The quickest way to understand the kind of music made by Britain’s Public Service Broadcasting is to go by the title of their first album, Inform – Educate – Entertain. It’s not quite so much an album title as it is a mission statement.
The music from that first full-length release was built around samples from old documentaries about all kinds of events, from the historically significant (the invention of colour television; the first ascent of Mount Everest) to the important yet mundane (road safety, mail delivery). For their second album PSB aimed literally and figuratively higher, creating an album that would re-tell historical events that, rather than being isolated, were part of a bigger story arc: the space race of the 1950s and 60s.
Each song on 2015’s The Race for Space covers a different milestone in the space race, using the same recipe as their first album; live instruments / archival snippets / synth accents. As the record nears its end we get “Go!” – about the touchdown of Apollo 11’s astronauts on the moon.
Although its speed and general upbeat freneticism make it a bit unusual for this blog, it captures an emotion, some combination of excitement and nervousness and even nostalgia, that is unique to this back-to-school time of year.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The chorus, such as it is, comprises a one-by-one roll call of all the various flight controllers involved in the mission, who each respond with a “go!” My favourite is the guy responsible for “guidance,” who seems much more pumped up than any of the others.
2. Much of the synth and guitar lines consist of arpeggios that rise, but as they prepare for landing, a background synth does a descending arpeggio.
3. The choice to do a song about the moon landing was obvious, but I love that PSB built the song around the experience not of the astronauts themselves, but the many people down on earth working together to make it happen. The nervous excitement in their voices as they take the lives of colleagues into their hands – colleagues who are hundreds of thousands of kilometres away – is what brings this song alive.
Recommended listening activity:
Writing to someone to wish them luck.