Fragmented memories, damaged states, and quiet persistence drive the new album

Transmission 243: Interview with Pea Sea

Pea Sea is the project of songwriter and visual artist Rollen, active since the late 1990s. Originating in Gretna, Scotland, and later rooted in the DIY circuits of North East England, the project has steadily evolved across decades marked by relocation, familial responsibilities, and intermittent musical output. The first Pea Sea recordings emerged in the late 1990s from experiments with 4-tracks and tape collages at Rollen’s parents’ house. The project’s first formal releases drew on influences ranging from Beat Happening and Smog to the Northumbrian post-punk and art scenes around Slampt! Records, Me and the Twins, and Les Cox Sportifs.

Title: A Pyke of Patina Slate
Artist: Pea Sea
Genres: Folk Rock, Indie Rock, Post-punk
Label: Sea Records
Description: Pea Sea returns with A Pyke of Patina Slate, out 18 July 2025 on Through Sea Records. An interview on folk, loss, tape hiss, and political fatigue.

The third album, A Pyke of Patina Slate (Through Sea Records, 2025), completes an informal trilogy following The Debatable Land (2013) and Lonnin Life (2017). Recorded in Berlin, Sunderland, and Oxford, the album features contributions from Peter Brewis (Field Music), Tom English (Maxïmo Park), and others, and shifts between skeletal demos and layered compositions.

Before Les Cox Sportifs, what were the first DIY or informal setups where you began experimenting musically?

I really started writing songs when I was about 14 with my school friend Justin on drums. We had a band called Aqua Jack that ran from ’95 to about ’98. They were 3-chord punky tunes reminiscent of Beat Happening and the more melodic elements of Nirvana. I then borrowed a 4-track at art school and started experimenting with building ‘songs’ by mixing instrument tracks from old LPs and isolating them with sellotape to loop and build a groove. I was also writing Smog and Silver Jews-influenced dirges and putting tapes of both of these things together on my own at my parents’ house in Gretna as Pea Sea. This was ’98.

What was the atmosphere like in the Sunderland and early North East scene when you were first getting involved?

I moved to Newcastle in summer 2000 to do a master’s degree in Fine Art. I partly chose Newcastle because of Slampt! Records and what they had put out. As it turned out, I was living just round the corner from Pete Dale in Gosforth. I went to everything for 3 years, you name it: raves, Aphex Twin shows, noise, drone, electronic, post-rock—the lot. There were a brace of really exciting bands that I saw religiously: Paper Cut Out, The Unit Ama, and The Futureheads. The latter were mind-blowing early on (still are); when they came out of the traps, it was like a vortex of energy that launched a hundred ships.

This Ain’t Vegas, another great Mackem band (Mackem is the name for people from Sunderland). Christo, the drummer from Les Cox, co-founded the Cine Side — a great meeting ground for like-minded arty types. I knew Paul Smith from this scene, and he played with the very talented Lancaster twins (painters Laura and Rachel) in Me and the Twins. Christi (Les Cox drummer) had co-founded The Vine Side—a collective of filmmakers of various cloths who were keen to expand the remit of cinema to incorporate art installation and music. I got swept up in that, and Christo and I started doing film and music stuff together. A Weird War gig at the Cluny cemented the union. The rest is a hysterectomy.

When did the idea for A Pyke of Patina Slatebegin to take form?

I lived in Berlin until 4 years ago, so Brexit, Boris, Trump, and Covid all happened while we were there. I had started writing new stuff straight after the Lonnin Life tour in mid-2017. Ideas formed around my immersion in ’60s and ’70s folk revival stuff. I wanted to add to the folk canon but avoid folk with a capital ‘F’. I really love what Richard Dawson had done with that very conundrum (Les Cox played with Richard a fair few times and we loved his stuff) and took influence from the spirit of what he does. Any ‘similarities’ are probably subconscious and definitely a homage to the great troubadour. Anyhoo, the songs came quite quickly during lockdown and sat and gathered dust, gained verses, slowed down, gained embellishments, etc., over the post-Covid years. By this time my wife, kids, and I had moved back to Blighty after a decade in Berlin.

How did you come to collaborate with Peter Brewis and Tom English for this record?

Peter and Tim are old friends from the aforementioned North East scene. We’ve kept in touch on and off, and Peter had a big part to play on the first Pea Sea album The Debatable Lands. He also recorded the last proper Les Cox stuff from the Bath Bomb EP, as well as a bunch of newer, as-yet-unreleased material. Tom was keen to contribute to the songs when I sent round some demos, and he recorded all his stuff separately in Toon. He will also be playing traps when I get a band together next month in Sunderland (15 Aug, Pop Recs).

‘A Pyke of Patina Slate’ completes a trilogy—did you always see these albums as interconnected, or did that arc emerge along the way?

It wasn’t a ‘trilogy’ gig until recently and isn’t really a trilogy. I kept a uniformity to the album packaging with a poetry quotation and simple layout that somehow chronicles the time that the music was released. So yeah, I’m a revisionist shyster.

How did recording in three very different cities—Berlin, Sunderland, Oxford—affect the final album?

I must mention the beautiful Mike Bannard of Safehouse Studios in Oxford who really ran with my ideas and carried the album to completion with both his expertise and enthusiasm. The Sunderland tracks were skeletal frames that we furnished later in Oxford. There is one track (Now That You’re Gone) that was recorded old-school style in Berlin by the lovely Rhys Patterson (Slug touring band and genius songwriter in his own right) on his laptop in his Neukölln flat one dreich afternoon. Real demoitis vibes with that one. I couldn’t better it if I tried.

Were there specific themes you had in mind while writing this record?

There are themes of loss in this album (as ever with Pea Sea material), but this time with a more raw, tangible feel. Personally, it has been a tough time between the last album and this, without going into too much detail, with familial breakdown issues and unforeseen challenges that have been quite overwhelming.

Outside of music, what sources—literary, visual, political—fed into the writing or structure of the album?

Brexit was a direct influence on me writing Mother England Pt. 1. It’s about a character who becomes blind with loss and becomes nostalgic to the point of obsessive compulsion to self-soothe with nationalistic clichés. I had intended it to be an epic, Dylanesque number but decided to leave it hanging a bit at the 3-minute mark.

I’ve always been heavily into lyrics and poetry. That’s all I hear in songs really, and so I lean on the poetry of many hands. Some notable examples are: Thomas Hardy (late poems), Burns, Seamus Heaney, David Berman (Silver Jews)—but I do spurge up all kinds of influences that really spark an idea. For example, the A.S. Neill (Scottish educationalist who founded a free school called Summerhill) memoirs A Dominie’s Log, which covers his time as the head teacher at Gretna Green School in the 1910s. It’s a beautiful book that all teachers should read. I’ve been in the teaching game for 20 years this year!

Was there a particular track that took more time or went through more revisions than the others?

The Loam is quite possibly my most accomplished song to date by my own estimation. I wrestled a lot with how to record it and am still not quite convinced it’s been properly captured yet. It grew at the height of the first Covid lockdown as something that I returned to when I needed a quiet spell while looking after our two boys, who are full of beans all the time. The album version has a verse from He Who Would Valiant Be at the start as a tribute to my good friend Dave Harper (Frankie & the Heartstrings drummer, Pop Recs co-founder and Sunderland legend) who died in 2021 just as we moved back to the UK. It’s a song about burying yourself alive to escape your ghosts—which turns out to be futile. Pretty heavy meta.

Did you approach the arrangements alone or collaboratively from the start?

Everything is ‘arranged’ by myself in a rudimentary manner. I’m absolutely of the unembellished school of doing things, probably through years of avoiding anything that appears professional/rock’n’roll. I’m a hopeless inverted snob who lives in hope that the world is just around that bend behind me and will catch up in due course. Lol.

Do you write with performance in mind, or do you only think about the live format afterward?

I have an unhealthy relationship with performing live. I really want to do it, but invariably regret having done it afterwards with pangs of embarrassment and self-berating. Then I come around to feeling good about the fact that I found it hard. It’s a masochistic tendency to find authenticity in moments of vulnerability and exposure, that’s all.

Are there already plans for new material after this trilogy, or is there a pause ahead?

Having said that above, I’m looking forward to playing some shows to play the new stuff to new audiences. I’d love to get a band together in Oxford and rehearse etc. regularly (perhaps your readers know of some willing bodies?). There’s a possibility of doing another 6 Music session at some point too. We’ll see. I’m keen to do some painting soon and work on my guitar playing too. I’d love to play some shows for Divine Schism in Oxford (haven’t been asked yet). It would be good for me to do something different for a while after the album does the rounds. We’ll just have to see what the craic is.

Photos courtesy of Pea Sea

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others