Do It For Your Mum: One band, one dad, one world war - a story of British Sea Power, rock dreams and family farce
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British Sea Power are intermittently successful suppliers of 'high-church amplified rock music', with Top Ten albums and the admiration of both David Bowie and the National Maritime Museum. But the band are also an unwieldy family firm. They are fronted by two brothers and managed by a third, the author of this book. They are also the all-consuming passion of the BSP brethren's father, Ronald Wilkinson - World War Two veteran and self-instructed expert on alternative rock from The Smiths to the Butthole Surfers.
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British Sea Power spring from Natland, a small village on the edge of the English Lake District. Neil Hamilton Wilkinson, singer and bassist, likes to walk home after gigs - 60 miles across country. Yan Scott Wilkinson, singer and guitarist, is self-possessed, remote and, like Stalin, given to composing odes to icebergs. Ringing in their ears come the interjections of their elders. Narrator Roy Wilkinson excitedly invokes both Field Marshal Montgomery and Freddie Mercury. Their dad is reborn as octogenarian teenage acolyte, ready to stop strangers in the street and ask them if they've bought the album they need - the album by British Sea Power.
This is a story that sets an idyllic rural youth and the eternal imponderables of family life beside the brute mechanics of the music industry. There is bathos, there is pathos, there is Kate Moss. Behold as Laurie Lee's 'Cider with Rosie' is introduced to AC/DC's 'Whole Lotta Rosie'. Against the odds the two parties get along OK.
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