Our Daughter's Wedding

Career

Our Daughters Wedding was a synthpop trio from New York, though two of its members originally came from California. The band consisted of Layne Rico on Synare synthesizer, Keith Silva handling vocals and keyboards, and Scott Simon playing bass-synth and saxophone. Their unusual name came from a type of do-it-yourself photo album. Silva explained that you could buy a simple album at Woolworth’s with a stencil for writing something like “Baby’s First Year” or “Our Daughter’s Wedding” on the cover, calling it “so simple it’s disgusting.”

Before forming this group, Silva and Rico played together in a band called Human Bends in their hometown of Fairfield, located in California’s Bay Area. After relocating to New York, Our Daughters Wedding made its debut in 1979 with Silva, Rico, and a woman identified only as Vanessa. Simon soon took Vanessa’s place. The trio’s first independently funded single, “Lawnchairs,” was released in 1980 and climbed to number 31 on the Billboard Disco Chart and number 49 on the UK Singles Chart in August 1981. They toured alongside major acts such as U2, Duran Duran, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Iggy Pop, and The Psychedelic Furs, and frequently appeared as guest hosts on MTV. Their television credits also included programs on both BBC and ITV, including an appearance in the first episode of the ITV drama “Jangles” (titled “Opportunity”), which starred Hazel O’Connor and Jesse Birdsall.

In 1981, the band released the Digital Cowboy EP on EMI America, produced by Colin Thurston and recorded at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in England. The EP’s liner notes specified that no sequencers were used. The track “Target for Life” bore a strong resemblance to early Talk Talk hits that emerged a year later. Besides “Lawnchairs,” the EP included “Red Alert,” “Dance Floor,” and “No One’s Watching.” Notably, the song “Digital Cowboy” itself was not included on the EP; Scott Simon later collaborated with the band Hyperbubble to record it for Hyperbubble’s 2017 album Western Ware.

The group’s 1982 album Moving Windows was co-produced by David Spradly, who wrote “Atomic Dog” and was a member of P-Funk, giving the music a forward-looking hip hop sound. Despite being locked into a recording contract with no record or tour support, the band spent a year touring the United States with The Psychedelic Furs. Our Daughters Wedding disbanded in 1984 but reunited in 2012 under Dreamfield Records to release a new EP, “Life’s A Party.” After the group’s initial breakup, Layne Rico joined Gogoplex, which released a single in 1986. For live performances as a trio, the band used equipment including the Roland Corporation RS-09, MicroMoog, Prophet-5, Sequential Circuits Pro-1, Synare 2 percussion synthesizer, and Electro-Harmonix DRM-32 drum machine.