British Sea Power
Behind the Scenery
Published by Under The Radar
If you’ve seen British Sea Power live, you know they fancy birds. Their stage is decked with tree branches and winged taxidermy, setting a scene something like the one in which these Brighton, England, transplants grew up. Midway through their new album, Open Season, between tracks of rapturously English guitar rock, birds can be heard chirping, along with a faint crunching sound. “Drink yourself of greenery/Become part of the scenery,” sings single-named vocalist/guitarist Yan, as the beautiful, slow-building “North Hanging Rock” gets underway.
Single-named guitarist Noble (none of the five members fancy surnames) explains the natural ambience: “Yan did the singin’ outside at nighttime, just with a microphone in the courtyard. If you listen to the start of that, you can hear these crunchy noises, and that’s him walkin’ around on the gravel outside.”
Three-fifths of British Sea Power—Yan, bassist Hamilton (also Yan’s brother), and drummer Woody—come from Cumbria, a rustic, mythically rich region in the northwest of England. And they all seem to prefer their island’s scenic spots to the bustle of London, a place they largely manage to avoid. In 2001, after living in Reading for a time, they moved south to the picturesque seaside town of Brighton. Part of Open Season was recorded amidst the rural splendor of Rockfield, South Wales, in a studio that afforded the opportunity to record even drums outdoors.
As early as the demo stage, Open Season soaked up the scenery. “We rented out a barn in the countryside and demo-ed stuff there,” says Noble. “It snowed while we were there, and there were gale force winds shakin’ the barn, and there’s some sheep in the field, and it’s really atmospheric. The atmosphere of that place managed to get on the record.”
Yan adds, “The description which ended up coming up more often than any other and which I think comes through lyrically as well, is a sense of spring time, of new things. There’s a sadness of leaving behind good things, but it’s what you have to do to move on.”
“The other one kind of had a windswept, cold, by-the-sea feel,” says the singer of the band’s magnificent 2003 debut, The Decline of British Sea Power. “This one’s more like a forest or something.” The singer attributes Open Season’s “warm, inland feel” to both the barn setting and the fact that many of the tracks were written during breaks between summer festival gigs.
“Yeah, it’s more of a human, emotional album, about feelings and things,” says Yan when I ask if he’d backed off some of the literary density of The Decline, an ambitious aural tome packed with tidal guitars, poetic imagery and historical references. “I think [Open Season] is a kind of reaction, ’cause we spent so much time touring and kinda living British Sea Power, and you have these ideas and concepts and things. We didn’t really have a lot of time left, so it was written in a break, almost like a holiday period. I think I just needed to get away from it all. It’s kind of a more personal, truthful album.”
It stands that the frilly verbiage of the first album contains clues to the same subjective states, so I ask Yan how he merges the personal and the mythical. “You just try not to separate them too much,” he says, “just in the way you think in your ordinary life. I don’t know why—haven’t read about him for years—but I remember reading a biography of Napoleon, and I normally kind of imagine these people more like friends. Maybe I should separate the personal and the mythical more. [laughs] You get some strange sort of facts about him, about how apparently he had quite big lungs. He was apparently a very deep breather, and that was one of the physical reasons, people think, why one person might behave in a certain way or maybe have intelligence or whatever. I remember he also recommended really long baths instead of sleeping. You learn things like that, and then you kind of think of them as ordinary people. Nobody isn’t an ordinary person. I don’t really separate them out.”
So did Napoleon find his way into a song?
“No, but I do take very long baths nowadays. [laughs] It was more some of his thinking—what he did wasn’t really what impressed me—it was the fact that he had a practical mind in terms of providing the basic things for his troops. He kind of took care of details.”
These guys read books (Cumbria is Wordsworth country, Yan informs). In fact they bring several liberal disciplines to the singular mind/body experience that is British Sea Power. Yan, a painter who also studied typography, assists in sleeve design. Woody, an illustrator, helps with the same and hopes to eventually produce an animated video for the band. Hamilton, a former film student, has shot most of the band’s videos to date. Keyboardist/percussionist Eamon studied art history, and Noble, zoology and psychology.
So Noble’s the one responsible for the animal friends on stage, I reckon. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. “If you put all our areas together and then the fact that everyone was brought up in the country, that’s pretty much British Sea Power.”
The animals and tree branches, the random pieces of military attire and an array of dangerous physical stunts have all combined to flag this band as one of the most insane live acts around. Yan almost lost an eye to a flailing pair of antlers. Both he and Eamon wound up on crutches during one tour, and Noble, just recently, nearly broke his neck. Is all this really necessary? What kind of feeling leads to such stupidity?
“It’s never the same,” says Yan, “but the main thing is to avoid being a robot, really. It’s very hard to describe. To just try and be present in the moment, I suppose. Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes you have to try and work your way into it, so it could be a number of things. Sometimes if you just concentrate on something really simple that you’re doing on guitar, it can happen, or it can happen quite late in a gig when I’ll maybe see Noble’s feet hanging down from some rafter in the rooftops. Sometimes it’s something special about the feeling in the audience, like an excitement that you can’t ignore. I think most of it, you just have to be brave and be willing to take the first step, and as soon as you do everyone else is in there with you.”
They’ve since ditched the antlers (Yan’s idea), but they think they might continue to abscond with local foliage on each stop of their tour. “To be honest,” Noble chuckles, “we haven’t actually thought of anything different yet that’s better than what we’ve got, so it could well be the same.”
Perhaps it should be. British Sea Power are apparently quite good with branches. “We trim them well,” boasts the zoological one. “We’re all educated in the art of pruning.”