This month sees the stateside return of one of the 21st century’s great independent bands, Public Service Broadcasting. Over the last dozen-or-so years, they’ve been releasing these brilliant storytelling albums, mixing historical audio with music that can be beautiful, exciting, sad, uplifting, and even fit for the dance floor. Their most recent album, The Last Flight debuted at #3 on the UK album chart and its remixed counterpart Night Flight has recently dropped. And here in San Francisco we’re being honored with a rare live performace by the band in the United States, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled that J. Willigoose, Esq, guitarist and founder of the band, got on a call to chat with me about Amelia Earhart, the secretive future of album concepts, writing on commission, the challenges of touring, and so much more.
Spinning Platters: I’m just going to start going to start with Amelia Earhart. So I don’t know if you saw that the US has started declassifying all the Amelia Earhart documents. Have you heard about this?
J. Willgoose, Esq.: I heard that they were talking about doing that. Yeah, I hadn’t actually seen that they were doing that. I didn’t think they were doing much of anything over the last month or so.
Well, it came out Friday, so I don’t know if that’s news.
No,I haven’t had a look. I mean, I’m very dubious that there’s anything in there that will shed any fresh light on anything. That’s partly why I’m not that kind of super engaged on it. But yeah, I haven’t had a look yet.
Yeah, that is the opinion so far of most of the Amelia Earhart biographers, I guess. So I guess the question to start is, would you now consider yourself an Amelia Earhart biographer?
Absolutely not. No. We’ve written about a very specific part of her life matter of weeks and obvious, a pivotal moment in her life. But no, I relied upon the expertise of those biographers, especially Susan Butler, her account in East of the Dawn. Yeah, it’s a fabulous book. So no, I wouldn’t call myself an expert on anything, but definitely not on Amelia Earhart.
So you don’t think that when you take on a subject, you don’t feel that you’re bringing new light to it? I feel like with that album particularly, you’re creating a mood, so you’re creating a mood and it …
Yeah. But I think in a weird way, I think possibly what we bring to it is a bit of naivety to everything that we’ve approached, that kind of outsider’s perspective. So I think actually approaching anything from the perspective of being an expert on it, or more officially setting ourselves up as some sort of biographers of her or anything, we kind of undercut that a bit. So I would see it as we more, we take relatively deep dives on certain subjects, but it’s always relying on the expertise of others and standing on the shoulders of giants. If ever there were a band that does that, it’s us.
SP: So in terms of your process then, I’m sure by now that’s been a couple of years, so well into your next project, and I’ve seen interviews with you where you don’t want to talk about your future projects until they’re released. I’m not going to ask you what it is, but are you willing to talk about how far into the process are you into the learning about a new item? Are you digging through the sound clips?
You’ve just made me check, if anything, if you can see a book in the background. I don’t think you could identify that. No, no. Yeah, well, that’s the book in question that I’ve plowed my way through, and that forms the basis of the next studio album proper. But I’m four tracks into demoing it.
But we are possibly on the verge of doing a bit of a left turn for a bit because we’ve been approached by a company to do more of a kind of soundtrack type thing, an unofficial history of a company who are slightly in our wheelhouse, I suppose. So there’s a bit of overlap, but it would be more of a kind of commercial imperative, I suppose, to soundtrack the exploits of this particular brand and their history.
So when the commission work comes in, that takes preference because of financial considerations?
Of course. Financial considerations, it would help us too, it is a welcome sum of money, but it wouldn’t be life changing, I don’t think. But it would help us to keep the wheels and the lights on for a year or so while we try and get towards our next UK album tour, which are the kind of things that kkeep you afloat for a year or two if you do them. Yeah. And also it’s to time with a specific anniversary or event, so it would need to be out by a certain point. So yeah, it’s kind of do it soon or don’t ever do it.
Well, you did the hundredth anniversary of the BBC . Can you talk about that piece?
Yeah. That was a real honor to be asked to do that, and the amount of trust that they placed in us just to get on with it. There was no interference or meddling of any kind, which is remarkable really, when you think about it. They just let us do what we wanted to do. Even the, I don’t know if you’ve seen the footage, but the way that we ended that concert with the orchestra leaving in sections as they finished their piece and just leaving empty stage behind, they were very, the orchestra leaders were very fretful about that. Is that right? People would chip over and die on the way off stage or something. But aren’t you coming back on for a curtain call? No, no. We’re trying to make a point here that if you kill the BBC, there won’t be anything on that stage, so we’re all just going to leave the stage. Right.
So it has been, I think eight years, I think, since you’ve been to the U.S. is that right?
Is it eight? It was the every Valley Tour, eight years since the tour. We did come over for a one-off in New York in 2018, but yeah, eight years since we’ve done a tour and eight years since the West Coast. Certainly
This is a pretty brief tour, and I imagine a lot goes into such a brief tour in terms of financial implications. I can’t imagine that it’s a money maker for you. So what inspired it?
I think just a bit of frustration not being able to come back since 2017 and having people getting in touch with us and being able to see that there was interest to a certain level and just not being able to test it. I think the way that we’ve operated in the past is probably like a lot of UK bands is you take some of the money that you make in the UK where we’re relatively well established and you spend that on trying to get something else going somewhere else, whether that’s Europe or North America or wherever. Really Australasia and yeah, because of COVID, we just went in that position, things really, it wasn’t until late 2024, I think here that we started to feel a bit more solid on that front. So as soon as things picked up here, we’re like, right, where can we pick things up and see if there’s actually any appetite for us? And North America was high on that list. Yeah.
So is this dipping your toe back in? Maybe you’ll get picked up for some festival gigs in the future, is that…
Those are the vague kind of promises that have been thrown our way. I’m not expecting any of them to come true, but we just wanted to give it a go. The most frustrating thing in band world is being able to see that there’s something there that with a bit of effort and with a bit of investment of time and possibly money you might be able to get going and not being able to do that for one reason or another is very frustrating. So we’re just happy to be giving it a go, really see what happens
And think it’s five shows, right? So San Francisco, LA what? New York, Toronto is it? [Editor’s note: See tourdates here]
Yeah, we start Seattle, San Francisco, LA, New York and Toronto.
And were those picked because you see the data that shows you’re known there?
Kind of, yeah, we get a bit of backend stuff more these days than we used to, but also just promoters who’s going to offer us some money to play a gig there. And in a few big cities, the answer was nobody. So yeah, we went for the ones who were enthusiastic about it. Definitely.
Alright, well I’m happy I saw that show. I think it was 2017, I think was maybe the independent, is that right? And I think once before you were at a place called Swedish American Hall.
2017 was the Swedish American Halll. We were in San Francisco and it was a weird one upstairs that you can do the club downstairs in the quiet …
Yeah, exactly. That’s still there. It’s still the same club, same situation. The Fillmore is obviously the most famous place in San Francisco. So I wonder, are you doing a poster? Do you know?
No, I don’t think we are. We’ve got kind of the poster for the whole tour, but we’re not doing individual ones for each.
Because you haven’t been here in a while, are you doing a special set list for the Americans or are you just kind doing the tour you’ve been doing?
Well, we’re coming over as the four of us, so we’re bringing Mr B. as live visuals for the first time ever. So that’s the bit we’ve not done before and that should take it up a notch, we hope
We don’t have live vocals with us. So I guess that’s slightly limits the number of live vocal tracks we can do because they always feel a bit awkward if you’re playing off track. So doing some of the stuff from The Last Flight might be a little tricky, but it might mean that we rely a bit more heavily on stuff from The Race For Space or the first record. And people are always welcome to get in touch if they have any particular last dying wishes that they wish they’d seen us to the obscure B-side or whatever.
So you’re touring in the UK now, you have live vocalists with you?
Yeah. And in Europe as well. We have EERA with us. She has she sung on the last two records and she’s been part of the touring band now for four years. And it’s great. It really lifts the show, but it’s another cost that doesn’t always work. So yeah, the idea would be to get to a level where we can bring her to North America and yeah, again, take it up another level. But this being our first trip for eight years, we need to just get over there and see how things go
So you don’t want to do a lot of triggering of live vocals?
It just it feels weird. I don’t think it’s that engaging to watch. I think coming to watch your man press buttons on stage is not what I would pay money for. I like to see something musically engaging. I like to look at a stage and know where the sounds are coming from and who’s doing what. And we go to great lengths to try and do as much live as we can. And when you’re doing that with just a vocal on track, I just feel a bit awkward, but at the same time, some of these songs are our most popular and we have to do some version of them. So yeah, we’ll have to try and find the right balance.
It’s like a song like Progress. I think that’s when you did that previously, you were triggering, right?
Yeah. Progress I think you can get away with because it’s a lead feature of the song, but it’s not kind of the be all and end all. Something like Blue Heaven is a bit harder.
I had a musician tell me once that the only thing you really need to make people think they’re watching a live show is a live drummer. And that if you have a live drummer, people will forgive anything else.
Well, and the other thing is, if you have a laptop, people will forgive anything else. They’ll presume you’re triggering it. And obviously people aren’t triggering hardly anything that’s going on. We’ve got Mr B. on stage with a laptop pressing buttons. People probably think he’s doing something musical as well, even though I tell people what he’s doing, but he’s been billed as a keyboardist in the past. He hasn’t got a keyboard. Whatcha talking about? Yeah, I don’t like relying on that kind of slight of hand, but sometimes when we’re a bit shorthanded, it’s a little boost, I suppose.
Sure. Of course. I mean, today there are really big bands that are doing very little on stage.
Tell me about it. I know we’ve had some of our drum techs working with people, big pop bands. The only person playing live is the drummer. Yeah, it’s outrageous, but what can you do?
Yeah, well, I mean that’s the state of the industry. I think a lot of people just forgive it, right? They’re just happy to be in the presence of these people that they listen to or watch on social media. So it’s not really for me, but I understand that that is for a lot of people. But I play that game. Is that live? Is that not live? Are they singing live? And that gets in my head. So I’d much rather see a band that I am confident is playing live.
Well, listen out for the mistakes. There will be a lot with me. So it’s live. I’ve got my way out of them.
Well, a lot of times you’re playing a record and there’s the scratches or something and they’re causing the clicks or stuff. And I had it explained to me by somebody once that they look at it as a mindfulness exercise, which is when you’re listening to a record, the mindfulness part is that I’m listening to the music, I’m not listening to the clicks. They’re not listening to the scratches. So no one’s going to listen for your mistakes. They’re going to forgive the mistakes if they’re enjoying …
You’ll hear ’em anyway. I had one the other night, I was looking down at my guitar and I kind of rely on the dot markers. I shouldn’t rely on the markers, but I still do. And I play this song hundreds of times. And I looked at it and I was like, that’s not where the 12th fret marker is. Don’t play that. And my brain’s going, looks like it is though. And I’m going, don’t do it. And my finger’s saying I’m going to do it and I’m going, don’t do it. That’s not the right note. And then I do it and I’m like, oh my God, that’s the worst possible thing you could have played. That kind of thing happens to me all the time.
Do you ever look out at the crowd and think they’ve noticed?
If they know most of ’em don’t care. We find it quite funny. Unless I’ve done a really bad one and then Wrigglesworth gets quite grumpy with me. He never makes mistakes. So it’s quite annoying.
Like I said you need the drummer, right?
Yeah. He’s a good drummer.
You talked about you’re pretty established in the UK and you’re charting band in the uk, your albums hit the top 10, right? I mean, that’s not nothing.
That’s ridiculous. That’s utterly stupid, but yeah.
Well, I mean, you put out good music, people like it, right? But what is it about that in the uk? Is there something about your band that’s particularly British that you do well there and that you’re a little less known outside?
I don’t think so. I mean, I think people thought that about us in the early days, and certainly the way that we present ourselves on stage is very kind of tongue in cheek English humor, but we’ve always focused on international stuff. We’ve had a lot of American samples in there from the start, probably more on the debut album than British based ones. Actually. The Race For Space has obviously nothing to do with the UK.
So we’ve kind of had an international outlook from the start. We did a record about South Wales, did a record about Berlin, done stuff about Dutch ice skating. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically in the subject matter that kind of limits us to one particular territory, but the one thing we’ve had in the UK?
First of all, we’re here so it’s cheaper to tour. Second of all, we’ve got radio support here from 6 Music who are incredibly important for the whole of the independent music sector in the UK and third of all, and we’ve got very vibrant UK independent music scene, even amidst all the struggles that it’s had over the past few years with venues closing and so forth. It’s got the right kind of setup to enable this sort of thing to take root. And that’s kind of what it’s done really.
And we’ve struggled a bit abroad. You don’t get the radio play or there isn’t that kind of network of independent shops or maybe things aren’t as connected. We didn’t really have a label for the first two albums, so we haven’t got that kind of foot in the door or that kind of extra muscle to make an impact. So yeah, it’s just not quite got there, but it’s starting to happen in some places in Europe and we’re hoping it’ll do so in America as well.
I mean, your catalog at this point, it’s pretty extensive now
Well, five albums. Yeah. I mean, I’m amazed we made one, but yeah, five albums in, we’re very lucky.
I think now the overarching theme of the albums, I think it seems to be to me, a lot of technology versus humanity a little bit. I mean even things like things like mining, you could look at the mining album in that way. Obviously transportation, it shows up a lot, right? There’s the Titanic, the Race for Space. Is that something that you’ve noticed or something you actually focus on, or is it just happens that way?
It tends to just happen. It’s not particularly conscious other than following my nose and following the sort of thing that interests me. And we are acting against the record before. So going from sort of superhuman endeavor on The Race For Space to sort every day endeavor on Every Valley. I think if I had to put my finger on it and I get asked this question a lot after I’ve finished something and I’ve got no idea why, I’ve just done what I’ve done for the last year.
Here’s the thing. And people say, why have you done this? I’m like, what links it? What’s the common thread? I’d say rather than humanity and technology and certainly humanity versus technology, I would say it’s about various facets of the human spirit and the kind of efforts and endeavors that take us beyond everyday prosaic, animalistic existence and into the more kind of spiritual realm really, without going into kind of a religious one. But what are these kind of shared experiences and what are these ways that we’ve driven our species forward? What are the kind of risks we’ve taken and who are the kind of people who take those risks? Those are the kind of things I think I’m drawn to. I would say, yeah, the human spirit overall.
So when I listen to your albums, I can always expect there’s something that’s going to be very sad, something that’s going to feel very inspiring. And then there always seems to be a club banger or two.
Yeah, I don’t know if we got a club banger on the last flight, but yes.
No, the last flight doesn’t really have a club banger. Is that why there’s a remix album?
I think it just wouldn’t have felt right to have a kind of underneath anything on that record. Obviously when you write about Berlin, you’ve got a bit of latitude on that. And with Sputnik and more technological stuff, you’ve definitely got more of a brief to do that. But yeah, it didn’t feel right for this one. It felt like a much more kind of rich acoustic album. And I was coming off the back of doing The Proms and working with an orchestra and writing for strings, wanting to get some of those textures on that record, I think. Yeah.
So the next album is back to the club bangers. Okay.
I think if I can talk about it next album a little bit, it is almost like a mirror image of the last flight. It’s like it’s evil twin.
All right, well that’s exciting.
Yeah, there’s a lot of parallels between the two, but they’re very different at the same
I wanted to ask about, you said you were approached here about something that was a bit of a soundtrack. I mean, have you been approached about film scoring? Have you done film scoring under maybe a different name that I don’t know about that hasn’t really come up?
Yes. Have you heard of Hans Zimmer? No. I got approached for a documentary in 2019, didn’t work out, wasn’t the right fit with the director. I’m doing an independent video game soundtrack at the moment to be finished by June, July next year. So that’s my first kind of official dip into those waters, and that’s a much more productive working relationship that we’ve got. But no, nothing in film world yet. I would be terrified, but I’d still probably give it a bash.
Why would that terrify you?
Well, because that’s a big job. Yeah, it’s a big job. I would be, it’s that feeling of can I do this? Which is a good feeling to have when you’re trying to create something because that challenges you. That’s how you grow and develop. But yeah, if it was a big thing with lots of expectation and moving parts and machinery and money behind it, that’s a whole other environment to how I would usually write. I don’t know how I’d respond to that.
Would it be similar to the BBC piece or that didn’t feel the same kind of pressure?
Didn’t feel the same kind of pressure because ostensibly it was for a one-off concert and they commission new works all the time. So it was great to be asked, but it wasn’t particularly a commercial endeavor. I mean, if it had been a commercial endeavor, it would’ve been one where we made pretty much no money. So it would’ve failed on every level there. But yeah, we did that kind of thing for the love of it more than anything else.
SP: One thing we like to ask everyone we talk to is to talk about something that you’re enjoying now that you don’t think enough people know about. Musically, of course.
I could give you three level answers to that
Established American artists who I think in the UK we don’t get enough of, but you guys probably see them all the time because they tour a lot. But I love My Morning Jacket. I wish they would come over here more often, but I understand why they don’t. It’s extremely expensive, et cetera. They’re just the best live band I think I’ve ever seen. They’re so good, so much fun, so much power, so much silliness as well, which is very underrated.
Maybe a band who aren’t as established in America as though I think they should be, even though they do very well over here. Someone like the Divine Comedy, someone like that, especially with his work for soundtracks.
SP: Yeah, he’s pretty much unknown over here. I think the only time I managed to see him here, he was opening for Ben Folds. I think that might be right. I lived in Ireland for a bit and he was playing these larger venues there and selling well with expensive tickets.
Yeah, I mean, I think he’s an extraordinary artist and writer. Nobody makes me laugh as consistently as he does on record. Very funny, very droll.
And if I was to pick somebody sort of new emerging, I’d say there’s a record I heard this year called Die to Wake Up From A Dream by MF Tomlinson. And it’s very big, very bold, very long songs, very kind of produced, lots of orchestral elements. I think he did it on a shoestring, but it sounds like it cost a lot of money is amazing. Very ornate, very florid, very moving. I find it. So yeah, I’d recommend that. Yeah, that’s off the top of my head
Thanks for taking some time and we’ll talk to you again.
Cheers, Gordon. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
This interview has been edited for clarity and to remove a few personal asides.
Get your tickets for the San Francisco show at The Fillmore on December 3
