I recently had the chance to sit down (stand outside in an alley) with Stu McGill from Silent Knight ahead of their show with Unleash The Archers in Perth, and he graciously gave me five minutes of his time before the show. “We [Silent Knight] are just doing the one show in Perth. When the tour for Unleash The Archers got announced, there was no Perth show at all. But I love this band and I thought… why are they not playing in Perth? So we reached out to the national promoters and put an offer in for a show in Perth and they accepted and we managed to get it here. They agreed to it so I’m pretty happy to have them play over here, so we look after them and get to play with them too.”
Talking about his love for the band, Stu says, “I loved them when I first heard the Apex album, 5, 6, 7 years ago, something like that, I really liked that album and I have been following them since then. I have always thought they should be coming to Australia.” Talking about musical influences, he says, “We are in the same power metal genre, I get to just enjoy listening to them and all the albums they’ve released.”
Silent Knight have an upcoming tour of their own. I asked Stu to tell me about it , and an excited smile flashed across his face. “We are going to the UK and Germany. We’ve been to Germany before for Headbangers Festival over there, so we’re going back for that again in July. We are playing in the UK this time too at the Cart and Horses pub in London, which is where Iron Maiden started, and in Southampton as well.” I asked Stu what someone going along to one of his shows can expect. “We are playing a show in Perth on June 28th, before we go. So, we are going to do that little send-off show and are going to play the same set we are playing when we go away. Its just a really high energy show, all fast songs, upbeat and positive, feeling good and yeah, everyone really gets behind it. Energetic is probably the best word to describe it.”
We did come back to musical influences; I asked Stu to list his top three. “For the songs I am writing, especially back in the beginning? Iron Maiden, Megadeath, Hammerfall is in there, Helloween, there’s a bunch. All the classic heavy metal bands.” I asked Stu to tell me about his process with song writing and how he goes about it. “Well I don’t do many lyrics, I might just have a line here or there and think ‘oh yeah, that’s cool’ and I’ve done a few of those. Or a song title. So Cam, the other guitarist, and I do most of the writing. We just do four or five songs each and we meet up and we start just nit-picking them an arguing about them and restructuring them. Eventually we come to something we are both happy with, and Cam does most of the lyrics. On the last album, we had Dan singing which he wasn’t on the previous. And there’s a song on the most recent album called Dark and Mysterious Times which I co-wrote with Dan for his solo album a few years earlier, but we re-jigged it for Silent Knight so its more Silent Knight-esque. So, there’s two versions of that song but he did all the lyrics for that song.”
I asked Stu if he could invite any musician to dinner, past or present, who he would choose. “That’s a really hard question because I have got to meet heaps of awesome musicians and cool people, who some I’ve thought were going to be really cool and weren’t and others who some are extremely fucking cool. So I’d probably just go back to one I’ve already met, like Hansi from Blind Guardian, who was here a couple of months ago. He is the nicest man pretty much that I’ve ever met. I saw him a couple of days in a row because we were helping out plus playing the show with them, and he hugged me every time he saw me, he was just so warm. I would hang out with him more because he’s just such a genuine cool dude. There are some grumpy people in metal and that’s okay. In this job, people are tired. The Unleash the Archers guys tonight, this is the fifth show in five days that they’ve played. They’re supposed to have a few days off and its Brittney’s birthday today, and they agreed to do the show, they could have done anything they wanted in Australia and they chose to come here in Perth playing tonight. A month ago mid-May I thought wow they are going to get a shock if they think this is Australian winter, but its cooled down a bit tonight for them.”
To end the interview, I asked Stu what one thing makes Silent Knight stand out from the Perth metal scene. “That’s not fair, they’re going to think I’m an asshole if I say anything. But we are far better looking and we all shower daily, sometimes even twice.” And that’s a wrap on my quick alley way chat with Stu.
You can catch Silent Knight playing on June 28th 2024 at Amplifier with special guests All This Filth and Amberdown, tickets available here.
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Photos by Shotweiler Photography
