SEA POWER - REMEMBER ME

JUN 02 2003 · 12:00

SEA POWER - REMEMBER ME (2003) Director: Dougal Wilson Era: Post-Punk Revival / Indie Landfill Precursor (2001–2003), British indie rock's early-2000s flowering on Rough Trade Records, bridging angular post-punk energy with literary-conceptual art-video ambitions ahead of the NME-driven boom. High. This video is a documented landmark in Sea Power's catalogue and in Dougal Wilson's directorial career, preserving a rare example of early-2000s lo-fi conceptual CGI video-making. Its explicit engagement with WWI remembrance culture, combined with self-deprecating DIY prop construction, makes it an unusually rich primary source for researchers of British indie culture, popular memory studies, and the material history of music video production on modest budgets. The fast-cut editing pace against near-static subject matter (stone statues) is a formally distinctive tension worth preserving in any survey of the era. Context: Released originally in 2001 and re-recorded for the 2003 re-issue on Rough Trade Records, 'Remember Me' arrived during the post-punk revival that saw British indie bands, Arctic Monkeys, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, reclaim angular guitar music from late-1970s reference points. Sea Power (then British Sea Power) occupied an eccentric, literary outlier position within this scene: their aesthetic was entangled with WWI remembrance, natural history, and British imperial iconography subverted through DIY art-making. The video, directed by Dougal Wilson, literalises this tension by turning London's public war memorials into lip-syncing band members, collapsing the distance between pop spectacle and national mourning. This was also an era when low-budget conceptual ingenuity, born of necessity on Rough Trade budgets, was itself a cultural statement, positioned against the glossy excess of mainstream pop video production. The single reached number 30 on the UK Singles Chart and number 3 on the UK Independent Singles Chart in October 2003, and was later voted ninth in BBC Radio 6 Music's 2013 poll of the greatest songs of the 2000s. Director notes: The concept for the 'Remember Me' video originated with Dougal Wilson and involved filming London's monumental statuary, including statues of Nelson and Wellington, on location. In post-production, the faces of band members and a selection of actors were digitally composited onto the sculpted stone and metal surfaces, creating what a documented account describes as 'eerie singing rock homunculi.' A purpose-built plywood plinth, dressed with cardboard-and-spraypaint lettering reading 'WE REMEMBER BRITISH SEA POWER' and metallic prop ornamentation (made by a craftsman who had recently worked on a stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), was constructed for the shoot. The band was costumed as figures of historical action, aviator, sailor, explorer, bugle boy, and soldier. The production self-consciously framed its own lo-fi prop-making as a commentary on monumentalism: 'smoke, mirrors and Plasti-kote Metallic Projekt Paint.' The video was produced to accompany the 2003 re-release of the single on Rough Trade Records, which reached number 30 on the UK Singles Chart. Wilson moved to London and began directing through Blink in November 2001, making this one of his earliest professional commissions.