British Sea Power at Larimer’s Lounge, Denver, Colorado, July 16, 2002

Published in the Uncategorized

Tonight I drove to Denver to see British Sea Power in a club the size of my living room with about 75 people crushed together. There was no sign outside the club in the industrial suburbs of Denver identifying it as Larimer Lounge, just a piece of paper taped to a door. The only way I knew I was in the right place was that the band’s bus was parked outside, and even so I walked past the door twice before I realized that’s where the entrance was. It cost $9.00 at the door.

Opening for them was Kaito, two girls and two boys with thick working class British accents, who were interesting, in a squawky, electric-guitar-as-a-percussion-instrument-and-sonic-generator, Fred-Frithish, let’s-see-what-kind-of-sounds-we-can-abuse-out-of-this-equipment, you’ll-never-hear-us-on-the-radio kind of way, like the deranged children of Sonic Youth. Life is good.

I knew I was in for something special when the roadies started decorating the stage with trees and bushes and stuffed owls and birds until the stage became a forest. Then they played a recording of John Betjeman reciting nature poetry backed by a band that sounded like Ornette Coleman crossed with the Kronos Quartet. As this was going on, the members of the band walked through the crowd (putting their hands on my shoulder from behind to step up onto the stage). They were young and very clean cut and rock star handsome but dressed in odds and ends and neck-scarves and buttons and head-scarves, and their keyboardist and percussion player (who they found living on the streets of Glasgow) was wearing a British military helmet from the First World War. Since the stage was a 6-inch riser and I was standing right in front of them, they were standing so close that I could look into their eyes and see that they were CRAZY— their eyes were slightly wall-eyed with raging fires behind the pupils and sort of spinning in their sockets.

It’s impossible to describe the places they went to musically, but they were able to incorporate recordings of Kurt Schwitters (the arch-dadaist) reciting his “nonsense” “UrSonata” poem in his made-up Merz language and make it sound perfectly normal. And that’s when I got it—these guys had designed the evening’s entertainment with the goal of  breaking into some mystical transcendence, taking all of us with them.

It ended in complete bacchanalia, beginning with “Lately” (the 14-minute climax of “The Decline of British Sea Power”) before going completely berserk for at least thirty minutes. After the show I grabbed the setlist taped to the wall and the final song was listed simply as “Rock in A.” It amounted to a continuous solid bass-‘n’-drums rhythm that was orchestrated to build slowly over nearly half an hour by very gradually getting wilder and wilder and wilder and speeding up and getting louder and then very gradually descending into a few strands of faint electrical hum, before ascending even higher and faster and louder until it became one huge harmonious roar in A, and then slowing down and doing it all over again, only this time higher, faster, louder, and longer. And, although the drums were menacing in “Lately,” to see them played by a percussionist goosestepping back and forth across the stage, swinging the drumsticks as high and as far he can, until finally throwing the drumsticks away and banging the drum repetitively into the top of his shaved head.

At this point, audience members were onstage playing guitar, band members were dancing in the audience or crouched on the floor smashing their instruments into the equipment and each other, and the lead singer sat on top of their speakers smiling at the mayhem he’d created before jumping back into the fray to wave a mike stand over our heads in an intricately choreographed metallic benediction, the electric cord wrapped around his neck, his eyes spinning, their crazy keyboardist playing two guitars against each other. And water, water, everywhere, until everyone, band and audience, was completely soaked.

And just when you thought it was about to end because it couldn’t possibly get any wilder—like when the lead singer was singing a verse to the stuffed bird at the back of the stage—someone would scream something at the band and they’d suddenly begin to play even faster and louder, and we realized that the band was responding to the audience–that we were conducting this mad orchestra, and the usual balance-of-power between artist and audience was reversed and dispersed among the crowd … until us and them, music and noise, poetry and nonsense and even time itself dissolved into one continuous roar and I felt completely transparent and saturated all at once.

And at that precise moment everyone–the whole room, audience and band together–all knew simultaneously that it was over. We’d experienced something–at least one moment in our lives–COMPLETELY. Even the stage set became a part of it, the branches and bushes pulled apart and ritualistically destroyed. Then, with the amplifiers humming and the guitars throbbing and pulsing with feedback, surprised that anything electrical could still operate in this wild environment, they walked offstage in a single file right past me screaming and waving their hands over the heads like boxers, climbing on top of the shoulders of  people in the audience, being saluted by harrahs like Caesar must have heard when he crossed the Rubicon and entered Rome, everyone reaching up to touch them as they were carried though the room, out through the bar, and finally into the street.

I didn’t want the night to end, so on my way home I stopped at Wendy’s and drank a Coke on my back on the grass feeling my head buzz and my heart race from the caffeine and I stared at the stars, my mind spinning so fast that I couldn’t even see them.