Public Service Broadcasting city to city live as Berlin inspires the band set for their latest Ironworks Inverness date on Thursday
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Public Service Broadcasting have shared landmark moments of their career with the Ironworks along the way – the first tour of the Highlands, album Race For Space which had a triumphant performance at the proms in 2019, the album celebrating the story of Welsh mining – and later this week, J Willgoose Esq and the band will transport us to Berlin performing their latest album Bright Magic there.
The gig is part of a second tour celebrating an album that was slightly cheated of its entrance to the world by the constraints of Covid.
But released last year, it meant the band’s lockdown experience included an album at the end of what for many musicians was a frustrating hiatus in their musical lives.
And 2022 has been and will still be a busy year – This New Noise, their proms BBC-commissioned new work celebrating 100 years of the public service broadcaster premiered at the Royal Albert Hall last month and in a couple of months, there will be a new studio.
First, there’s the chance to see how different venues across the country respond to the music of the ‘retro-futurist rockers’ Bright Magic.
“You can kind of persuade yourself that different places have different responses,” John mused. “But then you can go to somewhere like Glasgow when you think the crowd are going to be absolutely off the chart and it feels a little bit subdued and you are thinking ‘What are we doing wrong?. But sometimes it’s just that’s the crowd that were in that night. You could play a week in the same venue and it would be different every night. It’s such a weird thing, crowd science and the mood in the room.
“Inverness has always been good for us!”
Bright Magic is the band’s latest album that set out to answer the question about why Berlin has been such a magnet for creativity over the years. John stayed there during 2019 while he wrote the album. Fitting in how to record it there at the legendary Hansa Studios was more of a test but between lockdowns, PBS managed to complete it there.
Did John have his answer about why Berlin was so creatively inspiring before or after the album was done?
“I think my answer before would have been a bit more pragmatic and a bit more ‘head’ - just saying ‘You know it was a place that artists could flourish and people were persuading people to move there because it was a difficult place to live in West Berlin but you had this flourishing art scene with cheap rent and studio space and a burgeoning counter-culture because a lot of young Germans could avoid the draft by going to live there. I think I would have come back with something like that and expanded that through to the 90s and Reunification.
“But I think having researched the record the way I did and gone out and lived there for most of 2019 and written it there, I think I would probably go with a bit more of a ‘heart’ answer. And just having been there, I think there is something about the physicality of the place, and the malleability of the place, how it has been woven through a lot of people’s stories – the way David Bowie took it and the way Iggy Pop took it, and U2 took it - and the way bands continue to do that, and the way Marlene Dietrich took it, embodying a certain kind of post-war Berlin spirit and Anita Berber who we write about on the record, the promiscuous nature that seems to be part and parcel of living in Berlin.
Though PSB have taken the album out to perform live last year, John is looking forward to seeing how it continues to develop in the white heat of a live situation.
“I think it’s the same with any music, it’s just taking it out in front of people and treating it like a living breathing thing.
“It doesn’t feel real for me even when it’s a record that has been released and done OK, as this one has.
“But it doesn’t feel real to me until you have got it in front of a crowd and gauged the response - and also gauged that response every time.
“We’ve seen how certain pieces are reacted to after years of a record being out.
“When we toured last year, it had only been out a few weeks. It will just be interesting to see, have people taken certain things to their hearts, are they excited by certain things? Are certain songs gaining a bit of momentum?
“There are one or two I have kept my eye on and I think they have a lot further to go. It’s just whether I’m right or not.
“With a song like Go!, it feels now that that has been established as a crowd-pleaser forever, but it’s really only after two or three years of hearing it and how the reaction gets stronger every night.
“After about two or three years, you kind of feel ‘We’ve got one there!’.
“It’s just working out whether some of these other hunches are right for some of the other material.
“For example, a song like Blue Heaven [from latest album Bright Magic] has got a long way to go.
“Getting that song in front of people and seeing how that reaction grows over time, hopefully that is part of the reward of playing live to people.”
The live experience includes some extras, including the Norwegian singer Eera..
“We have got Eera with us again, performing with us and she is such a talented and versatile singer and she is on with us for a good 10 songs of the set for songs like Progress and They Gave Me A Lamp and some of the ones off the new record and the feeling in the room changes and feels less stilted when you can see something happen in the room in front of you.
“It’s always been an approach we like to take, though it has its limitations, financially and realistically.
“So Eera will be with us and the brass section will be with us as usual. There is definitely going to be enough going on to keep people happy.”
One of the tracks Eera features on on the album is People Let’s Dance with an irresistible video featuring rollerskaters. What was the story of the video – did it come from the band or a video director?
“We invite pitches from directors and Chloe Hayward the director for that one put in such a simple pitch.
“What we had said in our description of what we were looking for was movement and freedom and joy and expression and translating what the song is chasing into some kind of visual identity. And that was one of the simplest pitches I have ever read, it was just ‘Five skaters in some kind of choreographed and co-ordinated look and they perform a skate dance to the song – and that’s it’. She said just the casting and the location.
“You get all sorts of weird convoluted things when you invite pitches.
“People write shot for shot 10 page scripts for a video that has nothing to do with the song. And then you get something like this which is clear and as strong as Chloe’s idea and you just go ‘Yes!’. She was amazing and I think the video is great fun as well.”
The cityscape behind the skaters – Berlin, or is that London?
“It’s London by the docks by Greenwich. We wanted to do it in Berlin but it was the back end of the murkiest depth of the pandemic and it was just so hard to do stuff between countries.
“At one point we were just having to look at abandoning the idea of recording it [the album] and record in London.
“So we did stick with London for the video and there were a few things we had to be more pragmatic about given that we were living through a pandemic.”
Promoting the album when it first came out, PSB couldn’t do all the promotional work they might have wanted to in normal times.
“What was frustrating was that the opportunities around the record to give it the best chance of flying and do as well as it could, we couldn’t go to Germany to do promo, or go to record shops to do promo, we couldn’t go to radio stations in person to do promo and all the things that really help establish good will and get people talking, and give it a bit of momentum
“But it’s still done really well anyway, but it is a little bit of what might have been.
“Having said that, to be in that position where we felt we did well but we could have been done better, is still a fortunate position to be in and much more fortunate than other musicians struggling through the pandemic.
“We would never take that for granted, we were lucky that we got to Germany to record it and we’ve created a record that we are really proud of and that we hope will stand up over time.
“But I wouldn’t really want to relive much of that period.”
Bright Magic has a section called Lichtspiel – should people listen to that separately or was it planned to just run through from start to finish?
“Something we have done from the start is albums as albums, right from the start including the first one [Inform-Educate-Entertain in 2013] which was more scattershot and piecemeal, but we tried to have a thread running through it.
“There are musical themes and the development of narrative themes and conceptual themes through this record.
“It’s all done deliberately and with a purpose in mind and it would be nice if people followed the rough framework that we’ve built for them and find their way through the record and invest in it but at the same time, you can’t dictate these things to people
“If people just want to dip in and out for two or three tracks – or even just totally rewrite it.
“I know there are people listening to the Race For Space and insist on doing it in chronological order, you can’t dictate once it is out there.
“It’s part of the joy of releasing it, it’s not yours any more.
“But we’ve tried to structure it so it makes sense and then people can find their own way through it.”
For the moment, performing Bright Magic live is where PSB are, but for J Willgoose Esq, there’s a perplexing preoccupation – the next album, and what it might be.
“I don’t know what it is yet which is an unusual position for me to be in because I have always known what the next one is … " he says.
“So I’m thinking, and trying not to panic at the moment.
“I’m trying to keep the wheels on going into next year.
“But there is a new studio and we’re about to get into it, at the start of November and wiring it up."
This summer, This New Noise, saw the retro-futurist rockers invited by the BBC to create something to celebrate its century.
For this, they performed with the BBC Symphony Orchestra band and it was broadcast as part of the Proms on September 2, a 50 minute-long piece, commissioned by the BBC.
“We are talking to the BBC about what we could do with what we did on that night,” J Willgoose Esq revealed.
And more broadly, he waits for the first inklings of the next album.
“And keep this unlikely thing continuing!”
Public Service Broadcasting play the Ironworks on Thursday, October 6 with Pale Blue Eyes. Bright Magic, the latest album, is out now.
