More about: Sea Power

Jan Scott Wilkinson is in a reflective mood. Sea Power, the band he fronts, are about to release their new album Everything Was Forever, an album he describes as the “ultimate” version of the band. “We don’t really consider our music to have distinct stylistic eras, like Bowie for example, so what this album is is essentially the most Sea Power album we’ve ever done” Wilkinson gently tells us. And he’s right; Everything Was Forever contains the same progressive blasts of euphoria and instrumental experimentation we’ve come to expect from the band, who could now deservedly be called indie royalty. 

Making a brand new album in the middle of a global pandemic was described by Wilkinson as “hard, to put it simply. So many of us are in different places now, so it was difficult to try and arrange time to get the album written and recorded, but it was rewarding to hear the finished thing back”. Conceptually, he says they “never had a concept or plan in mind, we never really do. With my brother (Neil Scott Wilkinson) and I both writing lyrics, we rarely share our thought processes with each other, we just let the words speak for themselves”.

Whilst Wilkinson shares regret that the album centrepiece ‘Fire Escape In The Sea’ couldn’t be a single (“it really captures a side of us that we’ve never really shown before, it’s quite bold. For us!”), he adds that the singles chosen to represent the album, ‘Two Fingers’, ‘Folly’ and ‘Green Goddess’ stood out as the natural choices. ‘Two Fingers’ has the familiar unifying anthemic spirit of the iconic ‘Waving Flags’, whereas ‘Folly’ and ‘Green Goddess’ throw electronic and post-rock influences in there respectively. “In the streaming age”, Wilkinson adds, “you find yourself almost subconsciously writing big three-minute songs with big choruses and that’s fine. There’s always a place for those kinds of songs, and we still like writing them! The audience reaction is always great.”

When asked whether he feels an obligation to play the hits whilst on tour, he gleefully denies the notion: “we consider our set-lists nowadays to be something of a journey that we undertake mutually with our audiences. And playing the songs we’ve been playing for decades now is always amazing, the singalongs and communal spirit we see and hear always make us happy.” As for the material on Everything Was Forever, he adds he’s “excited to see where they will fit in on the journey, and how they will evolve and develop over time. Once we put it to record, it becomes its own being and it goes beyond us!”

The conversation turns to the B-shaped elephant in the room. Since August 2021 when Sea Power announced they were dropping the “British” from their name, a media fixation began, with a mostly positive reception from fans. Now that the dust has settled, Wilkinson admits “it wasn’t really that big a deal at all. We’d been wanting to do it for a long while now, all our fans were in on it, and aside from the unsavoury opinions of certain people, we felt there was no point in hesitating anymore. The negative response that we got calmed down after a matter of weeks, and all returned to normal. As it always should have been!” Following on from that, with a polarised climate in the UK and a rising sense of nationalism within mainstream politics, does Wilkinson think that music has a responsibility to reflect on that, and challenge it? “Of course,” Wilkinson states, “but we feel like we don’t need to say it. We feel that without going all Bob Geldof and stating 'this song is about this, this song is about that', our audience are smart, kind and empathetic enough to understand it and interpret the songs in their own ways. With Everything Was Forever, we very purposefully went down a different, more personal lyrical path. We’ve done our songs about Polish drinkers and collaborated with The Wurzels, so it felt exciting to finally tread the ground that every other band has done long ago!”. 

Alongside their April UK tour to promote Everything Was Forever, Wilkinson is keen to talk about Sea Power’s very own Cumbria-based festival Krankenhaus, which will be embarking upon its second edition this August. Sharing its name with a club night run by the band in Brighton, the festival also shares the night’s “manic spirit and energy”, in Wilkinson’s own words.

“The first festival was a magical experience; we wanted to create a little corner of the world where we could curate our own line-up of bands, artists and all kinds of creative people, where people could switch off from all the hang ups of the world and lose themselves in a tiny little corner of England. There’s no phone signal! It’s amazing!”. The band and team behind Krankenhaus are eager for this year’s event, although the line-up “can’t be announced yet”.

As for the future of Sea Power themselves, Wilkinson is less certain. When asked about lessons they will take with them into the next album, he admits he’s “taking it for granted there’ll even be a next album! I don’t know. We feel like we’ve achieved our ultimate form with Everything Was Forever, this hybrid of Queen and Sigur Ros, and we don’t really know where we could take ourselves in the traditional album format in the future. It’s quite hard to be in a band like ours in 2022, and we don’t know what’s in store.”

But in the present, Wilkinson is always creating. “I’ve been going into my shed and painting. I’ve been doing a lot of that recently and I always love seeing what’s going to come out of it. It gives me hope”. For a band with hope running through their musical DNA, and who give hope to a legion of dedicated fans, it’s only fitting that the simple hope of art is what lies at the heart of the unconventional, brilliant Sea Power.

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More about: Sea Power