British Sea Power - London, UK, Autumn 2003
By: Toby L
Attentive. Cumbrian-now-Brightonites British Sea Power certainly know a good thing when they see it. In this case, it's rockfeedback's attempt in earnest to relax two of the quintet - vocalist Yan, and bassist-brother Hamilton - amid the bare confines of their dressing-room for a show this evening. We scatter all manner of leaves and twigs across the floor to the clear joy of the musicians present. They both crack a sinister-cum-satisfied grin. 'Would you like a beer,' Hamilton gestures to us, a reward for the decorative efforts. We accept.
As if it weren't clear already, BSP don't do rock 'n' roll the typical way; whereas most arty-punks would be content with a polite queue of barely-legal groupies surfacing outside their door and around the corridor, or litigious substances piled high amid a busted amplifier, instead, the top-40 shattering 'Power are quite happily entertained by the mere presence of woodland norms (more of which later...).
So as a scent of musky, decaying tree-bark arouses the nostrils, we try our hardest to investigate one of the UK's fastest rising, most consistently acclaimed, and stars-adored bunch of newcomers. Famed for a classic debut on Rough Trade Records back in 2002 - 'Remember Me', released to a flurry of giddy reviews and hyping media-luvvies - what's most fascinating about British Sea Power's progression is the sheer, aching duration it took. From this point onwards, two further singles emerged - 'The Spirit Of St Louis'/'The Lonely', and 'Childhood Memories' - yet the initial press-fervour calmed and anticipation for a debut-album became reserved, many distracted by a burgeoning re-emergence of garage-punk.
Yet, then - the twist; upon the eventual release of the band's edgy, experimental opus, 'The Decline Of British Sea Power', the conveyor belt begins to speed up once again. Tours sell out, a preceding single - 'Carrion'/'Apologies To Insect Life' - makes the charts, and the band are personally invited for on-the-road outings from landmark-acts. Come the re-release of 'Remember Me', the band has hit number 30 in the charts, and are headlining to four-figure audiences. It's an evolution the band can summarise in one emotion.
'Relief,' sighs Yan. 'I didn't really have any expectations anyway. Playing that last main tour Pulp did, in the forests, was pretty special. They were an amazing band and they've pretty much split up now, I guess, and that'd have been one of the last things they've done in England at least. Then touring with The Flaming Lips was exciting; we were at a creative-peak at the time, where everything seemed to be coming together.
'Making the record, though,' he proceeds, 'I mostly thought about wanting to get home and hoping it would work. We started off with a fairly daft idea that we were trying to capture the feeling of a Turner sea-scape painting; and I think we at least got fairly close.'
Why such a quality?
'I don't know,' he ponders, his eyebrows rising in unison. I've now got seagulls on our new b-side song because loads live around me; there's a seagull called Gus, and his newborn Eric who's just started learning to fly - he's pretty good, he took his first proper flight yesterday.'
Are these your own seagulls?
Yan quietly grumbles at our ignorance. 'He's not mine, because he's wild. I've got some admiration for him; he's a big guy... Well, I call him a 'guy', but he's actually a woman... I call him Gus for some reason... Anyway, next door were trying to put some new windows in, for a converted loft type of thing, and Gus completely saw off the guy who was climbing up the ladder, and scared him away, in protection for his young. They're pretty big birds, you know.'
British Sea Power - if you hadn't guessed - are smitten on the great outdoors, hence our earlier donation of some branches to their living-quarters tonight.
'People don't take animals seriously,' stirs Hamilton, almost whispering. 'They go out for a walk on a Sunday and go, 'Ooh, look - there's a squirrel,' but they won't actually sit and talk to them, or hang around with sheep or something. I'd like to play concerts to sheep, because no-one ever does.'
Is this genuine, or are you taking the piss?
'No, it's genuine,' nods Yan ardently. 'I like seagulls, and he likes sheep. Animals are pretty smart; people separate themselves from them, especially in cities, some even seeing them as a pest to get rid of.'
Are you both vegetarians?
'Yep,' nods Yan.
So is Hamilton. 'I am too, but not all of us in the band are. I never really liked meat anyway. If you think about it, eating meat means that you end up with rotting flesh in your belly.'
'I'm not on like any real veggie-campaign. I've forgotten about that whole thing - I just don't see meat as food anymore,' reasons Yan, admirably not preaching, for long at least. 'If you think about it too, if a cow is slaughtered, it gets stressed as f**k and pumps adrenalin in its body, and that gets caught in the meat and will affect how your mind works when you eat it.'
Despite the steely stares and clear, peevish affixation of their subject, Yan and Hamilton are favourably passionate over their cause, without provoking alienation. It's a line that some journalists and critics have had trouble responding to, doubting the band's sincerity, BSP often a victim of their own eccentricity.
'Each to their own, I suppose,' shrugs Yan. 'It's not hard to be left of centre nowadays really.'
'Sometimes we say things and people make a big deal out of them; we're just honest,' acknowledges his brother.
Yan cracks one of his slightly common, wild glares. 'The main misconception is that people think we have stuffed birds onstage, but they're actually all plastic. I have got stuffed birds at home, though.'
Yet wouldn't taxidermy go against your principles as wildlife-lovers; surely, it's just unsettling?
'But that's why it's nice in a way,' responds Yan, curiously. 'I've got a fox's head at home, with its paw in front of it, surrounded by straw and grass and everything, and you might think, 'That's a bit of a weird thing for a vegetarian to have their house,' but it is a hundred years old, isn't gonna come back, and is kinda beautiful, but disturbing at the same time... I mean, I don't want people going out shooting things so I can put them on the shelf, but if it's an antique and it doesn't happen anymore, then that's fair enough. I think a lot of it came from hunting, and then there's naturalists that probably did it.'
Needless to say, in an age of few opinions and little tendency to cut against the thrust, such viewpoints - whether agreeable or not - are an augmented treat. Best, though, is the band's penchant for elevating and rather edgy experimentation, aurally - they muster shady, distant melodies, layer them in crisp and shuddering guitars, before dousing a surge of eerie white-noise over the top. And you're still able to hum along.
'I don't really listen to many modern bands, so I don't get a chance to get disappointed, but I probably would be,' flares Yan over current music. We look at our work more like a film, with scenes in it... We have probably also got more varied subject-matter that a lot of bands, and once you've got that, you need atmosphere. You can't really alter that once you've started, you just have to find a way to fit it all together.'
'It's all like David Lynch's approach to filmmaking,' continues Hamilton. 'He's big on atmosphere, and when the cameras are on, it's like a sacred moment, and we ourselves try to make every musical moment as special as it can be. It's easy just to get a producer and knock it out, but it's not what we're interested in - that's why we recorded the current album ourselves.'
How smooth was the convergence-process of the recorded ideas into the live-arena?
'It was our first go at making a record, so it's tough to tell,' explains Hamilton thoughtfully. 'I do prefer it when everyone's playing together - for example, 'Apologies To Insect Life' was recorded live - but some of the songs, we built up.'
'We have got a song which we can't even really play - 'The Lonely', which is a lot of people's favourite song,' smiles Yan. 'And you get people saying, 'Why don't you play that 'Lonely' song more live,' and it's because it sounds shit when we try to. I think it worked about once. We even had Paul from Interpol join us onstage to help us try and play it, a bit of that Interpol professionalism. But it still failed. But I did sabotage him with a completely out-of-tune guitar.'
What with the past featuring thirty-minute renditions of songs, stage-guests inclusive of over-sized grisly bears (fake, we hope) and random friends and fans, depict BSP for us live...
Hamilton raises a pervy smirk. 'Open your legs, and we'll ease it in.'
'It's beyond words,' answers Yan, his head shaking. 'We practice before and we just play our songs, but what happens at shows, we can't control - it's probably down to the spirit and moment in the room at that time with all the people, this kind of to-and-fro relationship.'
Hamilton regains a more temperate reply. 'I think if you saw us live before hearing us on the radio or something, it's a much better context; you can see our faces. But it'd probably be a bit strange to hear the record and then come and see it.'
'Lately, though,' opens up Yan, 'we've been recording on a pump-organ in a village-church, haven't we?'
Hamilton enthuses alongside his sibling. 'It's this beautiful, little church, like the smallest one in Sussex; there's no electricity there, and just a pump-organ, right in the middle of this wood. I don't know if we're meant to play it or not, but we go up there. I sleep there, sometimes.'
What about more perverse actions occurring there?
Hamilton, detecting our unsavoury inference, lets us down, before entering on a tangent. 'I haven't had sex there, no. Though, Noble's (guitarist of BSP) brother was in a movie once - he's an actor - and one of the other actors had sex in a graveyard during one of the scenes... We actually recorded our album near a graveyard, come to think about it; you could hear the foxes attack the chickens outside if you listened close enough... But, no, I wouldn't do anything like that inside the church. Maybe just outside.'
Yan erupts laughing. 'Or on the pump-organ,' he offers.
Suddenly, the door bursts open; after an intoxicating half-hour ranging from foxes to seagulls and coital actions in churches, those entering could as easily be the authorities or a horde of goats, and it'd still be little surprise. But, alas, it's the rest of British Sea Power (save from drummer Wood) - percussionist/keyboard-player Eamon and the aforementioned Noble.
With the news of a sound-check nearing, we make a gesture to soon depart, but not without enquiring just why we should buy British Sea Power.
'You've gotta listen to the whole thing,' remarks Yan, commenting on their sole LP thus far, 'because - otherwise - you're a wuss.'
Hamilton nods. 'It's only forty-five minutes out of your life.'
'And it's like if you go to see an Ingmar Bergmann (Swedish director) film or something,' Yan persists. 'You can try and get the idea in the first few seconds or minutes, but if you sit through the whole thing, it's an entirely different experience.'
And where next?
'I'm hoping for Rough Trade to pay for a sailing-boat in order for publicity,' states Yan. 'I'd just sleep on it, though.'
'For me,' steps in Noble, 'constant evolution, to keep making things better.'
And a summary of the group as a whole?
A substantial pause occurs.
'Half way between Chuck Berry and William Turner,' sniggers Noble.
Whilst Yan bags the final say. 'We're rock 'n' roll,' he grins, 'from the days before rock 'n' roll was even invented.'
Well, stranger things are out there. Not many, mind.
Artists in this article: British Sea Power