Lost Patrol

Lost Patrol are an Arransian rock band who have achieved more international success than any other previous act from the country. The members are Alex Morton (lead vocals, keyboards, rhythm guitar), Neil Williamson (lead guitar), Danny Mackinnon (bass guitar) and Will Dewar (drums). They were all born in 1977-78 and met at Skerne Institute, a highly-regarded independent school in the dockyard town of Skerne in Teviot.

While sometimes characterised as a middle-class band, in fact they come from a variety of backgrounds and Alex and Will attended the school on publicly-funded scholarships. Alex’s father still works as a maintenance foreman in the dockyard repairing submarines, while Neil Williamson’s father was the civilian manager of the dockyard and his older brother Stuart holds a senior position in the Arransian naval design office. Danny’s father was a submarine captain, now retired, while Will’s father left home when he was young leaving his mother, a nurse, to bring up him and his two sisters as a single parent.

The band was formed at school and they played a number of gigs at local pubs and clubs, and also recorded some demos. At this time they were rather more influenced by prog rock and given to overlong displays of musicianship, but the fundamentals of their later style were already apparent. Nothing came of the demos, and Alex, Neil and Will drifted away to university while Danny became an officer cadet in the Royal Marines. However, interest from a record company led them to get together again during the summer of 1997 and this led to them getting a recording contract and abandoning their studies or careers.

All four of them in their different ways were very good-looking, and the record company seemed to want to promote them as a starter rock band that would appeal to girls as much as boys. They released a couple of singles in a somewhat poppy vein without any great success. However, their debut album Sea of Souls, released in May 1998 had a significantly darker tone and included some longer and more lyrical pieces. It also featured a lot of religious imagery, which led many to categorise Lost Patrol as a Christian rock band, an impression that was reinforced by what is generally regarded as their breakthrough appearance at a Christian rock festival at Hallenbach in Colmar in August 1998. However, they have always insisted that they are “a rock band who happen to be Christians” rather than the other way round.

Since then, they have released three more albums, Walk on Water (January 2000), Dreampower (November 2001) and City of Light (March 2004), the last of which has sold over six million copies worldwide. Their fifth album, provisionally entitled Unredeemed, is scheduled for release in February 2006. Although this will include the beautiful ballad “Girl of the Sunset”, initial impressions are that overall it will have a darker tone and be less immediately accessible than much of their earlier work. In the summer of 2005 Lost Patrol undertook a mammoth and lucrative arena tour of Acadia, Sabrantia and Mayenne and some of her neighbours. For some reason they are more popular in Skania than even in Arransia.

Lost Patrol play grandiose, sweeping romantic music which tends to hint at profound themes rather than making them explicit. Their songs tend to alternate between emotive ballads and lighter-waving anthems, although they occasionally venture into a rockier vein, as on “Thrill of the Chase” from Walk on Water. Their best known songs are probably “The Last Hunt” from Walk on Water and “Albatross” from Dreampower. The latter is basically expressing an environmental concern, but with its magisterial, soaring chorus and reference to mighty wings wandering the oceans has become a kind of unofficial anthem for Arransia’s carrier-based air squadrons. Some critics have dismissed their music as empty bombast, but others feel it is inspiring and poetic, and the second view certainly seems to be held by a large portion of the world’s record-buying public. Not surprisingly, there are now a number of websites dedicated to in-depth quasi-academic analysis of their lyrics. Their music might be described as a mixture of Simple Minds, U2, Coldplay and Big Country.

Alex Morton is an eloquent and charismatic front-man for the band, and his handsome features and mane of raven-black hair have made many a woman swoon. In 2004 he was voted “Arransia’s most eligible bachelor”, but since then of course he has dashed many hopes by marrying Princess Fiona. Alex has made a number of rather general pronouncements about the need to combat world poverty and to protect the environment, but he has always refused to condemn outright Arransia’s whaling industry (which, of course, is what “The Last Hunt” is basically about). He is also, for a rock musician, a very accomplished singer, with a strong, clear tenor-register voice.

Many fans imagine that Alex is the band’s chief lyricist, but in fact this honour goes to Will Dewar, who is the most intense and thoughtful of the foursome. Neil Williamson is a natural romantic and very dedicated musician, who enjoys a contented home life married to Alex’s younger sister Susan, who had been his childhood sweetheart. Danny Mackinnon is the most fun-loving band member who is often seen emerging from nightclubs accompanied by some model or actress. However, he currently seems to have settled into a more serious relationship with Lady Charlotte Skene, the daughter of the Earl of Pentmark. There are unconfirmed rumours that Will Dewar, who guards his privacy very closely, and has much shorter hair than the other three, is in fact gay.

Not surprisingly, the success of a band like Lost Patrol has bred a number of imitators, although the best-known band placed in this category, Before the Mast, did in fact evolve a vaguely similar style entirely independently and all that can really be said is that Lost Patrol probably opened up the way for them. Before the Mast have somewhat more authentic working-class credentials, as their two leading members Tom Burchill (bass, vocals) and Donny Adamson (guitar) were apprentices at the James Caird shipyard in Elswick. Although, like Lost Patrol, they play anthemic “big rock” with a scattering of nautical, military and historical references, they make more direct use of blues and folk influences and Tom Burchill is a more gruff and soulful singer than Alex Morton. The two bands are often portrayed as rivals in the media, and amongst thirteen-year-old boys keen to have their finger on the cultural pulse, Before the Mast are seen as having more street credibility, but in fact behind the scenes get on very well with each other, and Tom Burchill famously sang a duet with Alex Morton at an arena show in Aubourg in July 2005. The other members of Before the Mast are Chris MacIver who plays keyboards and also a variety of traditional instruments such as the fiddle and flutes and whistles, and drummer Andy Grant. Chris MacIver in fact guests on a couple of tracks from Lost Patrol’s new album Unredeemed.  

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