PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING are more Reith Lecture than pop group. After space and south Wales, their latest destination is Berlin. Is it one giant leap too far? “It’s brave, but is it wise?” they ask DAVID HUTCHEON.
Achtung! The UK’s most singular group have turned the space race and the mining industry into epic pop. Now they map Berlin.
THERE ARE NO VISUALS IN WALTER RUTTMANN’S FILM WOCHENENDE (Weekend), an experiment in audio collage made in Berlin in 1930, yet your mind fills in the gaps: monochrome images of men working with machines, illuminated by sparks; a whistle signals shift’s end; marching bands in town squares; kisses beneath the trees in the Tiergarten. Four minutes in, a young woman, fashionably dressed in cloche hat, short skirt and Mary Janes turns towards us. “Mach schon,” she exhorts. “Let’s go!”
That unknown fräulein is about to become a pop celebrity of sorts. “Berlin sounds so noisy then,” says J. Willgoose, Esq, of Public Service Broadcasting, whose fourth album, Bright Magic, is a mystical dive into the myths that obfuscate the reality of Germany’s capital city. “It’s fascinating to be transported back in time by Wochenende and hear these voices of everyday Berlin almost a century ago. It just felt right to use her to open Im Licht, just before the album explodes musically.”
MOJO and Willgoose meet by the Wall, under the watchful eye of the Stasi – in reality, a south London cafe, and we are harassed only by pigeons – to talk about Berlin, mythology and electricity. For security, we have both adopted fake names and the password is “Ouroboros”. “It is a bit like a snake eating its own tail,” he concedes. “An album about people who move to Berlin to write albums about why they moved to Berlin to write an album. Everybody has their own version of this city in their heads. What is my version of Berlin that has given it this status, this kudos… and can we piggyback on that?”
ADECADE AGO, THIS WOULD HAVE SEEMED UNLIKELY. HAVING TRIED AND FAILED to make his way with various indie bands, Willgoose went solo, “mucking about” with samples, accompanying them on synths and guitar, until hitting on the idea – a step beyond, say, Big Audio Dynamite’s snatches of Performance dialogue or Saint Etienne’s interstitials – of a concept album in which each song was based on a different public information film. He found receptive ears helming
the British Film Institute and StudioCanal archives, and Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) was born.
“I wrote a line years ago that has haunted us ever since,” he says. “‘Teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future,’ but it was tonguein-cheek. Our look was that of the crumpled old leftwing intelligentsia, vaguely disorganised university professors who always wear brown corduroys, but I realised I could do more with it than just be slightly arch. I could use the samples to build a narrative, and if you do that it’s more likely to have an emotional hook that people can grab on to.”
A second member, Wrigglesworth, joined – “Some tracks just sounded better with live drums” – and the EP The War Room and LP
Inform-Educate-Entertain were released in 2012-13, with songs about the Blitz, Second World War fighter planes, mountaineers and mail trains. Its most affecting track, Lit Up, features the BBC’s Thomas Woodrooffe, in his cups and describing George VI’s Coronation Review of the Fleet in 1937; the corporation’s apology for his performance giving the world the phrase “tired and emotional”. It’s a fine line, however, between celebrating humanity and what today might be called “imperial nostalgia”.
“It’s important not to just hand these myths over to the nationalists,” Willgoose counters. “There are many things to be unapologetically proud of in what Britain did in the War, but it was about trying to express that without being jingoistic, the irony of creativity begetting destruction, or of the triumph of human endeavour on Everest, balancing the lofty poetry of the narrative with the grind that got them there.”
Another musical celebration of human endeavour in excelsis, The Race For Space followed. Its evocation of American and Soviet scientists locked in astronautical oneupmanship took PSB to new levels across the board, the album launching at Leicester’s National Space Centre in February 2015 and reprised during the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in July 2019, the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. The band grew in number, but the long-running success of Race… undoubtedly overshadowed its successor, Every Valley, the story of the miners of south Wales, once feted as “the kings of the underworld” in Richard Burton’s words, then “the enemy within” in Margaret Thatcher’s. Yet, even before that album, Willgoose had set his eyes on another horizon.
“When we signed with our managers, playing Berlin was one of my ambitions. The first gig we did there was a shocker. I muffed up
[Inform-Educate-Entertain track] Roygbiv so badly, Wrigglesworth fell off his stool laughing. Yet it felt cool, and Berlin still has the air of a great place. With a city that rich in history, it’s easy to find resonances that chime with you, but I think I, we, have an inbuilt desire to push back against the obvious – the Wall, the Stasi, JFK’s speech – all the stuff I’m sure people are tired of hearing about. I went to see the expressionistic films of the Novembergruppe at the Berlinische Galerie and I remember getting back in the van and saying: ‘Yeah, I’ve got it, I know what I’m doing now.’”
Wait. Your were on tour, in Berlin, and you went to a gallery? That’s not very rock’n’roll.
“Well, my experience of Berlin may have been different to Bowie’s. I was 38. I had a pregnant wife and a dog.”
“I WROTE A LINE YEARS AGO THAT HAS HAUNTED US EVER SINCE: ‘TEACHING THE LESSONS OF THE PAST THROUGH THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE.’” J. Willgoose, Esq