To me this song is the essence of what British Sea Power are- it is something timeless and powerful like the sea- stone and steel and horses heels images from the depths of history and to me this is a song about British and particularly English identity in the face of our long and dark history. An island is defined by the sea and so the sea is strong in this lyric. At the same time history is a dead thing, it is carrion, a weight that should be able to throw off if we are to build the new Jerusalem, something which the reference to this "corpus christic isle" in the final bridge seems to allude to. The bridge is missing from the above transcription:
When this Corpus Christic isle became a land of ocean blue
Again, she cried, you turned my eye,
At mentions of, no matter why,
And in the end, an August sun,
And one by one we blew
Until the devil screamed in the evermore
In envy of the grace we saw
Oh the heavy water how it enfolds
The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow
Always, always, always the sea
Brilliantine mortality
Brilliantine, as I understand it, is a hair styling product very popular during the second world war- an era that BSP refer to in various ways throughout The Decline Of...
"The battle of evermore" is a track of Led Zeppelin's famous fourth album, which featured guest vocals from Sandy Denny, one of the greatest english folk singers of the last century.
Scapa flow is in the Orkneys off the north of Scotland, it was the base of the Home Fleet in WW2 and a major naval base in WW1. Rotherhithe is one of the major areas of docks in london.
Throughout the song we have the past and the present - the enfolding heavy water perhaps alludes to the fact that much of Britain's nuclear capability is in the form of submarines, deep beneath the sea. Through out the past and the present we have the fact that the British Isles have been preserved (or defeated) as a result, at least in part, of british sea power...
To me this song is the essence of what British Sea Power are- it is something timeless and powerful like the sea- stone and steel and horses heels images from the depths of history and to me this is a song about British and particularly English identity in the face of our long and dark history. An island is defined by the sea and so the sea is strong in this lyric. At the same time history is a dead thing, it is carrion, a weight that should be able to throw off if we are to build the new Jerusalem, something which the reference to this "corpus christic isle" in the final bridge seems to allude to. The bridge is missing from the above transcription:
When this Corpus Christic isle became a land of ocean blue Again, she cried, you turned my eye, At mentions of, no matter why, And in the end, an August sun, And one by one we blew Until the devil screamed in the evermore In envy of the grace we saw Oh the heavy water how it enfolds The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow Always, always, always the sea Brilliantine mortality
Brilliantine, as I understand it, is a hair styling product very popular during the second world war- an era that BSP refer to in various ways throughout The Decline Of...
"The battle of evermore" is a track of Led Zeppelin's famous fourth album, which featured guest vocals from Sandy Denny, one of the greatest english folk singers of the last century.
Scapa flow is in the Orkneys off the north of Scotland, it was the base of the Home Fleet in WW2 and a major naval base in WW1. Rotherhithe is one of the major areas of docks in london.
Throughout the song we have the past and the present - the enfolding heavy water perhaps alludes to the fact that much of Britain's nuclear capability is in the form of submarines, deep beneath the sea. Through out the past and the present we have the fact that the British Isles have been preserved (or defeated) as a result, at least in part, of british sea power...