Music / Sea Power

We kind of exist in our own world...

— Noble

Sea Power (previously known as British Sea Power, or BSP for short) are an Indie Rock band based in Brighton, England, although three of the band members originally came from Cumbria, off to the north, and some of the band met at Reading University. Their first album (The Decline of British Sea Power) was released in 2003, and they've been recording and performing pretty much continuously ever since. Since 2008, their line-up has consisted of Jan Scott Wilkinson ("Yan") on vocals and guitar, Neil Hamilton Wilkinson ("Hamilton") on vocals, bass, and guitar, Martin Noble ("Noble") on guitar and keyboards, Matthew Wood ("Wood") on drums, Abi Fry on viola and keyboards, and Phil Sumner on cornet, keyboards, and guitar.

The band are noted for an eccentric approach to their work, verging on the Cloudcuckoolander; they seem to have a particular taste for mid-20th-century British imagery, and they also have a taste for playing in unusual venues such as a club on the Isles of Scilly, Village Halls, the Czech Embassy in London, caves in Cornwall, museums, libraries and sea forts. This is balanced by the ability to produce quality rock music ranging from punky to pop. Alongside relatively conventional songwriting and performance, BSP have created well-regarded soundtracks for a couple of documentaries, and worked with brass bands to create new arrangements of their songs. They also contributed the soundtrack for the Urban Fantasy Role-Playing Game Disco Elysium (where the band is implied to have an in-universe analogue named "The Etenniers").

The band have a Web site with the usual news, videos, merchandise, and such. In 2021, they renamed themselves simply "Sea Power" to avoid associations with "isolationist, antagonistic nationalism" which they saw as a current problem.

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Associated Tropes:

• Album Title Drop:
  • The title of the album Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is dropped twice in the song "Praise for Whatever":
    And in a world of extremities
    We all are accessories
    So let the dancers inherit the party
    ...
    And in a world made of allegories
    Tell me what are you supposed to be
    Oh let the dancers inherit the party
  • The title of "Everything Was Forever" is dropped in the song "Folly":
    ''Everything was forever
    Until it was no more"

• Anachronistic Soundtrack: The band's soundtrack for the 1934 Irish “fictional documentary” Man of Aran makes no particular effort to match itself to the period, or the low-tech community depicted in the movie.
• Crowd Chant: Live performances of "No Lucifer" tend to inspire this response with its opening chant of "Easy! Easy!".
• Doppelgänger: The song "Doppelganger" (on the album Everything Was Forever) uses the titular entity as a symbol of despair and alienation:
  Go into the centre of the blinding light
  Into the centre of the city tonight
  Gripped by darkness, grim by rights
  I hope that you will see yourself tonight
  'Cause oh oh, you're a doppelgänger...
• Drugs Are Bad: One might guess that the frenetic "K Hole" isn't entirely in favour of recreational ketamine use.
  I think I took a little too much
  We may be in some trouble...
• Game Music: Sea Power provided the soundtrack for Disco Elysium (which was also released as an album).
• Global Warming: "Oh Larsen B" deals with the collapse of an Antarctic ice-shelf, while "Canvey Island" appears to deal with a fear of the consequences of climate change.
• Gratuitous German: "Stunde Null" obviously has a German title. In fact, those are the only German words in the song, though they're repeated frequently throughout. The phrase translates as "zero hour", and is used in Germany to refer to midnight on 8 May 1945 — the end of World War II in Europe, and implying an absolute break with the past and a new beginning, as Germany renounced Nazism. The song seems to be talking about this:
  Oh clear the floor
  Let's get to the fore
  It's stunde null hour zero
  It's time for more, more, more, let's go
• Long-Runner Line-up: The band have been quite stable in membership, with just one departure from their initial line-up once it was settled, and a couple of guest musicians being eased into full membership.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title of the album Machineries of Joy invokes a short story collection by Ray Bradbury.
  • Early 1960s British songwriter Geoff Goddard is referenced by the song “Radio Goddard”.
  • "The Lonely" gives a nod to Liberace.
  • The Albert of "Albert's Eyes" appears to be Albert Einstein.
• Take That!: "No Lucifer" contains a few burns aimed at Pope Benedict XVI.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The subject of the song "The Voice of Ivy Lee" (on the album Let the Dancers Inherit the Party) is presumably a bad person with excellent PR. (Ivy Lee was the inventor of the modern public relations industry.)
  How could you refute such a godly lover
  A taste in your mouth you could never release
  And after all there'll be no other
  Just algorithms in the breeze...

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