The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

As their dressing room is cleared and the stage lights flicker into action, there is just time to witness the four members of British Sea Power - Yan, Hamilton, Noble and Woody - form a small circle, throw their arms around each other, bow their heads and launch into what looks and sounds like a bizarre primordial mating ritual. Though somewhat surreal, it’s a joy to catch a glimpse of the gang mentality that has helped the Brighton band remain such a prodigious force over the past seven years, triumphing not only above their peers, but generations of men with guitars before them.

To fully understand the band requires answering just one simple question: do you like rock music? This question is the title of the group’s third album, a release that has been variously described as an exploration of good and evil, an index of light and dark and the sonic equivalent of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

“Basically we wanted to celebrate the pleasant things in life but also address the nasty side,” explains guitarist Noble.

“I think everyone agrees that it’s a very confusing and fucked up time but there’s room for optimism,” adds vocalist Yan. “I can’t think of a better way of tackling these issues than with amplified sound.”

“I’ll be the first to admit this is a bright but haunted age,” goes the opening line of ‘Atom’, the first track to be lifted from the album and a song which supports the band’s strengthened mission statement as well as silencing those who have previously brushed off the band as mere novelty. Do You Like Rock Music? is an album that draws on the freewheeling ferocity of debut The Decline of British Sea Power, but tosses the timidity of follow-up Open Season to the wayside.

“I was pretty fed up after recording that album,” admits Yan. “We thought it sounded a bit wimpy so with this one we knew we had to make it more direct and less perfected.”

“We felt a lot more confident about taking risks this time around,” adds bassist Hamilton. “It felt like were we working well together for the first time.”

Album highlights ‘Canvey Island’ and ‘No Need To Cry’ offer sweeping moments of reflection while ‘A Trip Out’ and ‘No Lucifer’ are pure rock barnstormers; diverse but equally as epic and optimistic. And surely there’s no band better trusted than British Sea Power to gift Norwegian seabirds and 1950s wrestlers with the same level of importance as immigration and the smoking ban, a skill best mustered on six-minute epic ‘Lights Out For Darker Skies’. That song announces its message on global warming not by shouting from the soapbox, but by sitting us down for a history lesson.

“I wanted to write the story of light,” deadpans Yan. “I wanted to explore how it’s changed over the last 2000 years, from flames to lasers; you wouldn’t have to go very far back to see an electric light for the first time and be completely amazed by it.”

So far, so typical for a band obsessed with military history and wide open spaces, but for the most part Do You Like Rock Music? is an album more concerned with the present and the future than the past.

“I got tired with people getting the wrong idea about us, so I made a conscious effort to pack in as many modern references on the new album as possible,” says Yan. “I tried to be less obtuse because I didn’t want people to listen to it looking backwards; I wanted to tackle what’s happening with the world right now.”

Take ‘Waving Flags’, a stirring choral rock tribute to Polish plumbers, economic migration and featuring some particularly topical lyrics: “You are astronomical friends of alcohol so welcome in, from across the Vistula you’ve come so very far…”

As the Heydrich reference in their 2004 song ‘A Lovely Day Tomorrow’ attests, the band have a long-standing interest with Eastern Europe, and so relocating from their adopted East Sussex home to a makeshift recording studio in rural Prague made perfect sense.

“We lived for two months in a forest in the middle of nowhere,” says Hamilton. “We recorded during the day and chased wild boar and played ping pong at night.”

Recording sessions for the album also took the band to a snow-swept Montreal with Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Menuck, and Fort Tregantle in Cornwall, the latter location proving particularly apt for the band whose music remains littered with myriad military references.

“The army were practising war manoeuvres, so we’d be recording and look out of the window and there’d be 20 men in camouflage creeping past,” laughs Yan. “They would finish their target practise then head into the courtyard and sing our songs. If you listen carefully you can actually hear the sound of Chinook helicopters on the record.”

I’ve caught British Sea Power on a pre-Christmas “warm-up tour”: their excuse for choosing some typically odd spots to road test the new material, including playing the highest pub in England, a war ship on the River Mersey and, tonight, at an 18th century church on the banks of the Tyne. The cavernous expanse of the historic venue engulfs the band but the music stands proud with a wonderfully gung-ho ‘Remember Me’ opening proceedings and the show triumphantly climaxing with ‘Spirit of St. Louis’. Clearly we’re in the presence of four young rock sentinels whose crackbrained cargo can’t be quelled by even a thousand Hail Marys from the hundreds of slack-jawed admirers.

In a music scene preoccupied with pulling quotes from Wikipedia to score swat points, true party bands are in dangerously short supply. But with their latest effort British Sea Power have risen yet higher above the quagmire of diluted social observation and safe careerism that often passes for pop music. They’re a band it’s okay to obsess over simply by virtue of the fact that those who choose not to lend their ears and hearts to their wily ways don’t matter. Or, as Yan puts it: “It’s a fool who chooses not to welcome in a bit of good natured Armageddon.”