Public Service Broadcasting are as much a science project as they are a band. The duo create musical pieces exploring science, history and discovery using samples from vintage documentaries alongside more traditional instruments. Their latest album, The Race For Space, scavenges from the original Apollo transmissions, vintage Soviet documentaries and the actual signal broadcast by Sputnik 1 to tell the story of the 1960’s Cold War-driven mania for space travel.
On the eve of the album’s launch at Leicester’s National Space Centre, we sat down with frontman J. Willgoose Esq to go through the historic and scientific inspirations behind each track.
The Race For Space
President John F Kennedy addresses the public in 1964, promising to land an American on the moon by the end of the decade.
It’s an incredible speech. We wanted it to be the first thing on the album as it’s such a great statement of intent, I wish I could have put the whole thing on. I could have used the one he gave to Congress, which was less florid as he was trying to sell it to politicians; with this one he was trying to sell it to the country, it was about not letting the Soviets get out of sight.
Sputnik
October 1957: the Soviet Union successfully launches the world’s first artificial satellite.
There’s a slightly malevolent tone to that song, it reflects how uneasy the Americans would have felt at this uninvited visitor broadcasting over their entire country.
When I started putting it together and going through the samples, mostly from a film called First Soviet Earth Satellites, I found this quote “all the world is listening to the beep beep of the satellite,” I thought I could snip [the beeping signal] out and have it weave in and out of the song.
Gagarin
April 1961: the Soviet’s beat America into orbit again, as Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human ever to leave the planet.
I was attracted to the idea of writing a really celebratory song for Gagarin, something euphoric and exultant. I wanted to try and capture the scenes when he returned to earth: people went absolutely mental over him, all over the world, and he was such a cheerful and outgoing character.
There isn’t a great deal of room for frivolity on this album; this was an opportunity to have a bit of fun, and why shouldn’t you have fun with such a fabulous, celebratory moment for humankind?
Fire In The Cockpit
January 1967: the crew of Apollo 1 are killed when a fire sweeps through their cockpit during testing on the ground.
I didn’t want to use any of the cockpit audio: that would just be horrendous and unnecessary. We found various Nasa statements that were read out at the time, in a suitably serious matter-of-fact tone. I didn’t want it to be too maudlin with us emoting all over it, I didn’t want to grab people’s heartstrings, it would be cynical. There’s nothing fancy about that song; it’s unsettling, but it’s meant to be. We didn’t want to whitewash space exploration: there might be these moments of amazing triumph, but danger and tragedy aren’t necessarily far away.
E.V.A
March 1965: the Soviet Union’s Alexei Leonov performs the first ever “spacewalk.”
It’s quite an abrupt turn around, and that was deliberate. Things kept moving despite the setbacks, the pace was relentless. We could have presented it as this glorious Soviet achievement, “ten minutes that shook the world,” but what they kept quiet was that it went very wrong: he was out there for twenty minutes, his suit had expanded massively and he almost couldn’t get back. None of that made it into the official Soviet history.
The Other Side
December 1968: Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon.
We used the mission control transmissions from the first loss of contact, as they pass around the dark side of the moon, the three loneliest men in human history.
The bit that gets me is when you can just about hear the flight controller’s voice go, when he says “we’ve got it, we’ve got it, there’s a cheer in the room,” It paints a really vivid picture - it’s this guy trying to keep a very stiff upper lip, but even then he recognises the enormity of what’s been achieved. It’s the most nakedly euphoric moment on the record. America felt they had won the race: it would only be a matter of time before they did land a man on the moon.
Valentina
June 1963: Soviet Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.
[The archive footage we found] was so depressing: Tereshkova would talk for a bit and then very swiftly be faded into this proper RP Englishman speaking for her, translating her words. I couldn’t write a song about a woman and have it just be another man talking. We started casting about for singers that might want to work on the track with us, [folk duo] Smoke Fairies popped up and put their own spin on it. It’s got quite a gentle opening and is reasonably fragile, but I didn’t want it to be “this is the song about a woman, this is therefore the twinkly one” so it’s got that middle section where it ignites.
Go!
July 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to land on the moon.
I wanted to get across some of the excitement and the thrill of a big team of extremely intelligent, talented, dedicated people all working together to do something extraordinary, rather than “America’s done it! We’ve won the space race!” or making it sound like something you’d heard a million times. We did put “The Eagle has landed” in there but it’s almost an aside: you’ve got the countdown, the alarm calls and “we’ve had shutdown”. To me that’s the engineers’ wonderfully mundane, prosaic way of saying “we’ve put a man on the moon.”
Tomorrow
The space race winds down, the public lose interest in the missions and Apollo 17 is the last manned flight to the moon.
I wanted to mirror the dramatic falling off of public interest by going straight from Apollo 11 to 17: just like that, it’s over. I could have done Apollo 13 but it’s been done so much, we just kept it short and sweet.
It’s a melancholic end, and there’s a slight irony in calling it ‘Tomorrow,’ we could just as easily have called it ‘Yesterday,’ because there wasn’t much more. [Apollo 17 astronaut] Gene Cernan says “we’ll be back soon” and forty-odd years later we’ve not got anywhere near it. In the end the launches weren’t even getting on TV. It was very sad, but I think it’s one of the things that keeps driving us forward as a species: once you’ve done something you don’t dwell on it too much, you go to the next thing.