Music review: British Sea Power, The Old Market, Hove

Yan, AKA Scott Wilkinson (L) and Martin Noble (R) of British indie band British Sea Power (Getty Images)

If any current band could soundtrack Spirit of ’45, Ken Loach’s new documentary on Britain’s post-war spirit of utopian belonging, it’s British Sea Power.

The films they have scored to great acclaim - recent reverie on the British landscape From the Sea to the Land Beyond and 1934’s tale of wind-battered Irish island life, Man of Aran – give a clue, as does their name, to their archaic yet idealistic concerns. Ten years into what can loosely be called a career, they are the old retainers at Rough Trade Records, the label’s longest-serving loyalists. While The Smiths and The Libertines imploded, BSP continue. Values central to their music, the implicit culture being a fan of them lets you tap into, explains their endurance.

The stage looks, as always, like a woodland clearing as British Sea Power take their places among the misty, fairy light-garlanded shrubbery for this first gig in support of their fifth album, Machineries of Joy. Singer Yan (aka Scott Wilkinson) fixes his band-mates with wary stares, trying to get unfamiliar new songs right. A brace of them, “Machineries of Joy” and “Monsters of Sunderland”, show how exciting the new album is. The former song is a typically sensual and positive description of humanity. The latter, with a trumpet fanfare like a hunting horn, describes obscurely extraordinary, outrageous behaviour. “Lights Out for Darker Skies” from 2008’s Do You Like Rock Music? follows, and here people “dance like sparks”. The wide-open optimism is infectious.

Whether sung by Yan or Hamilton (the former’s brother, Neil Wilkinson), British Sea Power lack charisma. There’s no performer to idolise, no star-power to blast them free of the underground. But “Mongk 2”’s mix of motorik, monochrome 1980s pop and saurian rock guitar shows their sonic openness. “Lucifer” is an anti-Nazi song which rallies round Big Daddy’s 1970s wrestling battle-cry “Easy, easy!” And it is bettered by “Waving Flags”, an anti-nationalist anthem which presents Britain not as the timidly xenophobic island posited by politicians, but an ecstatic place of asylum. A lone crowd-surfer sinks out of sight during another inclusive song, “All In It”, only a shoe clutched in his hand still visible amidst the British Sea Powered dancers.

This band will never be stars, or consistent; maybe not ever quite great. But, like the visionaries in Loach’s film, they inspire by suggesting a better world.