Music > Interviews

Interview with Public Service Broadcasting

02/05/13

Do you remember the excitement of sitting down for a lesson at school, and your teacher wheeling out the TV and video player to shrieks of relief and delight? Even watching Miss fumbling with the remote control for 20 minutes unsuccessfully was a rush of blood to the head. Imagine you took what was on those gripping VHS’, and inter-spliced the highlights with a rich tapestry of sound, as imagined by the creative force of J. Willgoose Esq. and his drumming counterpart, Wrigglesworth. The music isn’t predictable and far from the dry assumptions that delving into historical archives might suggest. It has to be heard to be understood. So lend J. your ears… 

We were so impressed with you last time you came to Norwich, which was for the Norwich Sound & Vision Festival. The festival suited your ethos pretty well – do you remember much of the gig at all? [Laughs] I don’t remember much of anything; I’m far too drunk. No, that was our favourite gig of last year, I think. Spoken of in hushed tones, no, revered tones. We really enjoyed that and it was a great crowd as well. They seemed to really get into it and move around a bit. It’s always good when you can see people moving around out of the corner of your eye, ‘cause you know at least some people are enjoying it. You kinda feed off that energy and Norwich was the best for that last year really.

You’re coming back to Norwich this month, which is great and it’s fair to say that you’ve kept growing your live show since your inception – has the live show moved on at all since last October? Erm yeah, since then we debuted it at our London show; we’ve got kind of a –larger stage furniture, shall we say – we’ve got an eight foot wide TV now. It’s about seven foot high as well… it’s quite big! So we’ve got that on the stage, then we’ve got stacks of old tellies as well, three or four each and they can all show different things, so it’s kind of still growing. We had to grow the size of the vehicle that transports us as well, sadly.

I’ve seen that you’ve announced a few festival slots and I was wondering, with the hard and fast nature of festival soundchecking, if at all, what’s the festival setup like for you? Do you get to bring the whole rig? Yeah, we did a few last year and the sort of – well, good festivals anyway – you’ve got people helping you get on and off in time and they’re there to help you. They’re kind of on your side rather than standing there like, ‘c’mon, get a move on’. We’re getting quicker at setting up all the time as well, and to be honest with you, the amount we’re playing in May, we’ll probably be whacking it up in next to no time. Yeah, we’ve got like four days off in May, or maybe three. There’s a lot of shows going on, so we’ll be a finely oiled machine by the time we get to Norwich.

One of my writers had the album bagsied as soon as it came in to the office, so I haven’t heard it yet, which is quite exciting. I wondered, is there a narrative running through it like there is with, say, ‘The War Room’? Er, the themes are a lot broader and wider and more scattered, so there’s not as clear and coherent a narrative as there was with ‘The War Room’, no, but it’s still designed to flow as an album. In my mind, it all sort of builds to what is the peak of the album anyway, which is ‘Everest’, second track from the end. ‘Everest’ is supposed to be looming large over everything; it’s supposed to be getting towards it, if you know what I mean. Then there’s a swansong at the end that might be slightly dark, but ends on a more redemptive note – going up’s always more interesting than going down, and I think most of the album’s spent going up, I suppose.

Because TV and radio were only broadcasting mediums from the 20th century onwards, you’ve only got a certain period of history to choose from. Have there been any historical landmarks pre-TV that you would have loved to have given the PSB treatment to? The Battle of Hastings or something…?! Yeah, that’d be a challenge! You could do it, but I’m not sure how you’d do it without veering into naff historical footage, type of thing. I mean, I’m sure there’d be a way to do it; there’s probably an old documentary about it from the 50s or something that’d give it a period feel, who knows? I think for now, I know what’s coming next after the album, and it’s moving forward in time, rather than back, so we’re not trawling the archives that far back… not ruling it out either!

Was there a historical period that you wish TV crews would have been around for, to make documentaries of? Erm, you know I’m not particularly up on my history in general, which is probably why I enjoy doing this so much, ‘cause you get to learn a bit while you’re doing it! I suppose there’d be all sorts; the eruption of Pompeii would be horrific I suppose, and dramatic! Then it’d be nice to get away from conflict and death – it’d be nice to be around when Newton was making some of his discoveries. Stuff like that I suppose, that’d be informative and not too grizzly!

It seems only pertinent to ask, after the death of Maggie Thatcher this weekend [at time of the interview], whether you could ever see yourself taking on the Iron Lady as subject matter? Oh… I think we’ll be staying away from that one!

When I was listening to ROYGBIV – is it right to say ‘royg-biv’? Well I actually call it ‘roygy-biv’; my other half suggested it and that’s how she says it. Everyone’s got a different way of saying it though.

Well, in the song, there’s a distinctly ‘Tomorrow’s World’ feeling running through it, a TV programme I sorely, sorely miss. You mention the next material will be looking to the future; even with Tomorrow’s World from sixty years ago, there’s this futuristic feel to it, but from a voice of the past. Do you remember watching it in awe as a kid? Yep, I do remember that and I’ve actually looked at some of that footage with a view to using it, but it’s BBC and it’s very hard to clear at the moment without paying, I don’t know, £500 for every four seconds used or something, which is obviously slightly beyond our budget at the moment! So yeah, it’s all intriguing stuff but I don’t want to watch too much of it, because so much of it is so good and I’ll just end up getting really annoyed that we can’t use it.

I had read that you hadn’t been able to get your hands on the BBC Archive yet, but there’ll be a time where they’re wanting to use your music in their programmes – - Yeah, that’s hopefully the goal; if we get better known and people start realising what we do, then people will start coming to us, rather than us going to them, then some really interesting stuff could come around from it.

I really like ‘Signal 30’, and it made me wonder, with the footage being American, does the regionality of the footage affect the music that you create, or do you try and park all contextual references? I wouldn’t say that the location came into it and I wouldn’t say it was written to sound like a deliberately American song, but it is written very much to give the sound and the energy of a car chase, of sorts. I had that song sort of already written, in large chunks, which is really rare for me because usually I start with a very small idea and then things grow from there. That song was nearly there already and I just thought it was so fast, and so aggressive that I thought it’d be a nice twist to put driving safety messages to it, because it sounds like the sort of song that you’d like to drive fast to. So in that respect, the tone and the content does definitely influence the style of the music we make around it, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that where the stuff is from would particularly have a bearing on it.

Before you made ‘The War Room’ EP, I read that you were at the Edinburgh Fringe – what were you up to there? What was life before PSB? No, that was PSB but it was just me when it was a solo effort and in a moment of madness, I booked seven days straight up there and was just flyering on the streets for days and days, you know, hours each day and I think my lowest crowd was four! But that was the low end and every show at Edinburgh seemed to be easy; it was a great kind of proving ground. I’m not the most natural salesman either, so it made me come out of my shell a bit, which is a good thing even though it was really painful at the time – certainly financially it was painful! But yeah, it was a good proving ground and it was actually in Edinburgh that the idea for ‘The War Room’ came to me. It was kind of thinking, if I did come back next year, what could I bring that’d be kind of a different edge to it? Partly also just writing something that you could kind of get your teeth into and write narratives to, I suppose.

You work so hard at getting the narrative across, and making the tracks sound a certain way. In the cases of the remixes, I really like the Tape Op remix of ‘If War Should Come’, but their endeavours start to dilute the narrative – do you feel precious about that at all, creating something exactly the way you like it, then handing it over? Erm, well if I were handing it over and my version wasn’t getting out there, I’d be very anxious about that, but it is, so I actually quite look forward to what people are going to do with it. But I do think – and I’m not just blowing my own trumpet here – none of the remixes have quite sort of captured the narrative in a way that they’ve used the speech samples to dictate the structure in the way that we do. But I think they’ve all brought something else to it that’s made them worth a listen and I always just find it interesting listening out for which bits they’ve used, and where. It’s a bit like handing someone your, I don’t know – your dirty washing, or something, and seeing what they’ll do with it!

[Laughs] Wash it, hopefully! Alright, maybe just handing someone your clothes and seeing if they’ll actually wear any of them!

Yeah, whether they’ll upcycle one in to a natty waistcoat – - Or turn a jumper into a tank top, or something, yeah!

I’ve heard Lemonjelly bandied about when people are trying to reference your sound a bit, and even though you’re different, you can understand the reference to samples. Were there any samplers when you were growing up that inspired you to explore it? Erm, yeah there definitely were; I’d say Lemonjelly, they did definitely have an ear for melody that I think we hopefully do too, use strong melodies in our stuff, but I do find they’re a bit ‘four bars of this’ and ‘four bars of that’ – you kind of know where they’re going before they get there, if you know what I mean, which is something I’m always keen to avoid, even if it’s kind of chopping out a bar of the chorus, or something. Especially in ‘Spitfire’, it’s very deliberate, the switch around in the middle; instead of being eight sort of hits as it is the first time, it changes to six and hopefully catches people a bit off guard. That’s when you get more interesting music, I think, when you’re surprising people on the first listen rather than fulfilling what they’re expecting to hear. Yeah, but DJ Shadow’s ‘Entroducing’ is still the one, I still listen to it all the time – it’s just an absolutely incredible album. ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ by The Avalanches is sort of possibly the best sample-driven track I’ve ever heard; it’s just so well put together and full of humour and the right feel.

It’s funny you say that, because when I was listening to your music recently, I was reminded of The Avalanches’ other track, ‘Two Hearts in ¾ Time’; it doesn’t sound the same, but there’s this same kind of pulse and energy. Now, I saw that the video for ‘Signal 30’ was done by a couple of people, Alex Kemp and Tony Powell – that side of thing, creating the visuals, you’ve mostly done yourself before, is that right? Yeah, I’ve done most of the videos that we use live, and in fact the black and white footage that’s used in the video, I did, and that we show on a big screen when we play live, that was mine. But what they’ve done is obviously weaved us playing around that, in what I think is quite a clever way because we’re on the TVs as well.

Are you enjoying that aspect of handing it over to other creative people? Yeah, with the videos especially, yeah; video’s never been one of my strengths and I’m very happy… I mean, I only had to go and film for a couple of hours; they just shot me playing in the dark for two hours and the other bits took part on another day and I was ecstatic that I didn’t have to be there for it! I went and got on with other stuff, which is nice, having trust in people who you know are gonna deliver something good and give it a different spin. You can’t do everything yourself, and neither should you really, ‘cause it’s not healthy – for the band as much as anything.

Now Jay, you’re coming to Norwich next month and I always feel it’s only polite to ask – seeing as you’re going to bring us a cracking show, what can we, as an audience, bring for you? Hmmm, I’d like the same sort of spirit and movement and positive attitude as the last one please; it was really great actually. It was just really enjoyable and I know this one will be a Saturday night as well, so hopefully that’ll help. People might have a couple more beverages than they normally would. I hope people come along, relaxed and ready to ‘let themselves go’, as one of our songs does indeed suggest.

Emma R. Garwood

Public Service Broadcasting come to OPEN on Saturday 25th May. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. 

Do you remember the excitement of sitting down for a lesson at school, and your teacher wheeling out the TV and video player to shrieks of relief and delight? Even watching Miss fumbling with the remote control for 20 minutes unsuccessfully was a rush of blood to the head. Imagine you took what was on those gripping VHS’, and inter-spliced the highlights with a rich tapestry of sound, as imagined by the creative force of J. Willgoose Esq. and his drumming counterpart, Wrigglesworth. The music isn’t predictable and far from the dry assumptions that delving into historical archives might suggest. It has to be heard to be understood. So lend J. your ears… 

We were so impressed with you last time you came to Norwich, which was for the Norwich Sound & Vision Festival. The festival suited your ethos pretty well – do you remember much of the gig at all? [Laughs] I don’t remember much of anything; I’m far too drunk. No, that was our favourite gig of last year, I think. Spoken of in hushed tones, no, revered tones. We really enjoyed that and it was a great crowd as well. They seemed to really get into it and move around a bit. It’s always good when you can see people moving around out of the corner of your eye, ‘cause you know at least some people are enjoying it. You kinda feed off that energy and Norwich was the best for that last year really.

You’re coming back to Norwich this month, which is great and it’s fair to say that you’ve kept growing your live show since your inception – has the live show moved on at all since last October? Erm yeah, since then we debuted it at our London show; we’ve got kind of a –larger stage furniture, shall we say – we’ve got an eight foot wide TV now. It’s about seven foot high as well… it’s quite big! So we’ve got that on the stage, then we’ve got stacks of old tellies as well, three or four each and they can all show different things, so it’s kind of still growing. We had to grow the size of the vehicle that transports us as well, sadly.

I’ve seen that you’ve announced a few festival slots and I was wondering, with the hard and fast nature of festival soundchecking, if at all, what’s the festival setup like for you? Do you get to bring the whole rig? Yeah, we did a few last year and the sort of – well, good festivals anyway – you’ve got people helping you get on and off in time and they’re there to help you. They’re kind of on your side rather than standing there like, ‘c’mon, get a move on’. We’re getting quicker at setting up all the time as well, and to be honest with you, the amount we’re playing in May, we’ll probably be whacking it up in next to no time. Yeah, we’ve got like four days off in May, or maybe three. There’s a lot of shows going on, so we’ll be a finely oiled machine by the time we get to Norwich.

One of my writers had the album bagsied as soon as it came in to the office, so I haven’t heard it yet, which is quite exciting. I wondered, is there a narrative running through it like there is with, say, ‘The War Room’? Er, the themes are a lot broader and wider and more scattered, so there’s not as clear and coherent a narrative as there was with ‘The War Room’, no, but it’s still designed to flow as an album. In my mind, it all sort of builds to what is the peak of the album anyway, which is ‘Everest’, second track from the end. ‘Everest’ is supposed to be looming large over everything; it’s supposed to be getting towards it, if you know what I mean. Then there’s a swansong at the end that might be slightly dark, but ends on a more redemptive note – going up’s always more interesting than going down, and I think most of the album’s spent going up, I suppose.

Because TV and radio were only broadcasting mediums from the 20th century onwards, you’ve only got a certain period of history to choose from. Have there been any historical landmarks pre-TV that you would have loved to have given the PSB treatment to? The Battle of Hastings or something…?! Yeah, that’d be a challenge! You could do it, but I’m not sure how you’d do it without veering into naff historical footage, type of thing. I mean, I’m sure there’d be a way to do it; there’s probably an old documentary about it from the 50s or something that’d give it a period feel, who knows? I think for now, I know what’s coming next after the album, and it’s moving forward in time, rather than back, so we’re not trawling the archives that far back… not ruling it out either!

Was there a historical period that you wish TV crews would have been around for, to make documentaries of? Erm, you know I’m not particularly up on my history in general, which is probably why I enjoy doing this so much, ‘cause you get to learn a bit while you’re doing it! I suppose there’d be all sorts; the eruption of Pompeii would be horrific I suppose, and dramatic! Then it’d be nice to get away from conflict and death – it’d be nice to be around when Newton was making some of his discoveries. Stuff like that I suppose, that’d be informative and not too grizzly!

It seems only pertinent to ask, after the death of Maggie Thatcher this weekend [at time of the interview], whether you could ever see yourself taking on the Iron Lady as subject matter? Oh… I think we’ll be staying away from that one!

When I was listening to ROYGBIV – is it right to say ‘royg-biv’? Well I actually call it ‘roygy-biv’; my other half suggested it and that’s how she says it. Everyone’s got a different way of saying it though.

Well, in the song, there’s a distinctly ‘Tomorrow’s World’ feeling running through it, a TV programme I sorely, sorely miss. You mention the next material will be looking to the future; even with Tomorrow’s World from sixty years ago, there’s this futuristic feel to it, but from a voice of the past. Do you remember watching it in awe as a kid? Yep, I do remember that and I’ve actually looked at some of that footage with a view to using it, but it’s BBC and it’s very hard to clear at the moment without paying, I don’t know, £500 for every four seconds used or something, which is obviously slightly beyond our budget at the moment! So yeah, it’s all intriguing stuff but I don’t want to watch too much of it, because so much of it is so good and I’ll just end up getting really annoyed that we can’t use it.

I had read that you hadn’t been able to get your hands on the BBC Archive yet, but there’ll be a time where they’re wanting to use your music in their programmes – - Yeah, that’s hopefully the goal; if we get better known and people start realising what we do, then people will start coming to us, rather than us going to them, then some really interesting stuff could come around from it.

I really like ‘Signal 30’, and it made me wonder, with the footage being American, does the regionality of the footage affect the music that you create, or do you try and park all contextual references? I wouldn’t say that the location came into it and I wouldn’t say it was written to sound like a deliberately American song, but it is written very much to give the sound and the energy of a car chase, of sorts. I had that song sort of already written, in large chunks, which is really rare for me because usually I start with a very small idea and then things grow from there. That song was nearly there already and I just thought it was so fast, and so aggressive that I thought it’d be a nice twist to put driving safety messages to it, because it sounds like the sort of song that you’d like to drive fast to. So in that respect, the tone and the content does definitely influence the style of the music we make around it, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that where the stuff is from would particularly have a bearing on it.

Before you made ‘The War Room’ EP, I read that you were at the Edinburgh Fringe – what were you up to there? What was life before PSB? No, that was PSB but it was just me when it was a solo effort and in a moment of madness, I booked seven days straight up there and was just flyering on the streets for days and days, you know, hours each day and I think my lowest crowd was four! But that was the low end and every show at Edinburgh seemed to be easy; it was a great kind of proving ground. I’m not the most natural salesman either, so it made me come out of my shell a bit, which is a good thing even though it was really painful at the time – certainly financially it was painful! But yeah, it was a good proving ground and it was actually in Edinburgh that the idea for ‘The War Room’ came to me. It was kind of thinking, if I did come back next year, what could I bring that’d be kind of a different edge to it? Partly also just writing something that you could kind of get your teeth into and write narratives to, I suppose.

You work so hard at getting the narrative across, and making the tracks sound a certain way. In the cases of the remixes, I really like the Tape Op remix of ‘If War Should Come’, but their endeavours start to dilute the narrative – do you feel precious about that at all, creating something exactly the way you like it, then handing it over? Erm, well if I were handing it over and my version wasn’t getting out there, I’d be very anxious about that, but it is, so I actually quite look forward to what people are going to do with it. But I do think – and I’m not just blowing my own trumpet here – none of the remixes have quite sort of captured the narrative in a way that they’ve used the speech samples to dictate the structure in the way that we do. But I think they’ve all brought something else to it that’s made them worth a listen and I always just find it interesting listening out for which bits they’ve used, and where. It’s a bit like handing someone your, I don’t know – your dirty washing, or something, and seeing what they’ll do with it!

[Laughs] Wash it, hopefully! Alright, maybe just handing someone your clothes and seeing if they’ll actually wear any of them!

Yeah, whether they’ll upcycle one in to a natty waistcoat – - Or turn a jumper into a tank top, or something, yeah!

I’ve heard Lemonjelly bandied about when people are trying to reference your sound a bit, and even though you’re different, you can understand the reference to samples. Were there any samplers when you were growing up that inspired you to explore it? Erm, yeah there definitely were; I’d say Lemonjelly, they did definitely have an ear for melody that I think we hopefully do too, use strong melodies in our stuff, but I do find they’re a bit ‘four bars of this’ and ‘four bars of that’ – you kind of know where they’re going before they get there, if you know what I mean, which is something I’m always keen to avoid, even if it’s kind of chopping out a bar of the chorus, or something. Especially in ‘Spitfire’, it’s very deliberate, the switch around in the middle; instead of being eight sort of hits as it is the first time, it changes to six and hopefully catches people a bit off guard. That’s when you get more interesting music, I think, when you’re surprising people on the first listen rather than fulfilling what they’re expecting to hear. Yeah, but DJ Shadow’s ‘Entroducing’ is still the one, I still listen to it all the time – it’s just an absolutely incredible album. ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ by The Avalanches is sort of possibly the best sample-driven track I’ve ever heard; it’s just so well put together and full of humour and the right feel.

It’s funny you say that, because when I was listening to your music recently, I was reminded of The Avalanches’ other track, ‘Two Hearts in ¾ Time’; it doesn’t sound the same, but there’s this same kind of pulse and energy. Now, I saw that the video for ‘Signal 30’ was done by a couple of people, Alex Kemp and Tony Powell – that side of thing, creating the visuals, you’ve mostly done yourself before, is that right? Yeah, I’ve done most of the videos that we use live, and in fact the black and white footage that’s used in the video, I did, and that we show on a big screen when we play live, that was mine. But what they’ve done is obviously weaved us playing around that, in what I think is quite a clever way because we’re on the TVs as well.

Are you enjoying that aspect of handing it over to other creative people? Yeah, with the videos especially, yeah; video’s never been one of my strengths and I’m very happy… I mean, I only had to go and film for a couple of hours; they just shot me playing in the dark for two hours and the other bits took part on another day and I was ecstatic that I didn’t have to be there for it! I went and got on with other stuff, which is nice, having trust in people who you know are gonna deliver something good and give it a different spin. You can’t do everything yourself, and neither should you really, ‘cause it’s not healthy – for the band as much as anything.

Now Jay, you’re coming to Norwich next month and I always feel it’s only polite to ask – seeing as you’re going to bring us a cracking show, what can we, as an audience, bring for you? Hmmm, I’d like the same sort of spirit and movement and positive attitude as the last one please; it was really great actually. It was just really enjoyable and I know this one will be a Saturday night as well, so hopefully that’ll help. People might have a couple more beverages than they normally would. I hope people come along, relaxed and ready to ‘let themselves go’, as one of our songs does indeed suggest.

Emma R. Garwood

Public Service Broadcasting come to OPEN on Saturday 25th May. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.