Music and Myth: An Interview with British Sea Power
by Louis Cooke

British Sea Power had a good 2003. "We sing of landscape and memory and the urgency to do it now, in the street and in the fields," the band declared, as it went about its particular, curious mix of indie, new-wave and rural glam. Their debut album, The Decline of British Sea Power on Rough Trade, was named in Q magazine's "Poll of Polls" as the 17th best album released in the world in 2003. The group set out from its East Sussex base to perform live shows across the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, shows breathtaking enough for the Sunday Times to state simply: "The best band in Britain."

Now, after support slots with the Strokes and Interpol, British Sea Power is in the midst of its first substantial headline tour of North America. The day before flying out to Vancouver, British Columbia, bassist/vocalist Hamilton is quietly excited.

"It would be churlish to complain," he says. "Playing there before has been nothing but a pleasure, and this is our longest tour. We're looking forward to visiting all the places we haven't been before — Rhode Island, the Midwest, places in the South like Atlanta, Colorado..."

The band is also very much looking forward to playing SXSW again, he says, after its notorious performance last year.

"Our guitarist got a bit carried away. We were on a bill with several British bands, including the Darkness, who at that time were not known at all, really. We'd never heard of them before, but we all thought they were brilliant... and I think maybe there was a subconscious feeling of 'How do you follow that?'

"Our guitarist and his short-circuited brain came to the conclusion that the way was to throw massive bar stools from a great height at the audience. We can laugh about it now, but at the time, you know, someone could have got hurt. We're not the sort of band who wants to injure our audience, particularly."

Things don't always get so violent, but British Sea Power, like previous tour-mates the Flaming Lips, puts more into its live shows than just its music. The band's dress sense is, in its members own words, "the militant cabin boy look" — think off-duty WWII soldiers, or '50s mountaineers at base camp. Every band member displays disturbing thousand-yard stares. Lead singer Yan often prefers to do exercises like star jumps and squat thrusts rather than dance. Keyboardist Eamon is partial to banging a tattered marching drum. The stage is invariably littered with stuffed animals and decked with foliage — which causes its own problems when touring abroad.

"We've learned — or at least our tour managers have — that it's sometimes quite dangerous to get hold of foliage in America. They were attacked by someone as they were — quite carefully — pruning a few branches in New York. It was some kind of community garden, and this guy was obviously involved, and he actually physically attacked them. They were quite taken aback."

Lyrical references and evocative music create the romantic yet eerie atmosphere of a Britain from the past. "There are definitely elements of where we come from that we like to highlight, or celebrate, in a way," says Hamilton. Do American audiences react differently to British ones? "Well, the audience we're playing to now — a lot of them are quite Anglophile... it's clear they quite like it."

As well as delving into its own country's history, the band also takes in curio elements from further afield. The band's newsletters, signed "Old Sarge," are dated using the French revolutionary calendar and enthuse about Scandinavian myths and eastern European architecture, among other things. New single "A Lovely Day Tomorrow" will only be released officially in the Czech Republic, with English and Czech versions (the latter recorded with ambient group the Ecstasy of St. Theresa) and a recording of a song popular in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. And early single "The Spirit of St Louis" is a simultaneous nod to Charles Lindbergh and Iggy Pop.

"The interesting thing — the thing we must admit we didn't know at the time — is that in America the town is called St. Louis, rather than St. 'Louie,' so we're mispronouncing it. The song 'Louie Louie' obviously has a strong connection with Iggy Pop, but the little poetic device doesn't work in America. I guess until we play St. Louis, if we ever do, maybe even no one will point it out."

While British Sea Power draws from the past, it does not appropriate any one part of it completely — it is not "retro." Different influences can be detected in the music, but overall it feels refreshingly new and different (the name thrown around most commonly is Joy Division, but even that misses the mark by some way). Its live performances are too intense, and Hamilton is a sincere interviewee. Perhaps as a result of being so tricky to pin down, the band simultaneously draws such descriptions as "art rock" and "ridiculous," neither of which bothers its members very much.

"Art rock: words and music together — a radical multimedia statement! It's odd that it should be such a remarkable idea. If people want to call us that, fine, but it's not a term of reference we use ourselves. And the idea of being ridiculous as something you should worry or be concerned about — we would probably contend that we're all pretty ridiculous to some extent or other. A lot of the best bands are ridiculous and brilliant."

The more British Sea Power is subjected to analysis, the more it seems to be able to evade it, proving only that it is somehow more than the sum of its parts. The group's absurdity inevitably leads to accusations of pretentiousness (one of the album's tracks, "Lately," is a 14-minute epic), but the live experience makes it difficult not to admire the effort it puts in to provide something special. As Old Sarge writes succinctly in one communiqué: "Music and myth are machines for the suspension of time. These are mechanisms for which British Sea Power have a full set of keys."

Don't demand that British Sea Power make sense and the band gleefully retains some of the ambiguity and mystery music can have. Much the same as Hamilton's own definition of Frank Black as Pixies front man: not typical at all, but "so good it doesn't even matter."

E-mail Louis Cooke at louis at mintcake dot com.