PRINTBritish Sea Power sets sail
English rockers turn it down to 10
Courtesy of Rough Trade
British Sea Power is (from left) Noble, Yan, Hamilton and Wood. The hyperliterate Brighton, England-based band formed in 2001.
May 1, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
British Sea Power has always been drawn to innovation. In the British band’s eight-year existence, it has sought venues and studios that few would consider suitable for the recording and performance of music. Its music has resounded through slate mines and 19th-century water towers.
Yet, this tendency toward the peculiar goes beyond sheer novelty. “It’s like bringing extra things into rock music,” says bassist Martin Noble, known onstage as simply Noble. “Rock music doesn’t have to be a basic form (with) no content to it.” In using unconventional locations, the band has striven to bring something more to what it believes is the stagnant face of rock music.
The question posed by the title of the band’s third album, Do You Like Rock Music?, is answered by British Sea Power with a resounding yes. Despite the band’s forward-thinking taste in venues, the music hearkens back to The Joshua Tree — U2’s most bombastic era.
The album, which deals with a wide spectrum of material ranging from economic migration to floods on Canvey Island, embraces such potent subject matter by using “small stories (that are) parallels to things that are all over the world, so everybody has them,” says Noble. But the depth of the music is only to be matched by the ferocity and passion with which it is played, a trait that has been around since the band’s beginning.
In the first incarnations of their live show, the band members knew that they were allowed only a brief amount of time to “make the biggest impact we possibly could,” says Noble. Those early half-hour sets were driving and merciless.
However, British Sea Power doesn’t wholly disdain the conventional concert hall set-up, laden with towering speakers. Noble says that the band sometimes finds itself yearning for a return to normalcy after spending too much time outside the box.
Noble says the band felt that way this past November after playing a show at the Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in Britain at 1,732 feet above sea level. “They did just let people fall asleep anywhere in the pub,” Noble says. “And they had pet sheep in there and chickens, like inside the pub. It was a brilliant weekend. But you can’t do that all the time, you do have to take the normal shows, otherwise it’s not physically possible.”
Sometimes it’s just better to go back to the standard bars, venues and concert halls that have become synonymous with rock music, says Noble. There are times when that need becomes clearer, like when the band’s manager was nearly impaled with a pair of pruning sheers as he clipped branches from a private garden while setting up a stage in New York.
The need to take things down a notch also extends to the band’s setlist. “You can’t do an hour and a half of going absolutely berserk,” says Noble. “We’ve got a lot of slower ones now and some quite beautiful pieces of music, which are going to slow the set down quite a bit.”
Noble is quick to point out that even though there are some more mellow moments this time around — mellow in the sense that only one band member recently “smashed three teeth and cut his chin open, got eight stitches in there” — those are only fleeting moments.
Regardless of what the current tour might bring, what is amply clear is that British Sea Power will continue to contest the norm and brings with it a striking vitality and energy wherever the band travels.
