CITY OF LIGHT
You won’t read this in many self-help books but sometimes the best thing you can do in life is to give up. That’s what J Willgoose Esq – the dapper, bespectacled creative force behind electronic rock outfit Public Service Broadcasting – did in about 2009. It turned out to be the best decision he ever made.
“I stopped trying to be an average guitarist in an indie band, because I’d tried that lots of times and failed,” says Willgoose. “I was just doing stuff for my own amusement really. I was approaching 30 so I just thought, ‘It’s not going to happen now, I may as well just do something that’s fun and, if I need to drag my mates to the pub to watch it, then it may as well be something fun for them to watch as well, y’know?’”
These aims would coalesce into the fledgling Public Service Broadcasting, a band that melded synths, electronic beats and Willgoose’s proggy guitar with snippets from old public-information films, telling stories through music that sought to, as is neatly summed up by PSB’s debut album title: Inform. Educate. Entertain.
Since that first album in 2013, Willgoose has been joined by fellow multi-instrumentalists Wrigglesworth and JF Abraham, in creating a series of concept albums and EPs that cover historical topics as disparate as the Space Race to the death of South Wales’ coal industry. But for the band’s fourth full-length, Bright Magic, Willgoose’s muse drew him in a different direction. He was going to write an album about Berlin.
“I WOULD HATE TO BE CALLED A COLLECTOR. YOU SHOULDN’T BUY THINGS TO COLLECT THEM, YOU SHOULD BUY THEM TO PLAY”
“I didn’t really know why I wanted to write an album about Berlin,” he admits. “I just felt this draw to it,
