PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
With ‘The Race For Space’, PSB certainly haven’t plumped for
the easy option. They haven’t re-written ‘Spitfire’ 10 different
ways and released a collection of crowd-pleasing big tunes.
While there is at least one such track on the album, the
purposeful ‘Go’, which is about the Apollo 11 moon landing,
‘The Race For Space’ as a whole demands a little more of
its listeners. It’s perhaps worth noting the response to the
first single from the album, the horn-driven ‘Gagarin’, named
after Yuri Garagrin, the first man in space. It seems that not
everyone wants their favourite tweedy electronic geeks going
all funk on them.
But ‘The Race For Space’ is a more nuanced and carefully
constructed work than ‘Gagarin’ and its brassy swagger
suggests. It takes several of the significant moments and
achievements of the space race era as leaping off points for
creating new pieces of music that combine an earnest sense
of admiration for their subject matter with what is now a
recognisable PSB musical landscape, albeit matured.
The album is almost teasingly slow off the mark. The opening
title track samples JFK’s 1961 speech, in which he sets out his
plans for America’s space programme, with a backing track of
a heavenly choir. ‘Sputnik’ is a seven-minute orbit of mostly
subtle metronomic pulses and bleeps and blurts before building
into a crescendo that is actually never quite resolved. And then
‘Gagarin’ kicks in. It’s quite a jolt to the system. A superfly
funk blast.
“It came out that way,” says Willgoose. “Going back to the first
album, we did fairly well with the critics, but there were some
who couldn’t get their heads around us using samples and
writing new music around them. They said things like [adopts
enraged critic voice], ‘The samples have nothing to do with
the music! It makes no sense! Agh!’. It seemed to really annoy
them. With this record, I wanted to continue the non-literal
relationship between the music and the samples, rather than
go down a sci-fi, 60s-sounding, original Radiophonic Workshop
route, which I think is what some people might have expected.
“Looking at the footage from the time and listening to some
of the quotes, Yuri Gagarin seemed a larger-than-life figure,
even though he was only about five-foot-two. He was the
most famous man in the world. He was on the front of every
newspaper everywhere. He blazed a trail to the stars and he
was the ultimate hero, the symbol of mankind’s triumph over
nature. It struck me that the song should try to capture some
of his exuberance and energy and somehow translate that into
music. I like the way it’s not quite what you’d expect. It’s not
for nothing that the horn blast is so in-your-face. It’s supposed
to be a bit of a statement, it’s saying that we’re not going to
just do the same old same old. There’s more to us than that.”
A few weeks before this interview took place, Virgin Galactic’s
SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert, with the loss of
one pilot. The Apollo programme had its own tragedy in 1967,
with a fire on a test launch for Apollo 1 which killed the three
astronauts on board. Journeying into space is a dangerous
pursuit and Mr Willgoose felt he had to acknowledge that. The
result is a track called ‘Fire In The Cockpit’.
“I had massive doubts about us trying to deal with that,” he
admits. “But every astronaut account I’ve read and some of
the other books I’ve read all seem to suggest that, terrible
as those deaths were, they saved more lives than they cost.
They probably saved the lives of nine to 12 astronauts. So
it was a big event in terms of the implications it had for the
whole Apollo project, including Apollo 8 going to the moon
earlier than it was supposed to have done and the gamble they
took on doing that, and it seemed it would have been more
disrespectful to leave it out.”
The elegiac cello lines of ‘Fire In The Cockpit’ emerge from a
white noise of radio signals and dark electronic tones, providing
a suitably sombre backdrop for the sampled voice announcing
the Apollo 1 accident.
“There’s no way you could take a different approach,” says
Willgoose. “But I didn’t want it to be too maudlin, too
melodramatic. I remember when we were recording the cellos,
one of viola players who’d just played on ‘Gagarin’ leaned over
to me and said, ‘Don’t you want to add t