Seeing Public Service Broadcasting play their latest album Te Race For Space live is an audio-visual treat. Not only is there excellent electronic music alongside live instruments, there’s also moving space equipment and a visual feast of original footage. You don’t quite know where to look, such is the bounty of wonders on stage. I spoke to the man who IS Public Service Broadcasting, the smooth dressing J.Willgoose Esq, to find out why he loves space so much and why his music is filled with hope.
How did the concept of Public Service Broadcasting first come to you? I was just doing it for fun really, to find a way to give mostly instrumental music some vocals without singing. I really liked the sound of the first voices I used, as a sonic character at first rather than using it as an emotional narrative hook, which is what it turned into as it’s evolved. It was purely for self-amusement. How did you come to team up with your drummer, Wrigglesworth? I’d been doing gigs as PSB for about a year and had eight or nine tracks written, and it was getting to the point where it was going alright but it could be a lot better if I had a live drummer. So it was mid 2010 when me and Wriggles met up; I knew he was a good drummer and it’s worked out alright. Who would you say influences your work musically? It gets harder and harder to call them the older I get as there’s more and more music. Radiohead would be a big one for me, as would Mogwai, a lot of electronic music, a lot of older music…Primal Scream were very big for me for a while. In terms of what I listen to now, it’s all over the shop
24 / November 2015/
outlineonline.co.uk
l“It’s not a history
esson, it’s a musical interpretation of those events”
really. How much time do you have to use clearing and requesting permission to use samples? We tend to do most of that upfront. We research into whether it’s alright for us to use stuff ahead of sitting down to write it. We’re lucky that the people we work with, especially the BFI, have just been great about it all. We can rely on them to give us the thumbs up and we get on with it. What is the purpose of Public Service Broadcasting…why is it important to you to do this? I don’t feel it did at the start, it just was what it was. As it’s grown and evolved it has started to take on a bit of a meaning and you do find there are common threads running through it in terms of optimism and faith in technological development and people working together to come through hardships, so all these kind of things do run through all of the music. It starts to become its own little philosophy. It’s nice not to be a cynical band, another apathetic band; in a way, despite the fact we don’t speak on the records, we do have a voice and it’s becoming clearer as we go on.
I feel like your music’s definitely a positive force. Yeah I think it is too, and that’s weird because I’m the least positive person you’ll ever meet! Genuinely. I always fear the worst, so it’s probably why I feel I have to make this music or else I get terribly depressed. Why did you decide to use space exploration as your focus for your most recent album?
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