PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING: I THINK. I BETTER DANCE. NOW.
- Apr 28
- 7 min read
THIS FEELS A LITTLE BIT BAD, something that I rather than J Wilgoose Esq – who admittedly deployed it in a track by his band, but it was a few years ago now and isn’t there a statute of limitations on things like this being brought up by an interviewer? – should be a little embarrassed to bring up. But what the hell, like I said, he used it.
For anyone who has seen Public Service Broadcasting live, with their mix of strong visual presence and low-key human presence, sampled voices and archived recordings from the likes of former Welsh miners and crew members on space-bound rockets, with electronics, analogue instruments and always active rhythms, dancing is not out of the question. Indeed some of the build-ups and soaring moments, say in the recreation of the space race or the pioneering days of flight, aren’t dissimilar to a classic DJ set, and 2021’s People, Let’s Dance, from the reimagined Berlin album, Bright Magic, is a propulsive pulse and Germanic drollery combination that makes any suburban road a (fahren fahren fahren auf der) autobahn.
However, it is hard to imagine Wilgoose Esq, with his patched-elbow scientist look, his rumpled hair and monotone colour scheme clothes, his diffident manner and well-mannered voice (and, of course, his bowtie), calling out “people let’s dance” in their imminent Australia shows. Has he, in the years since PSB were last in Australia, become such a character? Should we alert the authorities?
“No. That’s why I think I wrote that song in German,” he says with a rueful smile. “But it’s not really my call to arms that song, it’s set within the context of Berlin and what’s made that city what it is in terms of a creative mecca.”
(Worth noting here that the first PSB album was called Inform-Educate Entertain.) “Yeah, I don’t do much shouting of any description, much less ‘people let’s dance’. It’s not even my title, it’s from Rory McClean’s wonderful book, Berlin: Imagine A City. Highly recommended.”
Further proof of the innate politeness of Wilgoose (not his real name, even without the Esq, you’ll be shocked to hear, but then his bandmates’ names are hardly more credible: Wrigglesworth, JFAbraham and Mr B.) is that he doesn’t laugh away my fumbled attempts to suggest a link, in my mind at least, between his band and seminal second wave folk troupe, The Incredible String Band.
Bear with me here, but there’s something to be said for the connection with The Incredible String Band, who lived on outer edge of new folk and psychedelia in the late ‘60s, and Public Service Broadcasting, in their innate Englishness and the use of storytelling outside the realms of regular music of their time. ISB in their own way recognisably had a European sensibility, a way of thinking that is outside British methods, though they were in many ways the most British of British bands, like PSB.
And Berlin is in its post-war/Cold War context especially is the ultimate example of the non-conforming-to-Britishness Europe that excites and horrifies Little Britain but pulls in artists. Is that what appealed about the once-and-again German capital?
“That’s what appealed to me. That record turned into me trying to work out what is it about Berlin that draws so many people, for centuries beforehand,” Wilgoose says. “There was a political aspect to making that record then: I moved there in 2019, which was the year before the UK left the EU for good and I was denied that freedom of movement, freedom of being able to live wherever I wanted to in Europe. So it was a last throw, a last hurrah for me personally, and a bit of a lament.”
The album, which sits between their study of Britain’s coal industry, coal towns and coal miners, 2017’s Every Valley, and 2024’s Amelia Earhart-centred The Last Flight, is European in every way, typically immersed in the cultural, historical and social elements of their subject and almost entirely German in the voices heard. It was however a deviation from the norm, with the band using not just the usual archived voices but live-to-tape contributions from people like Blixa Bargeld, Eera and Nina Hoss.
“It was quite a bold thing to do for a band that so often is lazily summed up as quintessentially British even though we’ve dealt with a lot of different countries and lot of different subjects. It was a very pro-European record,” Wilgoose says. “But then the other side of it is, once you start to look in any kind of detail to any of the myths about Berlin, or any of the creative myths that have come out, often they are exactly that, myths. There’s a self-mythologising, self-invented aspect to a whole lot of its history, which I found fascinating but quite ironic.”
That contrast between the mythology and the practical reality, or the combination of mythology and reality has informed pretty much all of their subjects and their work: the dream of space, the circumnavigation of the globe in the story of flight, the dignity and damage of mining as a national ethos.
”Yes, I think there’s that and on a more fundamental level, it’s just different aspects of the human spirit: the creative side to it with the Berlin record, or the more adventurous side to it with the race to space and the last flight, and the everyday heroism coupled with the politically deliberate decline of heavy industry in the UK with Every Valley.
“It’s odd because I don’t sit down and think I’ve got to do something that fits with that, I just move on to the next thing thinking I’m doing something radical and new until I look back on the whole of it and answering questions and realise oh no it does fit in it’s entirely of a piece.”
He smiles wanly: “There you go I can’t really do anything different or new, well done me.”
It’s hardly limiting if your canvas is mythology, structures, history, human frailty and adventure.
“I’d agree. One of the few things that does annoy me is when people think just because we use old materials or focus on material – the latest we’ve got is probably mid ‘80s, early ‘90s – that therefore by default is nostalgia. When actually what I think it’s doing is bringing stuff from the past into the present and allowing us to re-examine it and, if it’s not too pretentious, to recontextualise it really. And we approach it with all the knowledge we have now, whether that’s a tragic foreknowledge or a deep sense of irony or a great sense of achievement.
“Because we have that knowledge it changes the way we look at the material, a deeper layer of thought I would like to think behind each record.”
Each PSB album asks us to not only consider what we might think we know of the past but also that we understand that all we are is built on the myths and truths of these stories and this past, the only difference being how we interpret it and what we value and justify from it.
“It’s fascinating seeing how often that view is very distorted. If you think about almost any famous quote from history, you can best almost odds-on that the version we all say, whether it’s ‘play it again Sam’ or ‘Houston we have a problem’, they’re all wrong, that’s not what they said, almost entirely across the board. We need to tell ourselves stories to remember these things and often the story is better than real life.”
But is what PSB is telling us the truth? Is that important that there is a truth, the truth?
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of my emotional response to whatever I’m writing about and then trying to translate that to the audience. Whether or not that is true is kind of case dependent,” says Wilgoose. “Our song Spitfire is a good example of that on several levels. It’s a song about this machine we owe a great deal to in the UK, and I think across Europe and the wider world for the role it played in war – along with all these other planes that aren’t as mythologised and lionised – but the film we use to sample for that is The First Of The Few which has almost nothing to do with the true story of RJ Mitchell, the inventor of the Spitfire, who died before the war even happened.:
Why is that song significant in the PSB context? Or indeed, contemporary culture?
“It’s the manipulation of that into propaganda and it’s also embracing the inherent irony that a lot of creativity and a lot of technological advances come from the ultimate action of human destruction, which is war. A lot of the things that drive us forward as a species came about because we were looking for better way to kill each other,” explains Wilgoose.
“Even just on a musical level, taking the very deliberate decision to write about the Spitfire but making it a Krautrock song about the Spitfire, was playing with that a little. Whether or not its’ true, you’ve got to find your own way through it. You’ve got to leave enough room in whatever field you’re working in for people to find themselves in it.”
Find themselves in it and move while doing so? People, let’s dance!
READ MORE
SEE MORE
Public Service Broadcasting play:
Powerstation, Auckland, May 1
Meow, Wellington, May 2
City Recital Hall, Sydney, May 4
Princess Theatre, Brisbane, May 6
Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, May 7
Comments