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Here’s a game for a long car journey: what is and what isn’t rock music? Forget objective criteria, even instruments; consider the spirit of the thing. For British Sea Power’s guitarist, Martin Noble, who devised the rules, it’s like separating good from evil. Little Richard, seeing a wild boar and gazing at the horizon are all rock music; U2, Mussolini and tuberculosis aren’t.

Get the idea? Listeners to Radio 2’s Radcliffe & Maconie certainly did, chipping in suggestions of their own before Christmas.

By the Sussex coast, in the dark, Noble warms to his theme. “To me, these cliffs are rock music, but that road?” he says, gesturing at the busy A259. “Definitely not.” Three members of the Brighton band have led me up a sideburn of grass to the top of a headland because they fancied doing the interview alfresco. It’s 6pm, in early November. I have to use the singer’s mobile to illuminate my notes. But, if BSP love giving journalists the run-around, they’re set to make life easier for fans.

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BACKGROUND

• British Sea Power: Do You Like Rock Music?

• British Sea Power cast the net wide

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Their new album, Do You Like Rock Music?, should break the ice with a wider audience – one nonplussed, perhaps, by their image as a crazed cadet force. Existing admirers revel in their foliage-bedecked shows, antiquated get-up and pseudonyms-only roll call (now relaxed) as a gust of fresh air; sceptics, sad to say, find BSP too weirdly bracing. Their third LP’s title – goofy but not without guile, like an exchange student’s chat-up line – broaches a new dialogue with the music-buying public.

“People who’ve followed us wouldn’t expect that as an album name,” says BSP’s front man, Yan, content to let it be known that he signs cheques as Scott Wilkinson. “We’ve always emphasised the intellectual side of things in our titles. People who don’t really know us, however, get confused by that, so we wanted to approach the other element. It is a bit stupid, but that’s to put across the fundamental, Stooges-like quality of rock music, which shakes your bones when you hear it, and you get excited, and lose touch with your job or your girlfriend.”

In bidding to win more hearts and minds, BSP aren’t dumbing down. Do You Like Rock Music? may be a stirring warship of sound, drenched in reverb and packed to the gunwales with festival-ready anthems, but the lyrical content is as topical as Panorama. How many other bands this year will make such a confident fist of light pollution, flood defences and economic migration? “We try to share things we think are important,” Yan says. “There are enough people singing about discos and romantic upsets.”

Waving Flags, the next single, is a heroic salvete – “Oh, welcome in... across the Vistula/ Oh, welcome in... ’cross the Carpathians” – to Polish plumbers and Slovak waitresses. As rousing as a socialist-realist drinking song, it’s gloriously overblown, and witty to boot. Hailing the migrants as “astronomical fans of alcohol” (after Noble saw the phrase “fans of alcohol” on a banner in the Slavia Prague end while watching a Uefa Cup tie), it takes European popular culture to be one vast bierkeller, which may not be far wrong.

The song was written, Yan says, to counter the antipathy with which foreign workers are often greeted: “It seems to me we need intelligent, good-looking people with taste to come in and breed with us. Basically, [some Britons] don’t like them because they’re willing to work hard, but we like working hard, so we can identify with them.” As this track celebrates freedom of movement, it’s appropriate that recording the album was “an odyssey”. So says the bassist and co-vocalist, Hamilton (Scott’s bashful brother, Neil). The schedule took the group to a freezing Montreal (to work with Howard Bilerman, Arcade Fire’s engineer), a Czech forest (cue Noble’s wild-boar-spotting) and Fort Tregantle, in Cornwall (where they startled squaddies on exercise with Ursine Ultra, their semi-retired stage-bear costume).

For the first time, Yan and Hamilton contribute an equal number of tracks to the finished product. Hamilton shrugs when asked about his songwriting strengths – “I’m just learning the trade. One day, I’ll be a master craftsman, like my brother” – but the elder Wilkinson answers with acuity. “He can do sensitive stuff I don’t seem capable of,” Yan says, though No Lucifer, propelled by the “Easy, easy” chant of the 1980s wrestler Big Daddy, suggests that Hamilton does funny-sinister as well.

“He’s like a fairy-tale Syd Barrett,” Yan continues, before Noble adds: “Not as extreme, obviously. He knows his name, he knows where he is.”

After the laughter subsides, Yan says: “With Neil doing more, I can condense what would have been three songs into one.

I’ve always been interested in big shifts in a song, setting up a mood so you can break it.” Lights out for Darker Skies and Atom put that theory impressively into practice. The latter begins with a lulling coda, “Your head is a mess/ Oh, your heart is a mess”, and ends with Yan howling “I just don’t get it”, at the more we know/ less we understand aspect of the information age.

As we walk back down the slope to Saltdean’s tiny Whitecliffs Café, the thought occurs that if BSP came from Montreal, rather than simply recording there, the hype about Do You Like Rock Music? would already be deafening. They are, yes, a national treasure; yet too few of us, so far, have bought British.

“We haven’t deliberately stayed as a medium-small indie band,” Yan says. “It’s just that we didn’t realise a lot of our ideas got confused in translation. The new album is an attempt to redirect people’s attention while keeping the qualities we’ve always had.”

It is Yan who brings up the Arcade Fire comparison, but I was intending to. Early notices about Do You Like Rock Music? all mentioned the mighty Canucks, and anyone who enjoyed their Neon Bible will find that BSP offer similarly apocalyptic thrills.

“People get it the wrong way round,” Yan says, a tad tetchily. “They think it’s great that our record has a hint of them. But when Arcade Fire first came out, friends in America were texting us to say, ‘There’s a new band that sounds like British Sea Power.’ I quite like Arcade Fire; yet some reviewers see us and think, because we have a violin and a trumpet player, both of whom were on our second album, Open Season, that we’re getting on the Arcade Fire wagon.”

Point taken – so let’s just say the Montreal sessions are further evidence that BSP Mk III (the keyboardist, Eamon, recruited in 2003, having left to pursue his own band, Brakes) aren’t short of marketing nous. Because, if Arcade Fire fans here do their patriotic duty and give BSP Neon Bible-like sales figures, presumably Yan wouldn’t object? “I wouldn’t object at all,” he replies with a grin.

Waving Flags is released tomorrow and Do You Like Rock Music? on January 14, both on Rough Trade. British Sea Power’s next tour starts in Belfast on January 17

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