Decorating the Liquid Room stage with foliage and model birds of prey might seem a pointless indulgence. It’s a dark subterranean bar, not the Royal Albert Hall. Just get the guitars out and rock! But this is British Sea Power, self-mythologising nature boys (and girl). Details like this matter. It’s why the faithful love them.
Over six “proper” albums, BSP have proved impeccably consistent sorts, always remembering to pack a selection of earwormy choruses alongside the conceptual stuff about Antarctic ice shelves and 1950s floods. New LP Let The Dancers Inherit The Party is no exception, a well-balanced assortment of sprightly indie riffage and fragile, cerebral balladry. It’s just as well, as this new material dominates tonight’s set to an extent bands with a less fanatical following wouldn’t risk. Only Alone Piano from the new album doesn’t get a look in.
They do seem less high-spirited than of old, though. Once, they were the kind of band to knock themselves unconscious diving off speaker stacks. No such antics are on display tonight. In fact, to start with, the onstage mood feels almost sulky. Hamilton jokes “this is the Sunday Section” during a sombre four song suite that starts with Cleaning Out The Rooms and ends with Praise For Whatever. Rolling, oceanic instrumental The Great Skua gets an outing too. They do this stuff beautifully, of course, but they may have overdone the downbeat tonight. Old crowd-pleasers have been squeezed to make way, including the Open Season album in its entirety.
Those anthems that made the cut remain supreme. Tonight’s opener Who’s In Control? sounds more pertinent now than ever – “sometimes, I wish, protesting was sexy on a Saturday night!”. Remember Me is deathless and mighty. No Lucifer is the anthem you’d want to meet the apocalypse to – one last blast of blissful defiance as you are about to be vapourised.
New single Keep On Trying looks set to join those ranks. Like No Lucifer’s “Easy! Easy!”, its repeated chants of “Sechs freunde!” set the moshpit pogoing. Do the cheeky scamps really expect us to believe they’re singing about “six friends”? The spelling on the cover might suggest so; the censorious Radio 2 edit suggests otherwise.
Loss of sound from Noble’s guitar diminishes the impact of the swoonsome Machineries of Joy, as the sextet re-emerge for their encore dressed in bacofoil boiler suits (also seen on the video for Keep On Trying). But for visual impact you can’t beat the cover star of the Machineries of Joy album, a ten foot bear, wandering into the audience with an ursine chum, to hi-five and hug fans. It distracts from a fiery Spirit of St Louis on stage, but the bears exit stage-right in time to give the final moments of a Carrion / All In It medley due solemnity.
BSP continue to be the best of British. The khaki-coloured, boy scout Britain they romanticise still seems beautiful despite the tarnishing effect of the Brexiteers’ patriotic excesses. They’re next due in Scotland for Electric Fields in September, for what will hopefully be a quality Indian summer evening.