Public Service Broadcasting are a peculiar phenomenon and a
peculiarly English one at that. Are they a band? Are they an art
project? PSB certainly have Arts Council funding – and that in
itself is an indication of the changing face of the music industry.
It’s heartening to know that the Arts Council will consider
putting lottery dollars into a couple of guys who have set about
creating an electronic music project initially based on sampling
the nation’s film archive of the Second World War.
“The Guardian said we’re more a concept than a band,” says
J Willgoose Esq, Public Service Broadcasting’s corduroy-andbow-tie-wearing main man, over a pot of tea for two at what is
possibly the only pub in south London owned by the National
Trust. “I see where they’re coming from, and I don’t think they
meant it in a derogatory way, but people have since thrown it
at us as an accusation. I kind of disagree. People don’t go to
gigs to see concepts, they go to see bands. And if we weren’t a
band back then, we are now.”
Whatever PSB might be, J Willgoose Esq and his partner
Wrigglesworth are popular. The pair have built up a
considerable following over the last couple of years with a mix
of electronics and live instrumentation in the shape of guitars,
drums and even a banjo, packaged up and fronted by a kind
of languid Oxbridge BBC presenter, circa 1950. And all of this
without a record company flexing a marketing muscle.
“That’s not something a lot of people have picked up on,” notes
Willgoose. “I can’t think of any other group playing at the
Roundhouse who’ve got there without a label behind them.
Maybe things are changing. We were lucky to get a bit of
funding from the Arts Council, though, which definitely paid for
some of the more expensive things on our new album.”
‘The Race For Space’, Public Service Broadcasting’s second
album, is replete with expensive things. Thirty five singers
and musicians, including dream pop duo Smoke Fairies, cello
and viola players, and a sizeable choir, have helped to create
what is a musical tribute to the 15 years between the launch of
Sputnik in 1958 and the end of the Apollo programme in 1972,
15 years of the USA and Russia duking it out for supremacy in
space.
It seems like an obvious step for a band whose music so far
has taken its inspiration from the exploits of the Second World
War and the conquest of Everest. Their breakthrough record
was the stirring ‘Spitfire’ single. Ironically pressing into service
a decidedly krautrock sensibility in order to celebrate that most
British of wartime iconography, it’s the song that sends the
crowds crazy when PSB play live, with its nagging guitar hook
and