The interview was published in Popaganda.gr on 10.11.2014.
[Without any sense of exaggeration, having a conversation with the Public Service Broadcasting is one of the most enjoyable things ever. Happy and relaxed, they proved how cool they are and what makes them so unique.]
A quote from Guardian’s review on your debut album: “More a concept than a band, it's a little hard to see where they can go from here without repeating themselves. For now, though, Inform-Educate-Entertain is a flawed but fascinating curiosity.” How do you consider that? A fair reaction to something completely different or a motivation for you to prove what you actually do?
I think it’s certainly fair to describe it as ‘flawed’! To be honest I don’t think it puts us in any different situation to any other band who’ve released a debut album which has been relatively well-received. There’s always the pressure to do something better and avoid repeating yourself. In some cases I think some of the scepticism about our future has been down to a lack of imagination on the writer’s part, but it doesn’t bother me. That’s our job, to find new ways of keeping things fresh and interesting and – possibly – a bit challenging!
Also, people name you as the “Future of the new British scene”. Does the title restrict your thoughts in what are you going to do next? To limit your experimental mood?
I hate to disagree but I don’t think anyone’s ever called us that! I don’t really feel like we belong to, or ever have belonged to, any scene. We operate to a large extent outside the traditional structure of the music industry. We’re our own label, we work with a new booking agency, we only recently signed a publishing deal, we came up through radio first and foremost and listener reaction, plus by gigging a lot, not by any kind of ‘industry buzz’ or anything that basically means a label has spent a fortune on PR for you. But to answer the question – I think the only thing that can ever hold us back is our imagination, or lack of it, and musical ability, or lack of it! Your unique sound is accompanied perfectly by a unique name. How did you end up on this?
It just seemed to fit – it had a tongue-in-cheek element to it that appealed to me and it’s also a well-known phrase over here so it seemed quite nice to subvert it. It does share an abbreviation with the Pet Shop Boys, which I was quite wary about, as I wouldn’t want to be seen to be disrespecting them – I love them! – but we went ahead with it anyway.
Nowadays everything turns to past decades and lives through nostalgia. You decide to make a step forward with electronic sounds but at the same time including past elements. Why?
It was pretty simple really, the music we make is the music we (and I in particular) enjoy making, and are interested in making. There wasn’t any great, over-arching, post-modern plan to it, but it has inadvertently ended up being one of the more interesting aspects about what we do – that it’s not nostalgic, that we’re actually
bringing sounds from the past into the modern era and in some cases changing the meaning along the way, or drawing parallels between the past and today. And at the start, in terms of using the voices, I was mostly just interested in sampling voices with a bit of character and which were evocative (and often quite unintentionally funny); that coincided with my discovery of the Prelinger Archives and the BFI’s archives and off we went, basically!
Your samples come from British archives but your melodies are influenced by German bands such as Neu. Both things are a bit extraordinary on their own way. How can you manage to find the perfect balance?
Good question. We’re still trying to find a good one, let alone a perfect one! I think it’s important not to get too serious and over-think things, though. Sometimes things don’t make sense, and it’s important (in life as well as in music) to be able to deal with that and enjoy it for what it is. There’s no reason a krautrock-inspired song about Britain’s most famous WWII aeroplane should work, but it does, so we just go with it. I like to think we’re doing our best to continue the wonderful esoteric and eccentric vein that runs through a lot of British pop over the years - bands like the KLF, even going as far back as Bowie and The Beatles. Talking about the samples you use, is there specific reasons for the themes you have chosen such as propaganda material and British pro-war movies for example? Are you interested in history? Did you think that it would make an impression?
Some of the reasons for choosing the material we’ve chosen are entirely prosaic and mundane. The whole reason I wanted to write an EP based on WWII propaganda material was that I knew there’d be a lot of it, that it’d be something I could get my teeth into as a writer, and something that might end up meaning a bit more than our previous, more scattershot efforts. And I also knew the BFI had a wonderful collection and were very helpful on the licensing front! Of course it has the added benefit of being a fascinating subject, and one I learned a great deal about during the making of the EP and subsequently, but most of it came from the point of view of wanting to write something with a bit more substance and depth. Do you consider your live shows as music gigs or special performances?
A bit of both, ideally. We never want to get so far down the road of theatricality and audio-visual assault that the music starts becoming secondary and people forget that it is, primarily, a gig, but equally we always do our best to make our shows as interesting and eye-catching as possible. Budgets don’t always allow us to do what we’d want to, but we give it a good go! Give me your ideal definition of “cool”.
Not us! Ha! Thank you.
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