Silent Running release first new album in over 30 years
Today Friday April 1st, 2022 Silent Running release ‘Follow the Light’ their 4th studio album and the first in 33 years!
So, what took so long?
Silent Running signed with EMI in 1983 and released their debut album ‘Shades of Liberty’ in 1984.
The band then signed with Atlantic Records (the first Irish band to do so) and released ‘Walk on Fire’ in 1987 and ‘Deep’ in 1989 after which the band folded for 30 years.
Lead singer and songwriter Peter Gamble explains how ‘Follow the Light’ came to be made:
“Silent Running’s fourth album ‘Follow the Light’ came to life more by accident than design. A hastily arranged 3 song guest appearance for a band member’s wife’s birthday party in 2018 re lit a fire within us all and we started rehearsing just for the joy of making music together.
After a period of rehearsal, we wondered if we could manage to play our first gig for over 20 years. So, expecting only to play to our family and friends who couldn’t get out of it we booked Voodoo, a rock club in Belfast, on June 14, 2019.
Then we discovered a Silent Running Facebook fan group and advertised the show and to our great surprise fans from Scotland and England travelled to the show and we sold out. Having a gig to play also ignited a creative flame in me to write my first song for 30 years and the song ‘Lost Boy’ debuted at Voodoo.
The natural next step was to record ‘Lost Boy’ and release it as a single which we did in November 2019 and for reasons I can’t explain I had a huge surge of creativity and the songs on ‘Follow the Light’ just poured out of me. So, we thought why not record a fourth album produced, arranged, financed, and promoted by ourselves? Being able to make all the creative decisions ourselves was very liberating although in a band of 5 people with very strong opinions not always easy to reach agreement!
I had never been overly prolific but now songs just kept pouring out of me and pretty much every song I wrote is on the album. In the Autumn of 2019, we returned to Novatech, a recording studio just outside of Belfast, to start recording what would become ‘Follow the Light’. It felt very nostalgic as it was the studio we used to demo songs for our albums in the eighties. We recorded just one night a week and also rehearsed and demoed new material as we went, although everything was greatly
slowed up by the Coronavirus pandemic which shut the studio for several months during the lockdowns.
I feel ‘Follow the Light’ is Silent Running’s best album to date with the best and most consistent songs, and the band’s arrangements of the songs are really strong. As a songwriter, I always felt I could do better than the songs I wrote in the eighties and was a little disappointed in myself then. My favourites were probably the more collaborative efforts we wrote together as a band; songs like ‘Emotional Warfare’ for example, so it has felt really good to produce what we believe is a special album.
However, what really matters is what other people think!”
Follow the Light is now available to stream and download on all major streaming sites: https://fanlink.to/FollowTheLight
A limited-edition CD version of ‘Live Right Now’ is available on Bandcamp: https://silent-running.bandcamp.com/album/follow-the-light
Silent Running will be launching ‘Follow the Light’ with a gig in Voodoo, Belfast on Friday April 29th, 2022 when their special guests will be ‘Shock Treatment’.
