Public Service Broadcasting: electronic music collective coming soon to Cambridge
PSB doesn’t just stand for Pet Shop Boys, it also stands for Public Service Broadcasting, a highly successful electronic music collective whose leader also happens to be a fan of the illustrious duo.
Formed in 2009, Public Service Broadcasting released its fourth album, the very pro-European - and widely acclaimed - Bright Magic, on September 24. The London band, comprising J Willgoose, Esq, drumming companion Wrigglesworth, multi-instrumentalist JF Abraham and visuals guru Mr B, also recently put out a great video for its latest single, People, Let’s Dance.
The track features vocals from Berlin-based musician, EERA – it also incorporates a guitar riff from Depeche Mode’s People Are People – and the video, directed by Chloe Hayward, features colourfully-dressed women dancing on rollerskates in front of an industrial city backdrop, close to London’s O2. The Cambridge Corn Exchange welcomes the group in November.
Public Service Broadcasting has been “teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future” for more than a decade now. Its 2013 debut album Inform–Educate–Entertain used archival samples from the British Film Institute as audio-portals to the Battle of Britain, the summit of Everest and beyond.
Two years later, The Race for Space used similar methods to laud the superpowers’ rivalry and heroism in orbit and on the Moon. In 2017, joined by voices including James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, Every Valley was a moving exploration of community and memory via the rise and fall of the British coal industry which reached number four on the UK album charts.
As an indication of his dedication to his art, J Willgoose, Esq moved to Berlin – a city that some might call the ‘home’ of electronic music – to record Bright Magic. He spoke to the Cambridge Independent on the day he and his bandmates were due to play their first gig – a fundraiser for the Music Venue Trust at a pub in New Cross, south-east London – in more than two years.
“A lot of stuff had changed in our set-up and getting new stuff ready to play is always very complicated, in terms of our set-up and the way we do things,” explains J, “so it’s been a pretty intense period. It’s just reprogramming existing stuff and getting new stuff in as well, which always takes time.”
Willgoose, 39, lived in Berlin from April 2019 to January 2020 while the new album was being recorded. “It was written mostly during 2019,” he recalls, “although there were a few gaping holes by early January 2020. But then we came home from Berlin to London to have our first child, my wife and I, which we did at the end of January.
“Then we were supposed to go back out as a family, and as a band, in May and June 2020 to record it and just to have a nice spring and summer in Berlin, but obviously that didn’t happen... but we did manage to get back out there in September to record and get all the instruments back. All of our gear was in Germany and we couldn’t even enter the country for a few months.”
On Berlin’s enduring appeal as the ‘capital of electronic music’ – David Bowie, Depeche Mode and U2, for example, all explored that particular musical avenue while recording in the city – J says: “I ended up asking myself that question [of why Berlin] more than anything when writing the record...
“‘Why do you feel compelled to move there?’, for a start. All your friends are here in London, you enjoy where you live, all your equipment’s here, why do you want to move to a different city in a different country and put yourself in that situation of writing a record?
“What is giving you that impulse, what is drawing you there? And instead of writing the record I thought I was going to write about the more straight-ahead historical aspects of Berlin, it ended up being a record about that: What is it about the city that draws creative people in, and cities in general that draw creative people in? So the whole record is an answer to that question.”
J says he has missed the stimulation for the mind that comes from going to different places while on tour “extraordinarily”, almost as much as being on stage.
“That’s what music is to me,” he notes, “everything else is the stuff that you do to be able to have that privilege to get on a stage in front of people and create that shared experience – and I think the thing that’s been missing is that shared experience.”
Public Service Broadcasting will appear at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Thursday, November 11. Visit cornex.co.uk for tickets. For more on Public Service Broadcasting, go to publicservicebroadcasting.net/.
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