Public Service Broadcasting

26 | April 16, 2015 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

This week’s entertainment highlights

the critical list

THE HEADLINER: MUSIC

They had the nous to splice archive footage with electronic music and, as a result, are quite exceptional. ELLA WALKER has a very civilised chat with one half of the operation, J. Willgoose Esq.

Public Service Broadcasting: “Ask anyone, they’ll tell you I’m a helluva mover”

T

HEY still do their own soundcheck, with ‘front man’ J. Willgoose Esq, in reverse Superman-style, taking his specs off as a disguise.

It doesn’t fool anyone, in fact it’s kinda cute; but it does set a humbling, DIY tone, that makes it even easier to be swept up in the eccentricity and mystery of the London based Public Service Broadcasting.

J, who plays guitar and banjolele and hits buttons to make polite, witty recorded announcements (“Hello – Cambridge” / “Thank you” / “Here’s one about ice skating – in Dutch”), is joined by curly haired Wrigglesworth on drums, and visuals expert Mr B, who skulks in the background.

Known as much for their love of corduroy as for stitching electronic music together

with archive public information films, war recordings and speeches, they’ve recently followed up 2013’s Inform – Educate – Entertain, with new album The Race For Space. It’s the kind of record you play at full volume, while driving somewhere in the dark.

We found out more about it: So, you’re gearing up to play two nights at the National Space Centre in Leicester to launch the new album. Do you have any surprises in store, and are they going to translate to the Cambridge Corn Exchange gig?

We won’t be able to have a rocket tower at every venue we go this spring, but we’ve got our usual stage set and we’ve been working on a couple of extra super-duper special extras which are quite frankly ridiculous, and take us into full-on Spinal Tap territory. We’re looking forward to seeing people’s reaction to it; it’s pretty special, I think.

What attracted you to the era of the space race, and what did you set out to achieve when writing the new album?

Not to be too boring, I think I was trying to write a good album, something that hung together well and told a bit of a story through the space race. And maybe, for people of my generation anyway, highlight a few of the relatively unsung heroes of it, like the first space walker, Alexey Leonov and [female cosmonaut] Valentina Tereshkova; maybe highlight a bit more of the Russian side which has kind of got lost in all the American moon landings attention.

[Takes a deep breath] And maybe also, in our own little way, just offer a bit of optimism and positivity I suppose, a slight push back

Editor: Ella Walker email: ella.walker@cambridgenews.co.uk For breaking entertainment news for the city, visit cambridge-news. co.uk/whatson Follow @CamWhatsOn on Twitter

Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | April 16, 2015 | 27

against some of the prevailing cynicism of our times.

What do you mean by that?

This is one of our most technologically and spiritually revelatory periods of modern history, I’d say, and a great number of people choose not to believe that it’s happened, for various spurious reasons, which is incredibly depressing. So this is our attempt to push back against that.

That’s fair enough. The record is definitely quite jaunty; you’re far more likely to dance around to tracks like Go! and Gagarin, than say the angrier Spitfire and Signal 30 from the first album.

I think so, there’s a lot of brave slash possibly stupid decisions we took on this record to challenge ourselves and try something new and stretch ourselves. If you’d told me four years ago we’d be releasing a second album and we’d have written a song for a choir, and expanded things out to write for six-piece brass and five-piece strings, I think I would have been slightly disbelieving of you. I think it’s a good sign that we’re growing up a bit.

The video for Gagarin is categorically awesome (YouTube it for three minutes of astronauts break-dancing to funk). Where did that come from?

The broader idea for the song just came from wanting to do something celebratory and euphoric and upbeat and to try and make people turn this fantastic event – first man in space – into something that would be a really uplifting, celebratory piece of music.

When it came to the video, I recently heard a phrase I was quite keen on: ‘There aren’t many shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.’ So it came down to trying to capture a bit of that euphoria on film.

Are you much of a dancer yourself?

You can ask anyone, they’ll tell you I’m a helluva mover.

Nice. Are you pleased with how people have been reacting to The Race For Space so far?

The first reviews came in and they were fair to middling, and a couple of good ones, so it was kind of like, well, we were reasonably pleased with what we’d done but weren’t entirely sure what it was, I suppose.

I think people are really connecting with it, in a way beyond what I thought they might do. They really seem to be appreciating what we’ve attempted to do.

So you can put to bed all those comments that accompanied the first album, that you were destined for gimmickry, then?

I found all that rather annoying around the first record because I knew we were going to do this next, and I knew we could make it interesting and move beyond what a lot of people were throwing at us. But at the same time, I didn’t want to tell anyone what we were doing, so it was like, just get on and make it.

Do you think that criticism did affect the making of this album, however subconsciously?

We don’t write things in response to anyone, we just write music about the stuff we want to write about, so whatever other people say about it is irrelevant really. It’s more about what it means to the people who are listening to it.

You worked with singers for the first time (Smoke Fairies), on this record. You’ve

Turn to page 28

“This is one of our most technologically and spiritually revelatory periods of modern history and a great number of people choose not to believe that it’s happened, for various spurious reasons, which is incredibly depressing. So this is our attempt to push back against that.”

28 | April 16, 2015 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

THE HEADLINER: MUSIC

“We won’t be able to have a rocket tower at every venue, but we’ve been working on a couple of extra super-duper special extras which are quite frankly ridiculous, and take us into full-on Spinal Tap territory”

From page 27 previously said if a label swooped in to sign you, they’d try and get you to work with more singers. Is this something you’re considering anyway?

I don’t necessarily think a) a label is going to swoop in, and b) we want it to be something we want to do, and that’s why we’re doing it, not because we’ve suddenly been paid a ludicrously large advance and some record company is panicking that we don’t have mass appeal.

I like the way we operate at the moment, there are e a lot of downsides to it in terms of financial stability and not really having the clout ut that a lot of other larger labels might have, butt I quite like the feeling of operating on the fringes as a bit of an outsider. It allows us a lot of control over er every part of our process, which is very valuable to us.

So say, hypothetically speaking, you were thinking about signing up some collaborators, who would they be?

I don’t really want to say because I think we might start going afterr a few of them, haha. I don’t want to let them get their excuses in early. But we’ll see, hopefully on the next album there’ll be ea few other interesting faces popping up.

Considering you’re still very much committed to the bow ties, corduroy and lack of chat on stage, would it be fair

to say you’re still enjoying being mysterious?

Yes, haha, very much so, I don’t want to ever be, particularly, too [obvious]. We like to leave a little bit of room for imagination in what we do, and not just in our music.

OK, well, we are prepared to accept that fact if, in return, you give us one detail about your real life, however mundane or ordinary.

Erm, haha, I’m very keen on birds, I like garden birds. That’s something quite mundane isn’t it?! Yep, big fan, so if the RSPB are interested, tell them to get in