Sounds From The Junkshop #19 - Silver Sun

 

"Open the door and let the light in..." - Silver Sun - Golden Skin, 1996

On October 30th, I received some news which hit hard - James Broad, frontman with one of my favourite bands from my late teenage years Silver Sun, had passed away following a battle with cancer. At the time I was midway through writing an earlier SFTJ column about Mega City Four and reflecting on how Wiz's passing in 2006 came as such a shock to me so to hear this news definitely felt a bit eerie. Fast forward three months or so and as I'm midway through writing this SFTJ column about Silver Sun, I received the horrible news that Mark Keds, frontman with the Senseless Things (who I've also covered on SFTJ in the past and were one of the first guitar bands I got into - Mark was also the catalyst for me discovering the Wildhearts and starting my lifelong fandom of them when he briefly joined the group after the Things split up) had suddenly passed away. Again, this has been a real shock and I desperately hope that it's the last time I have to write about one of my heroes in these circumstances. RIP Mark and thanks for the memories.

Anyway, Silver Sun. I first discovered them in late '96 after hearing the classic Lava single played on Steve Lamacq's evening session and there was something about the sheer hyperactive energy of it that instantly hooked me. Although they were lumped in with Britpop (I think because of their short hair and Pulp-style thrift shop clobber), they were really a bit of a misfit in there which seems to be becoming a common theme with the bands I've covered in SFTJ in recent weeks - if anything, their mix of stomping glam riffs and Beach Boys style harmonising put them way closer to the Wildhearts and Terrorvision soundwise than it did to Ocean Duller Scene or whatever band Luke Haines was in that week.

Lava was actually the band's second single, having made their debut with the Sun EP (the group were originally called Sun until they were forced to change their name due to a German electro band having the same moniker). Its title track There Will Never Be Another Me really did lay their manifesto down in style, pure swaggering self-confidence with sugar sweet harmonies and riffs blasted forth with the same sort of gleeful abandon as prime time Ash.

Like some sort of twisted Cheap Trick meets Kiss meets surf-rock hit factory, the classics just kept on coming with the effervescent Last Day just missing the Top 40 before Golden Skin well and truly blew the doors off, scraping the Top 30. It laid the way clear for their self-titled album which remains an overlooked classic of its day, taking all the best bits of '70s stadium rock, glam rock, power-pop and pop-punk and blending it into a heady brew. Songs such as the stomping Service and Far Out were the sort of numbers that practically invited stadium audiences to bellow along while the spooky Two Digits and the acoustic led Bad Haircut showed a more mellowed side to their output (I was tempted to say "mature" but the fact that the latter is about self-pleasuring yourself on the toilet on a Sunday afternoon possibly suggests otherwise). It featured in a lot of magazines' end of year charts and the band were starting to look like possible contenders to the Britpop throne especially with the Wildhearts self-destructing and Kerbdog and Baby Chaos both splitting around this time.

Live, they were a great band as well with Broad's natural charisma always shining through and the band usually tight and focused behind him - I remember seeing them in Leeds in 1997 when Broad came up with the infamous line between There Will Never Be Another Me and Bad Haircut of "So that was a song all about learning to love yourself. This next song, however, is all about realising that learning to love yourself is a load of bollocks and you're actually a bit of a dick."

The trouble is that while the band were off writing their second album Neo Wave in 1997-98, the music scene underwent something of a sea change with indie music going on into the sort of dull windswept balladry pushed by Yorke, Ashcroft et al while the dimming of the Britrock light had seen Kerrang! take more of a shift over to the what would eventually become the horrible nu-metal movement popularised by Limp Bizkit, Korn etc. As a band who'd always seemed to fall into a the dreaded halfway house of being a bit too heavy for Britpop and not quite heavy enough for Britrock (although they'd still got plenty of plaudits from both sides of the divide) and thus didn't really have a proper pigeonhole to sit in, the danger of not really having a life raft to cling to with the tidal wave approaching was arguably very much there...

Commercially, the change didn't seem to hurt Silver Sun that much - their comeback single, a cover of Johnny Mathis' Too Much Too Little Too Late became their biggest hit, climbing all the way into the Top 20 and follow-up I'll See You Around also made the Top 30. However, the critics really were pretty venomous when it came to reviewing Neo Wave - NME especially really savaged it describing them as the sort of band who should be out supporting Robbie Williams or similar. True, it was a much more commercial and smoothed-out sounding effort than their debut and didn't quite have the same amount of killer tunes as their debut but songs such as Sharks and Cheerleading showed that the odd bit of spark was still there. Unfortunately it absolutely bombed (probably due to the negative press) causing their label to panic and drop them. The group would disband soon afterwards. 

You can't keep a good band down though and Broad would reform Silver Sun in the early years of the 21st century, releasing the Disappear Here and Dad's Weird Dream albums in quick succession, the former pretty much a solo effort and the latter with the full band backing him. Both saw the band playing well to their strengths with some enjoyably fizzy power-pop - not quite up to the standard of the debut but with more than enough fire in the tank to prove that Broad had still got it as a songwriter. I had the opportunity to go and see them in Leeds on the Disappear Here tour but unfortunately my own band were playing a gig elsewhere in town on the same night and I had to pass.

There then followed an extended break before the group resurfaced with 2013's A Lick And A Promise (again essentially a Broad solo album) which came out to hardly any fanfare at all. I was working as a reviewer for Pure Rawk by this point and considered that I had my ear to the ground when it came to new albums coming out especially with bands I'd loved growing up but it was only eight months after it was released that I even found out it existed. I managed to sneak a review into the PR webpages as it was another good effort from the pure Cheap Trick melodies of I Just Wanna Treat You Right to the mournful acoustic closer Smalltown Affair (a song that still sits up there with their best). A couple of years later, the group did their first live gigs in over a decade supporting Sleeper - again, unfortunately I missed the London gig due to being skint at the time and living outside the capital in Hertfordshire by this point.

The group's sixth album Switzerland surfaced last March - like its predecessor, it was only through someone on Facebook alerting me to its release a few months later that I even knew it existed. As you may remember, I was working through a pretty huge backlog of stuff when Nite Songs started due to having been out of the reviewing game for a good eight months so it wasn't until the autumn that we managed to review it on here (link here if you're curious). It was another good effort, playing well to the group's fizzing power-pop and after writing the review, I decided to check on James' Twitter page to see what he was up to and whether he was planning on getting the band back together to tour the album once the whole Covid madness had subsided*. Which was when I found out the news about him having bowel cancer and being holed up in hospital. Three weeks later he was gone. Heartbreaking.

(* Around the same time, I remember Ginger Wildheart saying on Twitter that he'd just heard the first Silver Sun album for the first time and had been so impressed that he was asking about to see if anyone could put him in touch with the band with a view to doing some dates together once gigs were happening again. Oh if only...)

They may have been so far under the radar towards the end that they were practically invisible but it was still heart-warming and saddening in equal measure to see the number of heartfelt tributes to Broad after he passed away and it really does make you wonder how Silver Sun never quite became the Top 10 conquering megastars that they deserved to be. Wrong place at the wrong time? Didn't quite fit in anywhere? Just sheer bad luck? Probably a bit of all of the above. Suffice to say I would have loved to have seen them live again after all this time and I'm kicking myself even more now for missing those last two tours. I guess all I can do is recommend all six of the band's albums - start with the solid gold classic debut, work your way forward from there and sigh wistfully as you wonder what might have been.

God speed ya James. RIP and thanks for the memories.