PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING – LIVE: REVIEW
- 11 hours ago
- 2 min read
PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
City Recital Hall, May 4
IT WAS PROMISED and it was delivered, close enough to being bathed in blue blue electric blue too. For before the band appeared we did hear a song (by a certain D. Bowie) suggesting we should sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision.
Sit we did, at least until the end of the set when bassist/keyboardist/flugelhornist JFAbraham roused us from our recumbent poses to … dance? Well, move, let’s say, with enthusiasm rather than reckless freedom to songs that could blend tub thumping drums (from the centrepiece of the live show, Wrigglesworth) and twang guitar (from nominal band leader J Wilgoose Esq) or synths set to fly against propeller guitar slashes, or project industrial machinery from heavy-impact percussion then stacking on weight to a lonesome flugelhorn introduction.
To be fair to us, an audience not in the first flush of youth but hardly ready for grumbling “sit down in front” to anyone leaping from their seats, the vision accompanying the sound did deserve attention. Created and manipulated live by relative newcomer, Mr B – who would on occasion step forward from his machines and take a hand-held camera to isolate individuals and project them into the existing footage – it was not flashy, not complicated. No one is going to confuse this business with, say, the recent Harry Styles or Kendrick Lamar shows.
But it did wrap the conceptual with the practical in subtle variations, just as the music did with its sampled voices from old interviews and a few times manipulated live voices, documentaries and stock footage, public service and private business recordings. How else to make stories from the decline of the coal industry, a touch of WH Auden and daily life in pre-war Britain (“Letters for the rich, letters for the poor”) and the adventurous risks of early flight with the mythology of Their Finest Hour, not just sit alongside the race to space and the emotional expansion of post-war Berlin, but feel conceptually aligned?
Or you could forget the theory and just get excited as the build-up in Go! – a kind of pop song in a motorik vehicle – launched you forward, then upwards, then soaring. Or ride a guitar motif that suggested a punky David Gilmour on a jazzy rhythm. Or ingest the meaty funk of Gagarin like hearty borscht.
Four men bespectacled and dressed like higher maths lecturers at a minor university – dun colours, three mildly colourful ties and one bowtie, elbow patches implied – who barely say anything, and half the time it is said with roboticised voice treatments anyway, do not sound like a gift. More like they’re made for pale blinds drawn all day, nothing to read, nothing to say. But Public Service Broadcasting have you sorted.
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Public Service Broadcasting play:
Princess Theatre, Brisbane, May 6
Northcote Theatre, Melbourne, May 7
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