Interviews
Noble from British Sea Power talks to Britsound
Interview with Noble, March 2008.
ROB QUICKE: How’s the tour going in Europe? You are in Germany tonight. How’s it going so far?
NOBLE: Yeah, it’s going really well. It’s Cologne tonight and there’s been a lot of long drives, but the shows have been really good. The Pet Shop Boys came to Berlin, which was quite weird.
RQ: Did you meet them?
NOBLE: No, we didn’t. They had to leave straight away after the show to go to some drag bar!
RQ: Obviously the album, Do You Like Rock Music?, is critically acclaimed and commercially successful. Do you feel as if this is your year at last?
NOBLE: People keep saying it’s "our year." I’m not sure if we own it or anything; you just share it with people. I don’t really like to think about it like, "Is it your year?” If we have “our year,” we might not have another year. We’d prefer if we went just a few years with everybody else.
RQ: When you look at the album now, it’s doing very well obviously in the UK, and it’s probably doing very well in America - people are getting to know you. Are you very happy with the album, the way it ended up?
NOBLE: Yeah, definitely. Just from start to finish, the way we went about it all. The second one was kind of rushed in a way. The first record is made up of songs that we’ve had for a good few years, and this time we wanted to do everything to make sure we had fun doing it every step of the way. If we are going to do this, be in a band, we want to get the most out of it as we can. We went to write songs in a cottage, in a place called the New Forest in the UK. We got to go to a fort in Cornwall, and over to Canada, and over to the Czech Republic as well. They are all really cheap places. We could have done the same thing again and spent three weeks in London, or use that money and have a really good adventure while we were doing it. I think if you have that adventure, you always want to make your records sound and be as good as your adventures. It’s kind a document of what you’ve done and what you’ve been through.
RQ: Did you set out deliberately to say, “Okay, we are going to do an album that is going to be a critical and commercial success”? Did you intend to do that?
NOBLE: Not really. There are a few elements, like the "Easy, easy” chant on No Lucifer: It’s something that we did; we were just having some fun, and it just came out. It was kind of fun and it reminded us of some kind of shouting you would have in Clockwork Orange, but you knew as well that potentially it could be picked up by loads of people - the immediate effect it can have and there’s no reason to be scared of it. The song is not, lyrically, that commercial. You know, in the first line, it says, “dummy,” “t**,” and “s***,” so it’s not really radio material. The story is partly about the Pope’s time in the Hitler Youth. It’s kind of a bleak, good-versus-evil story. So we don’t hide away from anything to try and make it commercial. I just think it's a more direct record, lyrically and musically as well. It’s still got all the atmospherics, and it’s still got all the energy.
RQ: What's the band’s approach to America?
NOBLE: We just hope people know who we are. It's quite hard for people to know you exist. I think if people know that you exist, then they can make their minds up a bit. It’s just kind of getting out there and making people know there is a band called British Sea Power who do these kinds of things and make these kinds of songs. Our manager is Scott Booker, who manages The Flaming Lips. I think he must have some kind of game plan, but we just let him get on with it!
RQ: What does it do to your music, being British? Does it have any effect on your music? I would assume it does in terms of what you write about, but do you feel that you are particularly British?
NOBLE: No, I don’t think we are at all. I think we are more European. There’s a certain element to British people , like you get the odd football hooligans who still cling to this old empire, and they think they are better than everybody else, and still going on about the war. That’s probably more typically British unfortunately than we are, so we just think about things that hopefully water all that stuff down.
RQ: The 2008 Brit Awards happened just a couple of days ago: What are your thoughts on that? Take That did well; Arctic Monkeys have done tremendously well. Do you follow the British music scene per se? Are you that involved or that interested?
NOBLE: Not really. I mean, there are a few things that you occasionally hear on the radio that interest you, or gossip stories that you get that are quite interesting, but not really. I did actually go to see the Arctic Monkeys before Christmas. That was really good actually.
RQ: One final question then. You are going to presumably tour this album for some time and then record the next one. Do you have any songs written for the next album?
NOBLE: I think there are definitely songs that have been left over; there are a few. We are doing something at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where we are going to play to a film which we haven’t decided yet. We are hoping to do mostly new instrumental material for that, so I reckon there will be a few songs that come out of those sessions, which would be great!
