The British are coming!

If there’s ever a reason to drag yourself off the beach, cut your spring break short and head back to Champaign a day early, it’s to catch a glimpse of British Sea Power.
The Brighton-based indie quartet is set to invade the Canopy Club on March 22, and they’re touting a live act that Pitchfork recently called “anarchic joy.” So what makes a British Sea Power show a success?
“You have a bit of fun, really, and have the audience have fun,” guitarist Martin Noble said. “There’s no real approach to it. It depends on how you’re feeling onstage.”
The band is touring the States in support of their latest album, which poses the deceptively simple question: Do You Like Rock Music? Noble said that the band hopes the title will inspire people to broaden their definitions of the genre.
“We’ve always wanted to incorporate different things into what’s generally thought of as rock music,” he said. “I’ll say rock music is like riding a bicycle, and the Rocky Mountains are definitely rock music. These weird groceries that we’re stopping at in the van where they’ve got like Denny’s and IHOP and all this weird food, that’s not rock music.”
For this album, the band took a new approach to recording, exploring the globe and soaking in their surroundings.
“We just wanted to have an adventure making it,” Noble explained. “You always hear about people having quite an unusual time making records. Our last two records we just made in London and stayed in a hotel, and it was pretty much like going to the office, and we just thought, ‘That’s not the way a record should be made.’”
The group traveled everywhere from the UK to Canada to a forest in the Czech Republic, all the way drawing inspiration from their environment.
“We stayed in some really cheap places in the UK like this massive concrete water tower,” Noble said. “It had this brilliant cathedral-like echo, and we played in there. That kind of echo stayed with us in our minds, and when it came time to actually mixing the record we made sure there was lots of echo in it.”
While much of the album was inspired by the foreign countries in which it was recorded, the band’s sweeping, ambient sound can be credited to their old stomping ground.
“Most of the band’s from the Lake District, which is an area in England which is probably one of the most mountainous places in the UK, and a lot of people go there for their holiday,” Noble said. “I think if you grow up surrounded by all that kind of grandeur, it’s just natural that it feeds into your music and you want to try and replicate it in musical form. That kind of grandeur brings sort of an atmospheric and theatrical aspect to it.”
Check out British Sea Power at the Canopy Club on March 22 at 9 p.m.

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