Public Service Broadcasting’s blend of rock and electronics along with an extravaganza of samples, documentary visuals and iconic live outings has earned them a huge following. But, after dealing with massive themes like space and Everest, they’re turning their backs on samples and embracing Berlin…

Photo: Alex Lake

Weaving huge themes with similarly huge sounds, multimedia visuals with massive, building and sweeping tunes, Public Service Broadcasting are on a mission to smash through genres and deliver an uncompromising live and recorded experience. Their winning approach involves matching sampled sounds and visuals with electronics, a full band feel and just about as many orchestral players that can fit on stage or in the studio.

And just when you think the PSB experience couldn’t be any bigger, they wrap everything up around (quite literally) the biggest stories to tell through their music. The track Everest, for example, is a live favourite and tells the story of Peak 15, the highest mountain in the world. “Why should we climb it?”, the sampled commentary asks as PSB’s ear worm altelectronic rock weaves the audio together, building to a huge crescendo to then simply answer: “because it is there”.

Then there are albums like 2017’s The Race for Space that deal with even bigger themes and push the interactive experience to the max. The album takes audio from the British Film Institute to tell the story of the Russian and American space race with visuals projected when the album is played live, and where better to do just that? What about a couple of gigs at the National Space Centre in Leicester? That should do it. Then to top even that, the band were asked to help commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landings in 2019 with a special orchestral performance of the album at the Royal Albert Hall. As you do.

But where to go next? Having conquered both the highest mountain the UK and space itself, there’s surely nowhere left for PSB to go. What to do? Well, you could follow in the paths of Depeche Mode, U2, Bowie and so many others and head to Berlin. But the band didn’t just end up in Germany’s mostly creative city because of who went before them – that would, they say, have been something of a cliché. No, it’s a bit more complex than that…

City to city

“I hadn’t really interrogated why I was there, I just thought it was the be all and end all,” says PSB’s founder J. Willgoose, Esq. while pondering what drew him to the city for the recording of their new album Bright Magic.

“I remember saying to our first manager back in 2012, ‘there are three things I want to achieve: play Glastonbury, play New York and play Berlin’.” He continues: “You feel this unique energy with all three, which is strange for a completely non cosmic, non spiritual and very pragmatic person [like me] finding yourself talking like ‘oh man! I feel the energy’.”

After hitting one of his ambitions and playing Berlin fairly early in the band’s career, the city’s energy called him back and in April 2019, after promoting the band’s third album Every Valley, Willgoose and family packed up and relocated to Berlin in search of an adventure and to write a new record. Although discussions between the band about producing an album based on Berlin had been happening for some time, the album’s narrative had managed to remain a distinctly blank canvas. As the record started to get sketched out, it found Willgoose taking a more reflective approach to his narration.