Doing a Public Service in Berlin

This week a new tune lands from Public Service Broadcasting. According to their own liner notes, Public Service Broadcasting have been “teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future” for more than a decade now.  I first came across the band when they made a video about Yuri Gagarin, featuring two band members dancing in space suits.  By setting their compositions to archival samples from the British Film Institute - evoking the Titanic, the Battle of Britain, the Space Race, or the demise of Welsh coal mining, they do something unpretentiously artistic and clever and full of memorable tunes.  Better still, their frontman J Willgoose’s best-mate is a drummer and he puts him front and centre of both the sound-mix and live staging.  With a top ten album, on the precipice of pop-stardom, Willgoose then did what any self respecting auteur would do and in mid 2019, packed his bags for Berlin and went to make a Berlin album.  The Berlin sojourn is a route is well-trodden, most famously by David Bowie, who recorded Low and Heroes there in the late 1970’s while living in West Berlin, nudged along and sonically shaped by producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno.  Before Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop went to Berlin to record a Berlin inspired album and Willgoose describes the new album, Bright Magic, as a “personal story…it’s an album about moving to Berlin to write an album about people who move to Berlin to write an album…”, which reminded me of Ted Hughes take on moon gazing: “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work. That points at him amazed.” The new record was recorded in Kreuzberg’s famous Hansa Studio recording complex , a couple of blocks from the former Berlin Wall, where Depeche Mode found their extraordinary sound and U2 made their best album Achtung Baby [with Brian Eno again involved].  I don’t know whether the new Berlin album will any good; but in a way that’s the whole point of PSB; they continue to explore and try and experiment.  If borne in the 1970’s they would be bracketed with some progressive rock dinosaurs, producing ‘concept’ albums, sung in Welsh, with guitar solos punctuated by voice samples like Alan Parsons dropped into Dark Side of the Moon.  But today - amidst so little imagination found in the scope of what can be achieved on two sides of vinyl, they are in a category almost all of their own.  I wish them well.  Viel Glück.