Silver Teeth are newborns according to its two principals, StevieRay Latham and Josh Flowers. “We both live in South London now,” Latham said, “but Josh is originally from Leeds and I grew up in the South West. We’ve both been writing and gigging individually for well over fifteen years (maybe even twenty) but we officially started Silver Teeth this past year.”
Ten years ago, Flowers was in a folk band called Josh Flowers & The Wild. He also has an EP out (“Side A”) along with another project, a trans-continental duo with Californian Julianna Zachariou called Echobaby. ‘Raining Cats and Dogs’ is their single. His methods for songwriting are, most importantly, to be observant of his surroundings, people and places and the sometime sticky situations they bring upon themselves.
He is fond of using diversions to tell his stories, not exactly of the shaggy dog kind, but the reveals oftentimes carry surprises. For example, ‘San Francisco’ involves the idea of being on one of those fault lines that crisscross California, causing earthquakes to occur at any moment. Underneath, it has to do with a friend being unable to lend him a book because all his books are in San Francisco.
Latham for the most part has done his own thing solo after serving an apprenticeship of sorts under master singer-songwriter Peter Bruntnell. His songs are filled with plaintive longing on a raw edge. His skewed lyricism offers a unique take on the world we live in. After releasing two albums in 2015-16, he has released a series of four EPs, the last coming out in 2022. “Hinterlands” features Latham’s delicate strumming over synths and percussion as on the stream-of-consciousness single, ‘Fugitive,’ which calls on shades of Kurt Vile or Kevin Morby. His latest recorded work was a single with Small Town Jones titled ‘No Apologies.’
Doubling as an artist, the allegorical worlds Latham’s songs inhabit are a construct of his art – striking designs like ‘Remembering the Future,’ done with acrylic, ink and charcoal. Last year’s exhibition at the Plough Arts Centre in Torrington was called “Future Histories.” Interested in the folk tradition as a carrier of cultural memory, Latham created a soundtrack for the exhibition which imagines folk music as rediscovered in a dystopian future, where humankind attempts to uncover social histories by piecing together digital artefacts.
As Silver Teeth, Latham on his Martin acoustic and Flowers on a Gretsch parlour guitar play four songs for this AUK mini-gig, three of their own and the fourth a cover of John Prine’s ‘How Lucky.’ That was an opportune choice as it serves to impart to our listeners how lucky we are to have these two talented musicians presenting their songs. “These were recorded at Andy and Josh’s flat in South London,” Latham offered, “and massive thanks to Andy for letting us take over the living room for the day.”
In order, here is the setlist for the mini-gig with notes from Latham and Flowers:
- The Trade – This song plays with a film noir aesthetic to make a metaphor about a breakup and how dramatic it can feel at the time. It’s one half of a double A side that’s our first release as Silver Teeth. We recorded it with Ellie Mason at her studio, where we tried to balance capturing a raw live feel with some slightly stranger sounds and textures as the song builds. We love playing this one live because it always gets a big response.
- Sometimes (Fun) – This was the first song that we wrote together, and it’s the other half of the double A-side. I remember us talking about why we wanted to write together and one of the goals for the project was to have fun with it because the singer-songwriter genre can be so earnest and melancholy sometimes. We just wanted to do something that felt playful and a bit tongue-in-cheek. The first verse starts with the line ’sometimes I sit and cry into an empty room’ and ends with the refrain ‘but sometimes I like to have more fun,’ and we thought that was funny. Once we had that foundation, the song felt like it wrote itself.
- Apple Core – This is an unreleased song that will probably be our next single. It’s a song about caring for someone and just wanting them to be kind to themselves. The way it’s written though it could be a message for an older relative or it could be a message that you tell yourself, but it’s a song that balances some dissonant and strange chord changes with a message that’s full of softness and love.
- How Lucky – This is a song that we both love, especially the version that John Prine recorded with Kurt Vile. Prine and Vile are songwriters that we both look up to, and we bonded over a shared love of Vile’s songwriting when we first met about ten years ago in a basement in South London. We started playing this song together before we started the Silver Teeth project, so it’s nice to revisit it and it’s just a great message to live your life by.
You can keep up to date with news of Silver Teeth over on their Instagram here. And you can find out what they are each up to in between projects here and here.
