British Sea Power Interview January 2011 [Part 2]
By: Stan Morgan
On your past albums you’ve had songs about humans’ influence on the environment, has that carried over onto the new album?
Yan: We were pretty in your face before, songs about melting icebergs etc. I think it’s taken for granted these days that that’s in the background of everything, so we didn’t think it was worth retreading old ground. Now it’s like ‘Nature’s going downhill, so....let’s go to the pub for a bit!’ It’s just part of life now. The new album’s more like an alien’s point of view life, descriptive rather than judgemental. We’re not trying to change the world like Michael Jackson or anything. There’s a great bit in his film This is It where a JCB comes through the back of the stage and he lies down in front of it. It’s an idea we’d have done if we had the money.
Hamilton: Not for the message, we just want a JCB on stage really.
How are you planning the stage set-up for your next tour?
Noble: Shit, we haven’t really thought about that yet. We should probably get on that.
Phil: We want to make a bridge that goes over the drum kit, but I think we need a much bigger stage to do that. We’ve been supporting the Manic Street Preachers recently, but I’m not sure they’d be too happy if we did that with them...
Yan: I’m in the process of making a giant robotic owl. Seriously. I would have bought one but I wouldn’t know where to get one. It’s 10 feet tall with lasers for eyes and full head rotation.
Noble: We’re actually rehearsing for this tour, which we’ve never really done properly before, so it might be the only chance you’ll ever get to see us properly rehearsed. Hopefully it will make us better.
Do you feel you sometimes don’t get as much recognition as you deserve?
Yan: We’re definitely better than a lot of bands out there, there’s a lot of rubbish ones around. We’d rather be interesting and different rather than have massive success. We always thought we were making popular music, ourselves.
What do you want to achieve with Valhalla Dancehall?
Noble: I would like exactly 300% more success, I’ve thought about it. The album’s three times as good.
Yan: It would be three times as good to get three times as much success. But seriously, we really would like it to do well.
Do you worry about reviews before you release anything?
Noble: A bit. If they say something negative that’s fine if we can see where they’re coming from, it’s just when you read something and it’s obvious they haven’t listened to the album enough.
Yan: I read one the other day, the guy took the first half of one line from a song, the second half of a line from another song, got the meaning of both of them wrong, lined it up with a quote about the single, which they said was about the album, and used it to prove that we were full of shit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that...
There’s a bit of a pattern of having a longish track at the end of your albums, is there a reason?
Noble: There’s not is there? Actually, you’re right!
Hamilton: I think structurally a long song can be a bit of a meander if it was in the middle of an album. We like long songs and we like short songs, it gives people a chance to actually sit and listen.
Yan: I think people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter aren’t they? So you can’t put a demanding long song first because you’re going to lose a lot of customers. All decisions we make are purely for commercial reasons *laughs*.
Have you got a plan for what you’re going to do after this album yet?
Noble: We’re going to make another one, and another one, and another one.
Yan: We’ve already got about eight songs written for the next one, so it could be done in the near future maybe. We want to follow the N-Dubz route, one album every year. Very hard working boys, them.
Phil: We don’t want to spend much time away, we want to keep things ticking over.
Yan: We’re just going to keep going until we win or lose really.
Artists in this article: British Sea Power