This temple of the arts and muses

Public Service Broadcasting | This New Noise

Public Service Broadcasting will always be known in our house as the band that made me ‘break the kitchen’.

Personally, I think Son2 is exaggerating when he says that.

But that’s not to say there’s not some truth in his accusation.

I can explain.

‘Go’ from The Race for Space is a particularly danceable track from the cult UK indie band who meld elements such as Krautrock, electronics and guitar rock with archival samples from sources like the British Film Institute.

And kitchen dancing when no-one’s looking, particularly to a blend of Krautrock, electronics and guitar rock with archival samples, is most enjoyable.

Unfortunately, a kitchen tile had been lifted after a pipe burst and temporarily replaced at an angle upon which it shouldn’t have been danced – not if you wanted it to remain in one piece. So I ‘broke the kitchen’. But it’s just possible that Son2’s exaggerating.

The dangerously infectious ‘Go’ was also on the setlist when Public Service Broadcasting made their debut at the BBC Proms in 2019 with a specially commissioned orchestral arrangement of their second studio album The Race for Space.

More recently, the band returned to the Royal Albert Hall and the Proms last year after being commissioned to write a piece for the BBC’s centenary.

“This new noise” was a phrase used by the BBC’s first director of talks Hilda Matheson* when describing weird sound of the Corporation’s ‘wireless’ service when it was launched in 1922.

Released last month, This New Noise is Public Service Broadcasting’s seventh album all told and is a remixed version of their 2022 Proms performance alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Its commingling of sounds and samples on This New Noise is evocative of both a specific time and place, as well as inspiring thoughts of the future – including one for a Reithian revolution in how we support arts and culture.

All Public Service Broadcasting albums provide glimpses of bygone worlds, from early NASA exploration to conquering Everest to the savage destruction of mining communities, but This New Noise is particularly rousing as it connects past, present and future.

There’s elements of DJ Shadow to the start of 'An Usual Man', while 'A Candle Which Will Not Be Put Out' evokes a positive sense of national pride (not words I’m accustomed to typing) in the broadcaster.

It’s a sense that comes from the temple of the arts and muses that’s paid tribute to in ‘Broadcasting House’, until recently the BBC’s famous London home, and the repeated refrains of Education and entertainment, a repeated refrain during the set as well as part of the title of the band’s debut album.

In today's hyperpolarised online discourse the BBC appears all too often in the guise of political whipping boy for its apparent news bias, though it's hard not to see it doing something right when both right and left are gunning for it

And to focus exclusively on its news output is to ignore the wealth of cultural resources it funds and provides. (Personally, with Son2 approaching GCSEs, we've got the BBC Bitesized study resources on speed-dial.)

It was also BBC support for innovation in the 1950s, 60s and 70s that gave us colour TV cameras, Teletext and the BBC Microcomputer, the latter of which not only gave me the ability to type “chain” exceptionally fast** but more importantly was a direct link to the development of the ARM microchips that today power 99% of the world’s premium smartphones.

All in all, it’s an institution that needs protecting for myriad reasons. 'What of the Future? (In Touch with the Infinite)’ sums up some of them and the balance that must exist:

“Broadcasting, without its responsibilities, is nothing. It’s not a way of thought, it’s not a way of culture, it’s not a way of life. It’s there to serve thought, so that people think for themselves.

“It’s there to serve culture, in such a way that people will turn more and more to active participation in the arts: go to the theatre, attend concerts, read books … and help to build a community.”

* Hilda’s own life looks fascinating – she was a spy in World War 1, one of Vita Sackville-West’s lovers and highly critical of some of her BBC bosses (believing her male superiors at the Corporation to have the “wits of a mentally deficient hen”)

** This is a slightly niche, UK computing reference from the ‘80s – typing the command “chain” being part of the necessary instructions to get games stored on first cassettes and later floppy discs to load