The silver scene

About The silver scene

A far cry from most girls her age, by the time Belinda Lee was 14 she was already strapping on the Les Paul and performing live in bars and clubs across her hometown of Perth, Western Australia... the youthful beginning of what was to become a life-long love affair with the stage.

Eventually called Lash, Belinda Lee’s first band was in some ways typical of every ‘first band’, but in many more ways a world apart. Formed in 1997, Lash found their feet early on, winning a West Australian Music Industry Association WAMi Award for their track Aloha Mr Hand; garnering the attention of producer Andrew Klippel, whose work with Australian acts The Vines and The Veronicas was the perfect set of credentials for Lash’s style of overdriven pop.

Signing Lash to his label, Engine Room, Klippel co-produced the band’s debut album The Beautiful And The Damned with Barry Palmer – an Australian production luminary who had worked with such immense acts as Hunters & Collectors. The results of this team-up were both commercially successful and artistically enriching for Belinda Lee, whose blossoming penchant for classic song-writing was already gaining stride and attention.

Earning the Australian music industry’s highest honour by being nominated for two ARIA Awards for Best New Artist Single; tracks Take Me Away and Beauty Queen were overflowing with the hooks and pop nous that Klippel and Palmer had already spotted in Belinda Lee’s song-writing.

The kind of songs that radio just loves.

With their album debuting in the Australian Top 50, Lash’s singles were added to high rotation airplay nationally, opening the door for every band’s favourite part of the job: touring.

Quickly becoming a recognisable name on the national touring circuit, Lash hit the road with the likes of The Living End, Eskimo Joe and Ash; solidifying their own reputation as an incendiary live act capable of stepping up to any stage and delivering the goods. And as the band continued to tour, the stages kept getting bigger and bigger.

As did the crowds.

Performing in front of 20,000+ people at both the Homebake and Big Day Out festivals, and then a staggering 50,000 people at Rumba; Lash were given a true baptism of fire on the road. And as a naturally adventurous soul, Belinda Lee used the opportunities at her feet to keep life interesting.

While her band was winning at the Romanian Stag Awards (whose previous winners include fellow Australian songstress Kylie Minogue) Belinda Lee was getting her hands dirty in the Sydney Army Orchestra, travelling throughout the villages of East Timor, performing for the far-away-stationed Australian troops.

An entirely different universe from the razzle and dazzle of performing live on European TV to a 250,000+ audience in the wake of the Stag Awards.

And Belinda Lee’s career would flourish as a result of this flexibility and sense of adventure.

By the end of the Lash’s lifespan, Belinda Lee had become a seasoned performer on live TV, having performed on Pepsi Live, Channel [v], and Rove [LIVE] – Australia’s highest-rating variety talk-show (with 1,000,000+ weekly viewers)... but, sadly, it was the end of Lash’s lifespan.

With the band’s lead singer settling down to raise a family, Belinda Lee took the brave step of carrying on by herself, once again teaming up with Barry Palmer to record a solo EP in 2005. The project was documented in the ABC programme The Hit Game, and with a rejuvenated energy and confidence, Belinda Lee started a new band that would see her take on her traditional role of song-writer, but add a new one entirely... lead singer.

Driven by her powerful vocal delivery and love of hard-edged guitar sounds, The Silver Scene was a band more true to Belinda Lee’s creative vision. More potent, more direct, and more vivacious; The Silver Scene was a collision of Belinda Lee’s two biggest loves: music and Fine Art. Her upbringing of ’60s rock’n’roll married itself to her love of cross-medium artistic pioneers such as Andy Warhol, and The Silver Scene presented a more sophisticated and self-aware generation of Belinda Lee’s songs.

Poetically, two such songs – Breeding Time and Sleep Away Your Dreams – were featured in the 2007 film Dugong, which went on to win an award at that year’s Sundance Film Festival... a universally-respected endorsement in itself.

For her next generation of songs, Belinda Lee teamed up with in-demand producer Nick Littlemore (Empire Of The Sun), whose own creative daringness made him a perfect match. Tracking in Sydney and New York, before handing the songs to mixer extraordinaire Andy Baldwin; the project has been Belinda Lee’s most rewarding and accomplished to date.

With this recording under her arm, and a seemingly inexhaustible well of creative energy at her disposal, Belinda Lee is looking at this – the next chapter of her career – with a sense of destiny.

As part of a career that began at such an early age, the here-and-now is the highest altitude that Belinda Lee has ever reached, but it is by no means the summit of the mountain.

The difference between those that make it up to the top, and those who don’t, is simply a case of who has the most heart to see the next precipice and start climbing for it.

And to that end, Belinda Lee’s history speaks for itself.

Loud and clear.