PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

VENUE roYal alBErt hall, london DATE 25/07/2019

From the Selkirk pub in Tooting to the Royal Albert hall might only be a six mile journey, but as a 10-year career arc it’s remarkable. Almost a decade to the day since that South London debut, Public Service Broadcasting are part of the BBC Proms programme, fleshed out by the Multi-Story Orchestra – a group of young musicians more used to performing in car parks – a brass section, and London Contemporary voices, a choir who made their debut here in back in 2010 as part of imogen heap’s Love The Earth show.

Because it’s a Prom, this old building doesn’t greet the band with the near-evangelical fervour that met, say, Marillion or Steven Wilson. After all, they’re playing for a mix of fans, season ticket holders, and Promenaders who don’t really care what’s on but are happy to brave the queue for cheap tickets. And because it’s a Prom, there’s a slightly awkward conflict between those inclined to applaud after every song, and the classical buffs who’d much rather wait until the performance has finished. For this Prom PBS have expanded their The Race For Space album – it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing – adding 20 minutes to the running time and introducing a host of audio-visual extras pulled from the archives of nASA and the Soviet space program. There’s a model Sputnik that rises up stage right, and dancing astronauts.

if there’s one remaining doubt about Public Service Broadcasting, it’s that the most interesting thing about them is their source material. They’re a band whose raison d’etre is to amplify audio samples that are dramatic in their own right, and this gives them a huge advantage over bands whose music might actually be more ambitious. Without the archive material, PSB’s own pieces might be a little dry, even a little uninteresting, and this archive material is some of the most iconic audio ever recorded. But the concept is brilliant, it’s executed with devilish flair, and when it works, it really works. E.v.A. is backboned by a groove worthy of Pink Floyd at their funkiest. During The Other Side, as Apollo 8 barrels around the dark side of the moon and contact with houston is lost, the tension in the hall is palpable. And Go!, as Mission Control staff go through their checklists and the music races, is almost feverishly exciting. All that’s left is for band leader J Willgoose to forget about multi-instrumentalist JF Abraham as he introduces the musicians, and there’s proof they can do comedy too, albeit accidentally.