Artful pop-postpunk outfit Silent Forum’s jagged pop music echoes Everything Everything, XTC and Talking Heads. Second album Domestic Majestic sees the band (vocalist Richard Birt-Wiggins, guitarist Dario Ordi, bassist Oliver Richards and percussionist Elliot Samphier) collaborating from across London, Cardiff and Barcelona. Richard told Emma Way how it went down.
There are themes of remote working and self-management across Domestic Majestic. Do you think this album would have happened if it wasn’t for COVID?
Oliver Richards, Silent Forum: Definitely not. We were set to record the first half of this record before the pandemic. As soon as March 2020 happened our producer [Charlie Francis] was like, we’re not going to be able to do anything for a while, and by the time we ended up recording we had a whole album ready. We recorded a lot later because all our songs are written by four people sitting in a room at the same time, working out ideas. Nobody ever comes up with an idea and brings it into the room.
In terms of the themes of the album, it’s all about self-care. It’s all about our mundane lives in the face of massive global events, being stuck in the gears of history and how we respond to it, from our tiny little perspectives. I probably never would have written a song about yoga! I’ve always written about work. We try generally to avoid themes that you see come up too often in music. There are a couple of love songs in this album, but traditionally, I would have said we don’t write love songs because there’s loads of those.
I feel like people spend their whole lives working in offices, working from home and doing these jobs, and they’re not reflected in art or music. I really like to write about those things. It’s part of people’s lives and it’s about trying to find new ways to describe people’s experiences – hopefully in a funny way.
I guess if you’d written a song about buying a private jet, people wouldn’t have been able to relate so much.
Oliver Richards: There are probably more songs about owning a private jet than about yoga. People like to write about aspirational or dramatic things, but are resistant to write about mundane things. If you can write about the mundane and make it beautiful, I think you’re really adding something, hopefully, to people’s lives.
Definitely. When I hear mundane things mentioned in songs, I feel like I connect to them more. How does it feel for these songs to come out at such a different time to when they were written?
Oliver Richards: I’m still working from home, but I think the structures of our world have been permanently changed, at least for me – for some people less so. A lot of the things I’ve written about in the songs are 100% relevant today. It helped that they were written in an unconventional way, for us. We were writing a lot of acoustic songs that probably will never be heard – about 20 acoustic songs over the period of the pandemic. They were a little bit more timely, describing the experiences of 2020 to 2021. The songs on this album are not quite as COVID-focused as they could have been…
I feel like we’ve been waiting to put this out since the dawn of time. I’m convinced it’s the best thing we’ve ever done; I think it’s our biggest concerted effort to write pop in a few different guises, from straightforward pop songs to poppier versions of art-rock or postpunk. There’s even an ambient chamber pop song at the end of the album, but there is a poppier sensibility we’ve never had before. I think our songwriting is just better, and we spent longer on this album than we’ve ever spent on anything.
Single Yes Man was written over two years ago. What kind of evolution did the song go through?
Oliver Richards: The song is about my experiences of working for a psychopath. I found myself in a situation working with someone who was just very negative, very toxic and made me feel insecure in the way that I worked. Yes Man is about working for somebody who you just say yes to – comply with.
The band got into a practice room and Oli, our bassist, came up with this looping synth line and then we wrote the song around that. Dario, our guitarist, is the jumping-off point for many of these songs, but it’s fun to tie one hand behind his back and see what happens when he’s writing in a more constricted environment. The synth line fills up lots of space, so he had to find somewhere to fit in within this maxed-out soundscape. I think the guitar lines he ended up writing are quite different as a result.
When we got into the studio with Charlie Francis, he had an idea to add a choral line at the beginning. It completely changed the nature of the song, because that then gets reprised later. Typically, you write a song for two to four hours and then it’s done, you might make very slight changes, but it’s rare that a song fundamentally changes like that. Charlie’s very good at just adding and adding, so he’s a bit of an enabler when it comes to vocals.
Did the success of that song make you want to tweak any other songs?
Oliver Richards: You’re kind of working on 12 songs all at once: the 10 songs on the album, and then two other songs that’ll probably come out a bit later. So we were making those big shifts and changes to Yes Man at the same time as we were recording 11 other songs. I think every album has one song that gets massively transformed. [Album closer] Little Bird got transformed too: it went from being a paper-thin, delicate song into one that massively blooms in the second half. By the time we got into the studio, it became this massive raucous ending to what started off as almost an acoustic song.
As a band you’re spread out across Cardiff, London, Bristol and Barcelona. How do you practice if you’re all based in different places?
Oliver Richards: We haven’t been [living] in the same place since 2018, so we’re very well practiced at coming together from ridiculously far away locations. Being even more spread out now with Dario in Barcelona, a few times a year we spend a whole week together writing. It’s more productive because you’ve got the momentum from day one going into day two, into day three: you end up doing as much as you would do if you were all in the same place. You just have to organise and manage yourselves more than you would typically.
It sounds a bit stressful.
Oliver Richards: Yeah, it’s a lot of work. I mean, to put together an album. I mean, it does amaze me that the four of us and the producer, Charlie, are willing to put in the amount of work that it takes to make something like this record but think it’s worth it and I hope when people listen, they agree.
Domestic Majestic is out now via Libertino Records.
words EMMA WAY
