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| British Sea Power Bristol Louisiana 30.10.02 There’s a grey owl staring right at us. A plastic grey owl on top of a speaker stack, and at the back, a plastic heron. They’re sitting there, amongst conifer branches sticky taped about the stage, like its some sort of wildlife reserve. And there’s a sound guy, dressed in khaki, creeping about in the foliage fixing up leads, looking like fuckin David Attenbourgh. Transdis doesn’t feel like we’re at a gig. Transdis feels like we’re walking the dog on a foggy Sunday morning in a forest (there’s great volumes of smog being pumped out onto the stage now). British Sea Power are a ragband WWI regiment, who on the way to their trench somewhere in the Somme, fell through a wormhole and ended up here. Lost, and confused to be standing in front of a room of people, and thinking just what are these instruments we’ve been handed, they sure don’t look like guns. The singer really does look like he’s spent three months in a trench, his shell-shocked expression, wide popper eyed stare, not so much detached from himself but from everything in this world. He frantically shouts at us, totally wired, fighting with the mic, loosing the battle with his guitar that keeps cutting out. Eventually he throws it down in a static thump. And the songs, they ring with a gothy clatter, ‘Lovely Day’ and ‘Childhood Memories’ are thoughtful laments, introspective meanderings. Other songs take us through jarring ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ territories, people think Interpol sound like Joy Division, when it’s this lot who are closer to that paranoiac airspace. Although maybe you cannot dance so much to British Sea Power. Meanwhile, the lead guitarist is a serious Russian in his white coat and fur hat. The bassist looking the most lost, with no shoes and rocking side to side like a retarded child. Still believing he is in his foxhole, the keyboardist crouching behind his Yamaha, tin hat on head, occasionally looking up to check for incomings. British Sea Power are truly strange. It’s impossible to work out if their quirky onstage eccentricities are the result of dedicated drug taking or if they’ve always walked round their home town in woolly scarves and breeches. The singer’s guitar problems have left the band in danger of their so far just keeping it together set falling totally apart. The last two songs form a mega rock out, more in common with Pink Floydian psychedelics than miserable Mancunians. The singer gestures to a bloke in a Sex Pistols tee to join him, which he does and a couple more crazy kids clamber onstage. The drumkit is demolished, the plastic grey owl is thrown audience-ward and the serious Russian is rolled over by a stage invader until the once tranquil forest scene looks like a hurricane has hit. And thus Transdis doesn't quite know what to make of British Sea Power, a band that looked happy being scared that can suddenly turn into kicking screaming total annihilation. Rachel. |