Were you to hazard a guess at the occupation of the five young men standing at the base of the Seven Sisters cliffs on the Sussex coast, you could be forgiven for putting 'rock band' low on the list. But British Sea Power, who dress in a way that nods back to a time when side-partings and stitch-on badges were de rigueur, have managed to distinguish themselves as one of the most original guitar bands in the country.
Lou Reed and Radiohead are among the admirers won over by their contrarily titled debut album The Decline of British Sea Power, on which the band set their myriad fascinations (ornithology, coastal geography, Czech literature) to a soundtrack that was at times expansively melodic, at others frantic and deranged. And as if their musical output was not idiosyncratic enough, their live shows became notorious for an almost Dada-ish level of oddness: they festooned their concert venues with boughs, twigs and plastic birdlife, and wore a military-style motley of armbands, puttees and tin hats.
Displaying such elaborately cultivated eccentricities, this mostly Cumbrian-born, Brighton-based group could have been perceived as a pretentious art-joke. They even go by single pseudonyms (largely adopted from surnames or middle names): brothers Yan (lead vocals and guitar) and Hamilton (bass and vocals), Noble (guitar), Wood (drums) and Eamon (keyboards). But, in person, they could hardly be less 'Look at us!'.
'I come down here a lot. It's only half an hour on the bus. Nice spot, isn't it?' Hamilton murmurs, looking about him at the virtually deserted beach which they have chosen as the location for their photo-shoot. It is a setting that is particularly apt for a band whose lyrics include such acute David Attenborough-worthy observations as, 'Hoopoe and herring gulls over chalky cliffs/whitebait and cockle shell washed up like a gift'.
Their heartfelt love of the great outdoors informs their entire approach to the business of being a rock band. As well as trudging around the customary touring circuit, they go out of their way to arrange concerts in locations of special natural interest ('Playing on the Scilly Isles, it's not like the rest of the UK,' Noble observes).
Hamilton cites one of the defining influences on their second album, Open Season (released last month to critical delight), as a book called The Shining Levels - a man called John Wyatt's lyrical account of his Robinson Crusoe-esque experiences living wild in a stone hut in the Lake District.
'It's my favourite book, probably. He burns different kinds of wood and finds out which ones smell good. A deer comes to live with him,' he says tenderly. Hamilton himself is prone to heading out into the hills - after a gig in Leeds last December he opted to travel to his family home in Kendal, across the Pennines, on foot. It took three days.
The band's singular outlook makes more sense when Yan, 27, and Hamilton, 26, sketch the details of their upbringing. They were the youngest of six siblings. 'What was normal for us wasn't normal for anybody else,' Hamilton says. 'We went to school in girls' shirts. We never thought twice about sharing a bed. We never had a car.'
Their father was 'a writer in his heart' who wrote an extensive Graham Greene-like novel 'about the dirty side of life' between odd accounting jobs, while their mother demonstrated sewing machines 'in posh stores'. 'Really, our parents made more sense than everyone else,' Yan insists. 'I mean, there isn't much difference between a girls' shirt and a boys' shirt. To the other kids at school there is, but really there isn't.' (It is a subject of wry amusement that their make-do-and-mend style - Hamilton carries a leather satchel with a spindly length of red cord serving as a shoulder strap - has been identified as modish by GQ magazine, which invited them to be fashion plates. They said no.)
Hamilton knew Wood, now 25, from secondary school, but it was several years later, when Yan met Noble at Reading University, that the band began to take shape. Hamilton (by then a film student in Derby) and Wood moved to Reading to join them, and subsequently they all decamped to Brighton in 2000.
Once there, unable to get sufficient gigs, they began to stage their own monthly night, called Club Sea Power, in local venues. Their forest-glade decor and atypical costumes began to win them a zealous fanbase, and on the strength of one visit to Club Sea Power in 2001, Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis signed them to his label. The band went on to tour with Pulp and the Strokes, before adding Eamon (who also fronts another Brighton-based band, Brakes) to the line-up in 2003.
The time is ripe for British Sea Power to transcend their cultish appeal. While Open Season has lost none of their free-wheeling intelligence nor plangent emotion, the songs have a more crafted, radio-friendly touch. The first single from the album, It Ended on an Oily Stage, went top 20, trumping the major-label young guns Kasabian; the next, the euphoric Please Stand Up, looks set to follow suit.
'And,' as Noble points out, their window-dressing has changed too: 'We've weaned ourselves off the branches and all that stuff now.'