AUSTIN, TX — It’s both strange and perversely appropriate to be interviewing British Sea Power frontman Scott “Yan” Wilkinson on a patio across from a daytime South by Southwest event promoting army recruitment — given that his band of Brighton art-rockers have a tendency to sing of history and valour, perform in far-flung locales, don military attire and, at times, attack the audience. And as Yan later explains, after the bulk of British Sea Power’s stirring third album, Do You Like Rock Music?, was recorded in Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studios with Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s Efrim Menuck and former Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman, his country’s armed forces stepped in to help them complete the mission.

The first time I saw you was here at SXSW five years ago, when your guitarist Noble almost took [Rough Trade Records’] Geoff Travis’ head off with his guitar. And at the Horseshoe Tavern later that year, you were riding on Noble’s shoulders and almost had your fingers taken off by the ceiling fan. Is the threat of violence an important part of a rock show?
Ah, you’ve seen all the violent gigs. It’s declined somewhat. We’re getting a little bit older now… you start to think, “I need my fingers!” It’s more noise-based chaos rather than real danger.

Your songs pay careful attention to historical events and details — is that a reaction to cultural cycles moving so fast, and that so many bands are ripping off what came out last week?
You get so many generalized songs about very general things like, “I love you baby” or “I’m getting over you,” and I like detailed songs that relate to the world outside of music. I like listening to BBC Radio 4 a lot, I find it relaxing — in a history program or a science program, I just think the words and stories are more interesting. I’ll take a lot of notes, steal them all, and mix them in. If you can understand something from the years gone by, you can get a better picture of where you’re at nowadays. Everything is very “instant” nowadays — it’s good to get a bit of distance, time-wise.

How did you make the connection with Efrim Menuck and Howard Bilerman in Montreal?
We were looking for somewhere we could go to get away from England, an interesting city; their studio came up as an option, and it was easily the top of the list. They seem like genuine, down-to-earth people — you can tell they’re musicians first. The studio’s like a big junkhouse — bicycles, big pipes hanging off the roof, freezing cold; they only had about two electric bulbs working. But we couldn’t mix it there to a degree that we were happy with, and that’s why we had to go back to England. We ended up in this Napoleonic fort in Cornwall on the coast owned by the army, and they let us have it cheap. It’s nice to know we can just go off on our own, in any kind of peculiar building and record however we like it: we’d stick mics out the window because all these helicopters started turning up completely unannounced in middle of the night, practicing their cannon drops.  

Well, you have developed a reputation for performing in weird locales.
Yeah, people suggest a lot of these places to us now in England because we’re known for it. Someone will turn up on the internet and say, “We own the highest-altitude pub in England. Do you want to play it? We’ve got sheep and chickens in the bar.” And we’re like, “We like sheep and chickens. Sounds good!” They’re all hit-and-miss, those things. That one turned out brilliant; the day before we played on a ferry in the river Mersey — that was a disaster. No one could see anything, you couldn’t put any speakers up properly. But I think it’s good to have a chance for gigs to go wrong.