Amelia Earhart’s story helps Public Service Broadcasting’s new album take flight
Musical collective Public Service Broadcasting, “the corduroy-clad brainchild of London-based J Willgoose, Esq”, will visit Cambridge this month after releasing their fifth studio album, The Last Flight, last Friday (4 October).
The art rock/electronica band, which also includes Wrigglesworth (drums, piano and electronic musical instruments), JF Abraham (flugelhorn, bass guitar, drums and other instruments) and Mr B (visuals and set design) in the line-up, will perform at the Corn Exchange, as part of a UK tour.
The Last Flight – the first album the quartet have recorded at their new studio in south-east London – concerns the final voyage of America’s pioneering female ‘aviatrix’ Amelia Earhart, who famously disappeared, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, while attempting to fly around the world in 1937.
“It’s the story of her last flight around the world,” says J of the album, “which obviously didn’t end very well, once you look into the story of that flight…
“I was looking for something female-focused, and something that was a bit more narratively straightforward, I suppose, than the last record [2021’s Bright Magic], because each record is always a bit of a reaction against the one that came before it.
“So I was kind of casting about for a period of a good three or four months, trying to find things that might catch my eye and interest me, and I can’t really remember how she popped into my view, but she did.
“She’s one of those names I think everyone knows, but probably not that many people know that much about her life. I think the more you read about her, the more you come to understand just what a truly remarkable person she was…
“I wanted to focus on that final flight, just to choose something that was a bit less obvious than one of the better-known ones that she made, and see what would come out of that, musically and emotionally and thematically, see what kind of record we’d end up with.”
The album’s first single, Electra, is named after Amelia Earhart’s aeroplane. “Yes, she flew in a Lockheed Electra,” says J, “one of the first actually to be built.
“It was a very modern plane to be flying around the world in, specially modified to carry more fuel and all of that kind of stuff that you’d expect for the very long-haul trips that she was making.
“And it’s just such an incredibly cool name, that as soon as I saw that obviously I knew I’m not not going to write a song about a plane with a name like that – it’s just asking for it, really.”
Following Earhart’s disappearance, a number of theories sprang up regarding her eventual fate. What does J think happened?
“I think the most likely thing that happened to her is that she ran out of fuel and sadly landed somewhere in the ocean,” he replies.
“That’s always struck me as the most likely thing… Coming from somebody who’s done a record about moon landings, you won’t be surprised to hear I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories.
“So I don’t buy any of the ‘she was a spy’ nonsense, or she turned up on a Japanese island as a prisoner-of-war – it doesn’t really bear any scrutiny.
“I think sadly she ran out of fuel; she couldn’t find the island and that was the end of it.”
The Last Flight’s guests include Carl Broemel from My Morning Jacket on pedal steel, Berlin voices Andreya Casablanca and EERA, who both appeared on Bright Magic, as well as This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables.
Amelia Earhart’s first-hand writings, including 1937’s Last Flight, was used as a starting point, along with the biography East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler.
On how the record differs from the quartet’s previous work, musically speaking, J concludes: “I think there’s a few things on there that we’ve not really done before.
“I think the sound of some of the tracks, like The South Atlantic, I think it’s a departure – no pun intended – for us.
“I think sound-wise it’s a very rich sound; I think it’s a very full, very lush sound, I suppose, and maybe the sound of the last record was a bit more clinical and cold and more synthetic, because it was using a lot more electronic instruments.
“So it feels to me like a band relatively at peace with themselves, to be honest, just kind of letting the music be what it needs to be and not overthinking things.
“That’s how it felt to me, it didn’t feel as tortured as some of the previous records.”
Public Service Broadcasting will be performing at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Friday, 25 October. Tickets, priced £37.50, are available from cornex.co.uk. Visit publicservicebroadcasting.net for more on the band.