Sea Power

Originally formed by brothers Jan Scott and Neil Hamilton Wilkinson – a.k.a. Yan and Hamilton - and school friend Matthew Wood in Kendal, Cumbria, England, alternative rock group British Sea Power relocated to Brighton and started running their own club night, which they called Club Sea Power. The group was discovered by Geoff Travis and signed to his iconic label Rough Trade Records in 2001. With their charity shop clothes, Dostoyevsky and Macbeth references and tribute to folk institution The Copper Family, their debut album The Decline of British Sea Power (2003) set the band up as smart, eccentric, indie types, or, in their own words ‘militant pastoralists’. They were named Live Band of the Year in 2004 by Time Out magazine and scored the Top 20 single “It Ended on an Oily Stage,” but it was third album Do You Like Rock Music? (2008) that brought the most acclaim. The album reached Number 10 in the UK and earned a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. The band played at a number of unusual locations, including a ferry across the River Mersey and the highest pub in Britain, and recorded the experimental soundtrack to the film Man of Aran before returning with the stomping, anthemic party rock of Valhalla Dancehall (2011). In 2012, they embarked upon a new project, composing the soundtrack to From the Sea to the Land Beyond: Britain's Coast on Film. The success of this work led to another soundtrack commission for the documentary Happiness in 2014. In 2016, the band announced through a crowd-funding website that they were working on an album entitled Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, which was released the following year. Their next soundtrack – for the role-playing game Disco Elysium – was released in 2019. Shortening their name to Sea Power (because of a rise in antagonistic nationalism that they didn’t want to be associated with), the band returned in 2022 with the release of the album Everything Was Forever.