Having changed their name to distance themselves from nationalistic fans, the indie rockers’ empathic, elemental new album shows they’re still wild at heart
With their propensity for foliage-covered stages and a large bear mascot that wanders through the audience at their gigs, Sea Power are used to people getting the wrong end of the stick. “The word ‘oddball’ has been put around, and that can put people off,” guitarist Martin Noble ruefully admits. But, 20 years on from their debut single, the band’s recent decision to change their name from
British Sea Power marks a new beginning at a time of creative revival. The wacky bear is retiring and the band are fizzing with a new sense of purpose, fresh from finishing their new album Everything Was Forever, winning a Bafta for their soundtrack to the video game Disco Elysium, and performing their first gigs in two years. Noble has missed playing live so much that he compares going onstage to “coming up on an E”.
Their new name has been enthusiastically chanted by fans, and the sole complaint they’ve had came from “some fellas who had to make their own Sea Power T-shirts because we’d not brought merch out quick enough”, says Yan Scott Wilkinson, the band’s co-frontman, with brother Neil Wilkinson. In the end, the only truly negative reaction to dropping “British” came from
Social Media and the rightwing press. The name British Sea Power “had become a monkey on our backs”, in the words of Noble, and the band had become uncomfortable that some people were wrongly interpreting it as nationalistic, even antagonistic – although to do that they would have had to ignore the band’s history of writing songs such as Waving Flags, a pro-immigration anthem.