Here comes the science bit
Public Service Broadcasting
Something is stirring deep within one of London’s august Victorian edifices to enlightenment. You’d hesitate to call it a mosh pit – consisting initially of people punching the air at the right moments during Go!, then a couple of women getting up to dance, even clambering on-stage to greet the horn section – but though it is one small step for fans, it’s a giant leap for museumkind.
Cosmonauts – Birth Of The Space Age, the exhibition the Science Museum is hosting until mid-March, is surprisingly moving as a testament to imagination and drive; symbiotically, it also puts flesh onto the bones of Public Service Broadcasting’s second long-player, The Race For Space – available in the gift shop downstairs. When the computerised, HAL-like voice of the band’s disembodied MC announces “this is for the chief designer”, and the band launches into Korolev, a glance at the museum booklet tells the story of Sergei, the clandestine aeronautics expert who inspired engineers on both sides of the Cold War. The newsreels on the IMAX screen behind the musicians do a powerful job, but it’s an entirely different experience listening to Valentina when you have just seen the pod that Ms Tereshkova was in
Boldly bringing Floydian intensity and Reithian diligence to the space age. By David Hutcheon.
when she returned to Earth in 1963. If the album was an impressive step up from their debut, it is on this tour, which began at Leicester’s National Space Centre in February 2015 and has included Gene Kranz, NASA flight director for the Apollo programme, turning up at a gig with a CD he wanted signed, that J Willgoose, Esq and Wrigglesworth have outgrown caveats about their modus operandi. Though adding guitars, drums and synths to the words of government information films – or, ouroboros-like, to John Betjeman poetry originally set to GPO promotional films celebrating the technological wonders of the pre-digital age – can seem like child’s play, there is real skill in doing it to create the emotional thump of The Other Side, where a heartfelt cheer rises from an audience slayed by a crescendo of silence as Apollo 8 goes round “the black side of the moon”. Of course, there is something not very rock’n’roll about this, a bit tweedy and offputtingly Open University – even if Willgoose plays a mean Rickenbacker, it’s simply not very punk to have a group in which all four on-stage members wear glasses – and, especially when E.V.A.’s Run Like Hell-style guitar rings out, the shadow of Pink Floyd hangs heavy… just without the angst, the self-loathing, the anger, the bitterness, the pomp, the po faces et al. That HAL voice better expresses where it is PSB are coming from as the encores are dedicated to “south London’s finest”, our own, recently departed, “interplanetary traveller”. They may be the Floyd for the generation raised on Matt Smith’s Doctor Who, but PSB’s eagle has only just taken flight.