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 JAMES LEES and LUCINDA SHAW from local act SILVER SIRCUS explain to LINDSEY CUTHBERTSON their love of the dark.
Silver Sircus are a delightfully dark electronic group from Brisbane. Consisting of members of local ‘90s band ISIS and produced with the help of the acclaimed Lachlan ‘Magoo’ Gould, their debut EP Sovereignty is theatrical, sinister and hopeful. The creative core of Silver Sircus consists of close friends James Lees and Lucinda Shaw, a duo of very interesting individuals. Shaw, the vocalist, comes from a theatrical background and is currently working on a Tom Waits Cabaret. Lees, the programmer and drummer, is blessed not only with synaesthesia (a trait where one perceives music as colours) but also with a savant-like knowledge of musical artists. With these gifts and years of experience under their belt, the resultant Sovereignty EP is brooding and lyrically brilliant.
“Music is like cooking – it’s like putting all together the right ingredients. I think we all have our strengths and weaknesses, and I believe that a good musician is aware of that. I feel like Lucinda and I are aware of that. Since ISIS we’ve had an almost constant working relationship on various things. It feels like we’ve been friends for three hundred years!”, Lees says on the reasons to play together once more.
Shaw agrees with Lees’ comments. “We kept our friendship going. James really liked the music and felt like ‘let’s not let this go.’”
Lees and Shaw, for explorers of the dark and gloomy, are impeccably polite. Obviously Silver Sircus is their outlet for the ‘demons’ inside all of us. The two also have a vast depth to their artistic backgrounds, citing artists from Patti Smith and Portishead to David Bowie and Shakespeare as creative influences.
“It’s about finding very true human experiences and writing them truly, so when others read it, hear it, listen to it, they’re getting from that truth a universal moment,” Shaw comments.
“It’s my dark side coming out to play. For me art is a brilliant arena to express all the different aspects of human experience. I love artists who embrace that shadow, but turn it into something powerful and hopeful and often tantalising. Lyrics are always going to stem from a lived experience for me and then that will be crafted with poetic license.”
Lees continues on from where Shaw finishes. “Anything that’s dark or sinister or blackly comic – I’m wired to enjoy it. It scratches an itch for me.”
The EP showcases this love of the theatrical and shadowy, with such personal tracks as Acland Street laid alongside the desperate longing of Sovereignty. The EP will be released later this month, and while they are still promoting it, the two artists state that they are sitting on an album’s worth of material. Not intent on rushing anything, Lees revales quietly that the album will be out when it’s ready, regardless of a time frame. Yet again, their experience shines through. For a shadow-loving group such as Silver Sircus, it is this beacon of know-how that seems certain to lead them to a bright and sunny future.
SILVER SIRCUS launch the SOVEREIGNTY EP at The Press Club on July 21.
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