophrenic, bulimic filling of space through dazzling ethnic-urban colours, comes across almost as a figurative version of Pollock's abstract canvases, leaning toward the pop-art direction of Basquiat.

The emotional sweep continues with the incisive, cutting rendition of “Bullettproof Heart”, originally recorded by O’Neill back when he was still playing with Fingerprintz. This song is dedicated to the dramatic events in Ireland, and indeed the tension that Silencers manage to build makes it a kind of mini “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. At last, the big opportunity seemed within reach - this was the right song, the right moment. And yet, unfortunately, in the end it was only a partial success. In Spain it genuinely became the radio song of the year, but at home it ran into boycotts: the more or less concurrent outbreak of the First Gulf War led to British radio censorship of any songs referencing the use of firearms, and this one was no exception. Its fortunes would be at least partly redeemed by Jim Kerr, at the dawn of the new millennium's second decade, who dug it up for his solo album “Lost Boy” - if nothing else, for reasons of kinship (we might as well reveal it now… the artistic similarities between the two bands are also explained by a blood tie: the frontman of Simple Minds and Silencers bassist Donnelly are none other than cousins!). And so the circle closes.

After an opening made up of three utterly gripping tracks, one might think it's now safe to relax about the album's overall quality. And yet the next track, “The Art Of Self Deception”, brings the level down noticeably. Not that its pure academic Beatles citationism is bad as such, but it simply feels out of place coming right after the emotional violence of “Bullettproof Heart”. It almost feels as if Silencers are apologizing to the listener for having let themselves get too carried away just before.

Luckily, things pick right back up with “I Want You”, a perfectly composed and performed folk ballad (complete with the usual military tones nobly tied to defence and loyalty: “And I want to be your soldier and I want to be your friend”). More Beatles citationism follows in “Hey Mr. Bank Manager” (a fairly natural comparison, given the title, with Harrison's “Taxman”, though there are also echoes of Harrison's horns from “Savoy Truffle”, not to mention a vocal delivery reminiscent of Lennon). Far more effective, though, is the heartfelt tribute to the Rolling Stones in “This Is Serious/”John The Revelator” (with O’Neill, however, ending up imitating Jim Morrison!). Prince isn't all that far off either, in the arrangements and choruses of “Rosanne” and in the electric strings of “Electric Storm” (which even features a touch of Kate Bush's “Cloudbusting”). The Prince of Minneapolis was heavily influenced by white folk music (“The Cross”, “Raspberry Beret”), whereas here the influence finally runs in the opposite direction. Still, at the heart of “Electric Storm” lies not only the greatest Black songwriter of that decade, but also the greatest white one, Bruce Springsteen, with keyboard chords echoing “Born In The Usa”.

Also very successful is “One Inch Of Heaven”, with its Cure-style guitar arpeggios reminiscent of “Picture Of You”, and a truly beautiful chorus, worthy of a genuine “classic” - whether sung alone by O’Neal or bursting into magnificent choral warmth.

Despite the looming threat of mannerism, which becomes ever more present, the album as a whole holds up convincingly, with a few genuinely outstanding moments. With it, Silencers wrap up the two-album run begun with A Blues For Buddha, dedicated to the systematic exploration of the full chromatic range of their sonic potential.

Between Light and Shadow

With Second Of Pleasure in 1993, the Silencers, already battered by various lineup changes, took a step backward. Despite two gold records in France and one in Spain, relations with RCA had grown strained due to the band's inability to break through in Britain, and the new album had to be recorded on a shoestring budget. With the opener "I Can Feel It", though, the Silencers also seem to have aimed for greater radio-friendly simplicity. If that was the goal, it was probably achieved, but for anyone who asks music for something more than a cunning concession to average-ear tastes, "I Can Feel It" can come across as rather grating. The turn toward commercialism is also helped along by the new male voice - already lending support to O'Neill for some time - of Ginky Gilmour, who here sounds truly "as radio-friendly as it gets" (fortunately he proves far more convincing elsewhere).

Despite the band's more limited resources, the clarity of the sound remains admirable, even if the sonic exploration is noticeably fading to make room for greater compositional conventionality, in which guitars once again take pride of place, as on the debut album. These, however, are no longer the same epic-mythic guitars of their early days: those have by now given way to transatlantic blues and folk guitars. And when the instruments take over, as always with the Silencers, there's plenty to be satisfied with. Such is the case with the pleasant "Misunderstood", which would sit perfectly on Rodriguez's "Dal tramonto all'alba" soundtrack. "Life Can Be Fatal" again aims for radio-friendly easy listening, but with far more convincing results than the cloying "I Can Feel It", and would instead provide the perfect soundtrack for a bittersweet episode of "Scrubs" or for a surreal comedy about American teenagers.

But one of the best compositions in terms of traditional song form is "The Unhappiest Man", a beautifully dreamy, melancholic melody with a wonderfully judged brass flourish worthy of a western soundtrack (the ability to conjure up so many possible soundtracks seems to be the album's greatest strength).

On "Streetwalker Song" the Silencers effectively tap into the sound of their adopted spiritual homeland, France. They nail both the accordion arrangements and the crepuscular melody, landing on a genuine "lost classic". Also worth noting is the unexpected Lou Reed-style touch on "Walkmans And Magnums".

Other tracks, however, should be carefully avoided altogether, such as "My Prayer", which slides dangerously close to pandering to the same audience as "I Can Feel It".

A couple of years later the Silencers made So Be It. Having left RCA and the high-end producers it had put at their disposal, they could still count, for the last time, on the backing of a major label, albeit on a more geographically limited scale: by now our "knights" had begun their strategic retreat onto French soil, their ideal mother country, and signed with the corresponding local branch of BMG.

Although from this point on things got genuinely tough for the Silencers and their albums saw only very limited circulation, they still managed to show they had some interesting cards left to play, putting them to particularly good use in the feisty opening 1-2-3. Specifically, the "xylophone-driven" "Something Worth Fighting For" carries on with its knightly dreams ("Do you pray for moments of charity, a letter from a King"); it's immediately countered by "Killing For God", which once again tackles the exploitation of religion for warlike ends. Then comes "27", a perfectly realized example of full-on stadium rock, a genuinely wasted track that had every potential to become a "generational anthem". It really is a bomb left buried and unexploded underground, just waiting for some willing bomb-disposal expert to finally set it off in the global mainstream with an explosively impactful cover.

Unfortunately the rest of the album drops off sharply in quality, but the Silencers still manage to play well "at home" with the new, delightfully French-flavored "Number One Friend".

1999 brought Receiving and a completely overhauled lineup, which saw the permanent addition of O'Neill's daughter, Aura, to the group, after she had appeared as a guest on the previous album. According to O'Neill's own intentions, the album was meant to pursue a partial attempt at change - actually carried out only on a handful of tracks - toward creating a "new wave for the '90s" in the style of Fingerprintz. With hindsight, we can now say that the idea of creating a "nu new-wave", even coming from someone who had already contributed to the old one, puts the Silencers, at least conceptually, several years ahead of the Interpol, Editors and White Lies phenomena.

In 2001 their first live album came out, notable above all for the telling title of the band's musical programme: A Night Of Electric Silence.

In 2004 the Silencers tried again with Come, receiving at most a bit of attention in their adopted spiritual homeland, France. This is perhaps the most American of the Silencers' albums, so strongly marked by that rock-college-easy-listening blend already tried out (and overused) time and again by American bands (just think of Hole, or indeed Foo Fighters, to name two particularly well-known examples). This is evident, for instance, on "Don't Make Plans" and "Time". But it's worth lingering at least on the delicate title track, and on the new anthem to universal love, "Siddharta": the relentless repetition of the slogan "Love is stronger than force" seems intended to put an end, once and for all, to the "love-versus-war" dispute so deeply felt by O'Neill, finally declaring an ultimate winner.

At times the album's academic American name-dropping brings to mind Savoy, partly due to the similar male-female vocal pairing, though with fewer standout peaks. When Aura steps up to the mic over the guitar chords, she truly recalls Laureen Savoy, with a vocal style that's also reminiscent of a more graceful Belinda Carlisle.

The Silencers' next release was Real in 2008, but it's an album that's virtually impossible to find.

Overall, the Silencers' defining trait is that they always walked a very blurred line, balanced between mediocrity and talent. At times that line was clearly crossed in the direction of talent, across entire albums or large parts of them, as on A Blues For Buddha and Dance To The Holy Man, or in individual tracks that stand out here and there across their earlier and later work ("I See Red", "Letter From St. Paul", "The Unhappiest Man", "Streetwalker Song", "27", "Number One Friend", "Siddartha", to name a few). Their emotional drive (or rather, O'Neill's) toward positivity never fully concealed darker, or at least more ambiguous and harder-to-interpret, elements, particularly regarding their somewhat enigmatic treatment of religious themes. Deeply shaped by their own historical and geographical origins, yet marked by musical and cultural openness that was anything but predictable, the Silencers certainly never failed to scatter elements of originality and distinction along the way. Starting from that initial premise, then, there's only one conclusion to draw: they would have thoroughly deserved far more attention than they actually received from critics and audiences alike.

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