I am sitting in a converted garage on a residential back street in south London, sipping a cup of tea with a man dressed like a 1970s geography teacher. We are surrounded by keyboards, samplers, computer monitors and drum machines, with any remaining space consumed by flight cases of guitars, crates of CDs and piles of multi-coloured cables.
This is mission control for Public Service Broadcasting, the British band that has made its name by mixing archive film with new beats and music – using archive in the place of lyrics. The group’s latest album The Race for Space includes archive from the American and Soviet space programmes of the 1960s, some of it unheard for 50 years.
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“We’ve formed a niche using archive material,” says J Willgoose Esquire, Public Service Broadcasting’s lead musician and the man dressed in the retro threads. “The space race is suitably dramatic and emotional but personally I have a great interest in space exploration, science fiction and I’m just a bit of a geek really.”
The archive Willgoose uses on the new album ranges from the relatively obvious, such as Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, to obscure 1965 Soviet footage of the first spacewalk. It also takes in Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 flight and the horrific Apollo 1 launchpad fire of 1967, which killed three Apollo astronauts.
Emotive audio
In his early 30s, Willgoose is far too young to remember the Moon landings and the name and outfit are all part of band’s retro image. Nevertheless, he believes the space race of the 1960s still has an important cultural resonance.
“If you were going to condense human history into key facts for an alien species,” he says, “surely one of the main things has got to be that these people left their own planet and walked on another world. That’s incredible.”
We are all familiar with the visual icons of the space race – such as Gagarin being lauded in Red Square the Earthrise picture from Apollo 8 or the American flag on the lunar surface – but, for Willgoose, audio has proved just as emotive.
“Radio has the best pictures, there’s a certain amount of imagination that this music calls upon,” he says. “Our live shows are so video-heavy and we get a lot of presumptions that the music is totally reliant on the images but I think it’s the other way round.”
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This is perhaps best exemplified by a track called ‘Go!’ where we hear the familiar ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ from mission controllers prior to launch. Conveniently for Willgoose, when it came to setting these to music, there were eight ‘go’s from controllers – enabling him to put four to a bar. On another track he has also managed to match the beeping of Sputnik with the beat of the music.
Soviet stockpile
“I remember hearing the pulse, thinking it’s electronic and they’ll be some sense of menace in this music because – from the American point of view – having a Soviet satellite pass overhead, broadcasting these sounds, is going to be incredibly threatening,” says Willgoose. “That informed how the music was taking shape in my head and when I sat down and put it together I put some delay on it to give it musicality.”
Getting hold of Nasa archive was relatively straightforward – most of it is publically available. However, ensuring the balance of Soviet and American space achievements through the album was always going to be challenging. Soviet space footage is difficult to obtain and most is in Russian.
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“The US is incredibly open and it didn’t try to hide the faults, whereas the Russian programme has always been shrouded in secrecy,” says Willgoose. “It still is – I tried to find popular histories of the Soviet space programme and there’s not very much, so it was always a worry that I wouldn’t get enough.”
Then he had a stroke of luck. “I rang up the British Film Institute for some Nasa footage and they said they didn’t have any,” Willgoose explains. “But then they said they’d just inherited a collection of Soviet space material if I was interested…I was sat on this very chair and I swear I nearly fell off it. I knew then the album was going to be a goer.”
There is, however, a significant difference in perspective between the two sides of the space race. Whereas the Nasa material is generally factual and reliable, the Russian propaganda is decidedly misleading. Take the film of the first spacewalk, for instance, suggesting an overwhelmingly trouble-free 10-minute triumph of Soviet technology.
Moon melancholy
“One of my favourite lines on the album is on the track about the space walk and it’s ‘10 minutes in space, 10 minutes that shook the world’,” says Willgoose. “[Leonov] wasn’t out there for 10 minutes, he was out there for 20 minutes and he nearly died! It’s such a blatant distortion of reality and truth.”
The album concludes with a decidedly downbeat track called Tomorrow, featuring the words of the last man on the Moon, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan.
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“I find it melancholy that we haven’t been back,” says Willgoose. “It’s very sad.”
Nevertheless, 50 years on, the legacy of those pioneering missions still endures. I’ve written plenty in the past about the technological legacy of the space race, from microcomputers to fuel cells, but as Public Service Broadcasting proves, there is also a significant enduring cultural legacy.
“It was such a condensed, hyper-accelerated period of firsts,” says Willgoose. “Such an exciting period of technological history is unlikely to happen again any time soon.”
Public Service Broadcasting’s new album The Race for Space is out this week and they are touring in the UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Europe over the coming months – more details on their site.