All Quiet On The Northern Front

There’s a theory that the most effective way of making your voice heard in a crowded room lies not in standing on your tip toes and trying to out-din the din, but by fronting down the cacophony with as little noise as possible. Mumble and whisper for long enough, so it runs, and eventually the rest of the room will tune down to your pitch.

In a previous incarnation, Sixty Minute Silence would have happily cleared a space in the middle of the joint and let rip with all manner of noisy notice-me manoeuvres. These days, however, the three-piece seem content to stand in the corner – talking quietly amongst themselves until the rest of the party is ready to join in.
“The songs are very different from our previous band Fallout,” explains frontman Ben McAuley. “That’s why we changed the name. We used to be really into Sonic Youth, so it was very much noisy guitars. It’s not that we’ve grown out of that, but I think we’re interested in taking a different
approach. Ultimately, when you write a song, when you form a band, what you want to do is communicate with other people, and I think we were finding that loads of feedback and distorted guitars was getting in the way of that. We were distancing ourselves from the audience. When we first started we were listening to The Clash and The Manic Street Preachers. We wanted to be in people’s faces. But the change has been pretty organic. Maybe it’s just becoming more grown up.”
It’s rare indeed to hear musicians from these parts talk so openly about communication, but an hour spent supping tea with Ben, drummer Desmond J Mooney, and bass-player Jon Hilditch (the world’s unlikeliest surfer) reveals Sixty Minute Silence to be a band with higher aspirations than their garden variety peers.
“I don’t want to talk about other bands in Belfast,” says Ben. “But it does seem like very few of them have ever actually thought about why they are in a band. Most seem to be doing it because their mates are in bands. They don’t seem to be compelled to do it. I mean some of them are good, even if they aren’t…morally serious about it.”
If Ben hadn’t delivered this last point with a laugh, you would be well within your rights to quit this article right now. Taken alongside the often sombre timbre of the music (a lot of Smog, Palace Brothers and Low records have been ground into the mix), you might begin to suspect that what we have here is merely another bunch of sad-core fanatics who have confused a low serotonin level with a grand artistic calling. But such a judgment would be deeply unfair. There is a refinement and wit to Sixty Minute Silence that suggests they are capable of painting brilliantly with much brighter colours.
“None of our songs are actually that sad,” protests Ben. “They’re not overtly emotional the way emo bands would be. I mean, those guys should really look at themselves and wise up.”
“We’ve never written about anything that hasn’t affected us,” expands Desmond. “We’re not pretending.”
“Dealing with emotions doesn’t mean you sit down and write a song about emotions – 'This is the sad song',” Ben continues. “It’s about transmitting a certain emotional atmosphere and doing it with enough subtlety that it allows the listener to add their own interpretation. I think that’s far more effective.
"I don’t spend much time on lyrics. I’d stick in an image – three if you’re lucky – and hope to evoke something rather than describe it. I don’t think there’s any point in telling stories, it’s much better if you get people thinking for themselves.”b

Sixty Minute Silence play at Eamonn Doran’s, Dublin on March 13