From the start of their near 20-year career, psychedelic pop adventurers Broadcast always stood in a class of their own. Formed in Birmingham, England in 1995 by James Cargill and Trish Keenan, Broadcast were a band that fused the worlds of pop songcraft and experimentally-minded electronic music into a contemporary blend of psychedelia that resonated deeply with listeners, effectively expanding the conventions of what could be considered psychedelic. After a trio of arresting singles for small indies like Wurlitzer Jukebox and the Stereolab-helmed Duophonic UHF Discs, they signed to Warp Records, where they remained for the rest of their career. The band’s signing to Warp was, at the time, a surprising and somewhat controversial move for the label, as its catalogue at that point dealt almost exclusively with acts outside of the world of pop music. Over time though, Broadcast became one of the label’s most revered and beloved cult acts, attracting a fan-base that continues to grow. Cargill and Keenan assembled the band with guitarist Tim Felton, keyboardist Roj Stevens and drummer Steve Perkins after hearing cult 1960s psych band The United States Of America during a night out at Birmingham’s Sensateria club. The United States of America’s lone 1968 self-titled album – a fusion of West Coast flower-power psychedelia, primitive frequency modulations and wry sociopolitical lyrics delivered via frontwoman Dorothy Moskowitz’s warm yet commanding delivery – was a revelation to the band, and they vowed to explore this avenue in their own work. Bringing together 1960s science fiction atmospheres, skewed variants on swinging jazz balladry and an equal embrace of experimental and populist aesthetics, their early work offered a Eurocentric counterpoint to the mostly American psych innovators they’d imbibed. Additionally, they incorporated influences from British and French library music pioneers like Ron Geesin, Roger Roger and Basil Kirchin; the kitchen-sink musique concrète of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; and the atmospheres of Italian giallo cinema. To quote Keenan herself: “The avant-garde is no good without popular, and popular is rubbish without avant-garde.” This was a credo to which Keenan and Cargill held steadfastly throughout the band’s tenure, always eager to incorporate new influences as a means of paying tribute and sharing their love for such cultural touchstones. With hindsight, Broadcast’s discography follows a clear route away from the fashionable swagger and lad-centric posturing of Britpop’s halcyon days into the crate-digging multiculturalism embraced by hip-hop and dance music producers. This sound would become a cornerstone of postmodern pop songwriting, and the fact they were one of the first bands of the era to attempt to shift that axis into a more rock/pop format is often overlooked (it’s worth noting that the first American label to sign the band was legendary hip hop outpost Tommy Boy). At the time of their inception, Broadcast were often lazily compared to Stereolab, Portishead and the post-rock movement of the time. The references to Stereolab, one of the few bands with live instrumentation to incorporate esoteric influences and retro-futurist tendencies, are sensible to a point. In retrospect, though, it makes more sense to consider groups like Saint Etienne, Disco Inferno and Pram as aesthetic peers. Though Broadcast’s music plays like a unique fusion of those three groups’ distinctive styles, it displays a deep knowledge of pop culture esoterica from around the world, stitched together in dense psychotropic collages and utilising a female voice that confidently shifts away from the stereotypical tropes of a rock frontwoman, delivering emotional lyrics with a cool detachment. The band endured constant line-up fluctuations over the years, losing members with each consecutive album, and in the process drastically altering the sonic make-up of each record. This worked in the band’s favor, as necessity forced Keenan and Cargill to construct new vessels for their increasingly complex ideas. Cargill has been vocal about the group’s necessity for inventive production techniques as a result of their limited financial means; Broadcast often recorded in small household rooms and local church halls with limited equipment, and their ingenuity in such limiting environments is to be applauded. Aside from Cargill and Keenan’s partnership, which was both creative and romantic, the only other constant in Broadcast’s lifetime has been graphic designer and recording artist Julian House, who has been responsible for the group’s strong visual identity since their first demo. House is also credited with providing considerable sonic influence over the years, offering guidance from the group’s formative years through to their later period via his Ghost Box label, where he offered not only inspiration and contextual reference but provided a creative foil via solo recordings as The Focus Group. Broadcast’s work with The Focus Group brought forth a startling new evolution for the group, but one which was tragically cut short after Trish Keenan’s untimely death in 2011 from pneumonia, brought on by contracting the H1N1 flu virus while on tour in Australia. News of Keenan’s passing shook the music world, and brought the band’s music to the ears of a new generation of listeners. Their sound remains timeless because it was not a reflection of their environment and their time, but an escape from it. In celebration of the band’s 20th anniversary, and on the eve of their long out-of-print discography being reissued on vinyl for the first time (with hopes of an announcement from Warp on the release of Broadcast’s final album, which Cargill has been finishing with Keenan’s fully recorded vocals in order to give the band a proper farewell), here is a selection of Broadcast’s most noteworthy songs, plus a mix blending many of the tracks included with a few rarities and bits of Broadcast ephemera.

Broadcast

‘Accidentals’

(Wurlitzer Jukebox, 1996) Broadcast’s first single was a gentle, woozy electronic ballad entitled ‘Accidentals’, constructed around a sample of Sir John Dankworth’s score to the Joseph Losey’s 1967 film Accident. Produced on an old Commodore Amiga PC by Cargill, Keenan, and Roj Stevens, it’s one of the band’s most beautifully simple tunes, recalling the forlorn, rainy day waltzes of Scott Walker’s Scott 3 album, thanks to the stark dichotomy between Keenan’s icy whisper and the profound poetry she recites (“Under the strain / Something’s got to break / I don’t think this branch / Can take my weight / I’ve been up this tree / All the time you’ve been looking for me / And you will not see, or try to believe / When there’s no guarantee”). This would become a key component of the band’s power, and ‘Accidentals’ (backed by the soft sci-fi gurgle of ‘We’ve Got Time’) showed a band with a clear mission statement, using “cheap bits of technology that we had around rather than singing about going down the boozer,” as Cargill once said in reference to the laddish Britpop mania overrunning UK pop during the band’s inception. A modest yet promising start.

Broadcast

‘The World Backwards’

(From The Book Lovers EP, Duophonic, 1996) After sending a demo tape to Stereolab, Broadcast were courted by manager Martin Pike, who was intrigued by their unique sound. Their next release would be on Stereolab’s Duophonic imprint and The Book Lovers EP was, in many ways, the band’s first real breakthrough; the record’s four songs were more strident, displaying the confidence and power that was only hinted at on their debut single. With drummer Steve Perkins and guitarist Tim Felton now fleshing out the group’s arrangements, Broadcast’s sound drew parallels to the cult psych band that initially brought the group together. The oscillating keyboard motifs, melodic basslines, and jazz-inspired drumming anchoring Keenan’s quiet-yet-commanding vocals were highly reminiscent of The United States Of America’s 1968 album. But where The USA’s hot-wired psych grew from the seeds of Californian flower-power and increasing disenchantment over Summer Of Love idealism, Broadcast replaced that with the loneliness and isolation of Midlands life and a bit of Left Bank cool. While all four of the EP’s songs are memorable, ‘The World Backwards’ is perhaps the highlight, with everyone’s contributions gelling into a tour-de-force performance that displays the group’s muscle as a live unit. Cargill’s bassline provides the melodic backbone, Felton’s aeriform guitar floats above the ground ominously and Stevens’ keyboards dance around in counterpoint while Perkins’ drums propel the song forward. Keenan, meanwhile, delivers her most buoyant vocal yet; her dexterous runs give the song an assertive strength that would be used sparingly in these early years, but would see greater fruition as time passed.

Broadcast

‘Hammer Without A Master’

(From We Are Reasonable People, Warp, 1998) After one last single for Duophonic, the band were signed to Sheffield’s Warp Records. Their first release for the label was an excellent compilation of past singles entitled Work And Non-Work, but it was on Warp’s We Are Reasonable People compilation that we got the first taste of fresh Broadcast music, and for those familiar with the singles it would prove a surprise, as the track was considerably more weighty and muscular than anything they’d done before. Opening with jarring synthesizer chords and Trish’s wordless, ring-modulated siren call, ‘Hammer Without A Master’ was a promising hint of things to come on the band’s debut album, as an oppressive bass synth drone wobbles over skittering jazz drums, discordant keyboards reminiscent of 1970s era Sun Ra, and Felton’s guitar slices sounding like he’s auditioning for Gang Of Four. The instrumental would become a highlight of the band’s live sets during this era, enabling them to really cut loose and get noisy. While the band would regularly partake in instrumentals on their albums and EPs throughout the entirety of their career, ‘Hammer Without A Master’ remains one of their most successful, moving away from mere incidental music into a much weightier zone.

Broadcast

‘Echo’s Answer’

(Warp, 1999) One of the most haunting and beautiful songs in Broadcast’s catalogue, ‘Echo’s Answer’ was the first real taste of Broadcast’s debut album. A sharp contrast to the maximalist jazz discordance of ‘Hammer Without A Master’, the stripped-back ethereality of ‘Echo’s Answer’ was almost shocking. Keenan’s quiet delivery of a cryptic yet sinister lyric, surrounded by little more than ring-modulated piano and electronically manipulated string samples, showed a maturation and refinement of the band’s approach. It recalls both The United States Of America’s ‘Love Song For The Dead Ché’ and obscure Belgian chanteuse Claude Lombard’s 1969 Ondes Martenot-infused ‘Sleep Well’, though Keenan strips away the sentiments of those songs and recites in its place a resigned ballad of imprisonment. Her love of these artists and subsequent appropriation of their methods was an attempt to reimagine “a better Sixties – one without sexism or racism,” as she put it. “I discovered psychedelia, and it seemed to have self-help properties that allowed me to let go of an immobilizing working class pride that was cementing a false identity into my psyche, stopping me from transforming.” It was a transformation and reawakening that she would nourish for the rest of her life.

Broadcast

‘Where Youth And Laughter Go’

(From Extended Play EP, Warp, 2000) A B-side from Broadcast’s Extended Play EP released as a teaser for their long-delayed debut album, ‘Where Youth And Laughter Go’ is an understated deep cut that’s arguably the EP’s highlight. This song was one of the band’s first displays of Keenan multi-tracking her own voice in order to harmonize with herself, which is used to striking effect during the chorus. Her confidence as a vocalist had grown considerably, as had the band’s arrangement skills. Vibraphone is utilized beautifully here in the chorus’s upward swing, blending with Felton’s fluid guitar overdubs. Elsewhere on the EP, the band indulge their love of film music, particularly Ennio Morricone; the widescreen exotica of instrumental ‘Belly Dance’ recalls the renowned composer’s scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, while the galloping, shadowed majesty of ‘Dave’s Dream’ finds Keenan doing her best impression of, or tribute to, Morricone collaborator Edda Dell’orso. The iconic single ‘Papercuts’ rounds out the EP, promising great things for an album which was – finally – just around the corner.

Broadcast

‘Come On Let’s Go’

(From The Noise Made By People, Warp, 2000) ‘Come On Let’s Go’ remains one of Broadcast’s most beloved songs, and an unimpeachable highlight of the band’s debut album. Not only a great Broadcast song, but a great pop song in general, Cargill’s bass playing is reminiscent of Can bassist Holger Czukay’s ability to provide maximum melodic efficiency with the fewest notes possible, and Keenan’s vocal aches with ennui that recalls a Joe Meek girl group production. There’s a classic timelessness to it – one could easily hear Cilla Black or Dionne Warwick singing the tune over a more showbiz backing, and the drum hits at the end of each chorus wink mischievously toward Phil Spector’s cavernous ‘Be My Baby’ intro. The song serves as a sweetener for what on the surface was a very cold, melancholic album, The Noise Made By People, which captures the tension of the era’s post-Y2K techno-fear as well as the group’s struggle to complete the album . Drummer Steve Perkins was out of the picture by the time of its release, and the group’s determined perfectionism at times dilutes the power of some of these songs in comparison to other versions recorded for John Peel or French radio’s Black Sessions. Regardless, that anxiety and unease can’t overshadow the majesty of the songs included; it’s just a shame that the band’s skill at fusing pop music with austere electronic wizardry would be overshadowed just a few months later with the release of Radiohead’s Kid A, an album that explored similar concepts and moods with comparable aesthetics to much greater commercial success.

Broadcast

‘Unchanging Window / Chord Simple’

(From Extended Play Two, Warp/Tommy Boy, 2000) The band closed 2000 with the release of a second Extended Play record, this time featuring newly recorded material and a far superior take on two The Noise Made By People-era cuts. It is arguably the defining document of Broadcast’s five-person lineup, and a fitting closure to their first era. Extended Play Two plays like a more concentrated interpretation of The Noise Made By People’s wintry cabin fever. Stunning opener ‘Illumination’ glides across a throbbing pulse that anchors Keenan’s soaring chorus vocals, while ‘A Man For Atlantis’ and ‘Poem Of Dead Song’ explore schizophrenic stop-start tempo shifts and spectral synth melodies. The show-stealing reworks of The Noise Made By People‘s ‘Unchanging Window’ and B-side instrumental ‘Chord Simple’, here fused together into one monolithic tune, showcase the band’s increased strength in every member’s performance; where the album version was relaxed, reluctant, and reserved, this one is a commanding rendition that increases the tension, the weight, and the dynamics. The band had been touring extensively around this time, and Extended Play Two’s songs greatly benefit from that tightened interplay. Most surprising are Keenan’s vocals – where she once displayed a near timid calm, her voice now carries with newfound confidence and assertion. Broadcast give these performances their all, and that increased power would carry over into the sessions for their next album.

Broadcast

‘Still Feels Like Tears’

(From Pendulum EP, Warp, 2003) The arrival of the Pendulum EP in 2003 ushered in a tougher, more ambitious Broadcast, which had managed to sharpen both its pop hooks and its serrated experimental impulses. The catchy title track was a declaration that the band was exploring more hard-edged influences, recalling the oscillating undulations of ’60s electronic pioneers Silver Apples via its thicker waves of electronic frequency and powerful drumming. Roj Stevens’ keyboards and Tim Felton’s guitar work throughout the EP proved to be beefier, messier and more scorched, giving the EP’s songs more detail; their aggressive textures also served as a wonderful foil for Keenan’s melodies, which were vibrantly technicolored compared to their previous monochrome hues. ‘Still Feels Like Tears’ stands out here, with Keenan lamenting the loss of something or someone dear to her via a deceptively childlike metaphor (“Seasons mean nothing / You went away and I’m falling / Even clouds have tried their best / To move and give my tears a rest”). The band motors forward on a metronomic krautrock groove, Felton and Stevens ejecting heavily modulated and distorted splatters of guitar and synth tones across her requiem in place of her tears. The song encapsulates the power of Keenan’s creative worldview, though would sadly come to serve as a bittersweet reflection of many fans’ emotions after her untimely passing.

Broadcast

‘Man Is Not A Bird’

(From HaHa Sound, Warp, 2003) James Cargill has often stated that 2003’s HaHa Sound album was the closest the group ever came to having its initial vision for a release be reflected in the final product. A kaleidoscopic soundworld overflowing with intricate instrumental arrangements, daringly abrasive abstract textures and romantic melodies, it both reflects the band’s influences at the time and transcends them. Songs inspired by cult Czech film Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders, British composer Basil Kirchin, and the esoteric library music pop experiments of Roger Roger and Nino Nardini are given lush, ambitious environments in which to frolic. The results – from the whirring, sun-soaked dance of opener ‘Color Me In’ to the looking-glass delirium of ‘Lunch Hour Pops’ – make for not only Broadcast’s warmest, most playful album, but one of the finest psychedelic albums of the new millennium. The real star of HaHa Sound, though, is drummer Neil Bullock, a concert and session drummer who earned his chops in the British jazz scene. The band recorded Bullock’s parts in a local church, and his intricate, dexterous rhythms are a vital ingredient in the album’s success. ‘Man Is Not A Bird’ plays like a showcase for his talents, its rolling snare, thumping toms and Echoplexed cymbal hits giving way to an extended outro that lets him cut loose. Bullock toured with Broadcast to promote the album, and Cargill cut a series of additional library-inspired pieces with him for the first volume of the group’s Microtronics tour EPs. His presence was so distinct that when he left the group to pursue other gigs, Keenan and Cargill never replaced him.

Broadcast

‘Tender Buttons’

(Warp, 2005) After HaHa Sound, Broadcast lost both Roj Stevens and Tim Felton, leaving just Cargill and Keenan as the band’s creative core. They decided (mainly out of necessity) to record their next album as a duo, and the resulting record was perhaps the most dramatic re-contextualization of their sound to date. A double A-side single was released ahead of that album, and while the buzzing 8-bit synths and George W. Bush-dissing of ‘America’s Boy’ was a surprising left turn, it was the single’s other song that really stood out. ‘Tender Buttons’ (a reference to Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book of abstract verse, which also became the album’s title) opens with something previously unheard of on a Broadcast song: an acoustic guitar. Layers of overlapping one-note strums interlock as Cargill’s bass carries the melody once again, while a minimal machine pulse keeps time. The effect instantly pushed Broadcast’s points of reference forward by 20 years, recalling DIY post punk-era projects instead of the kaleidoscopic psychedelia of their previous records. It was an ingenious way to keep things from growing stale, but it’s Keenan’s vocal that’s arguably the most shocking thing here, with her stern recitation of cut-up texts derived from automatic writing sessions. The exercise would be a creative breakthrough for Keenan’s lyrical contributions, and would lead to the band’s most polarizing work yet.

Broadcast

‘Corporeal’

(From Tender Buttons, Warp, 2005) The release of Tender Buttons proved to be a catalyst for change among many of the group’s fans and detractors. Many who were attracted to the band’s retro psychedelia were uninterested in Tender Buttons‘ stripped-back, minimal sound, while others who were previously put off by the group’s maximalist indulgences suddenly found themselves intrigued by the duo’s new direction. Now sharing aesthetic similarities to groups like Young Marble Giants and Essendon Airport instead of Silver Apples and Fifty Foot Hose, the Broadcast of Tender Buttons also explored more personal and realist lyrical content with increasingly oblique strategies. They’d initially recorded an album’s worth of demos to shop around in the hope of acquiring additional personnel to flesh out the songs’ arrangements, but that band never materialized, leaving Keenan and Cargill to arrange the songs themselves. In hindsight, it’s beguiling to imagine what these songs would’ve sounded like with a full band (you can get an idea in their Loading Video… ;feature=youtu.be” target=”_blank”>live Loading Video… ;feature=youtu.be” target=”_blank”>recordings from the period). Keenan said in a 2006 interview that “when you strum a guitar, there’s too much reality that comes with it. [Electronic and sample based music] was a good way into escapism… it was a way of fantasizing in songs, in a sense, but still describing my emotions.” Her hypothesis proved true on Tender Buttons, which featured more unobscured guitar than even the group’s work with Tim Felton. During the writing and recording of the album, Keenan coped with the loss of her father to cancer, bringing more undisguised personal references into her songs as the rest of the texts became coded and cut-up. ‘Corporeal’ is one of the most explicit examples of this, and its percolating arrangement belies a lyrical conceit that can be viewed at least two ways – as an obtuse love song abstracting the nature of the human body into scientific terminology and evolutionary theory, or as the protagonist (presumably Keenan herself) looking at X-rays of a loved one and wanting to switch places with them, processing the confusion of the human body’s ability to fight and then suddenly give up against a devastating sickness. The insertion of her own experience, no matter how veiled, adds an additional weight to the impact of these already stark and powerful songs.

Roj

‘The Gamelan Threshold’

(From The Transactional Dharma Of Roj, Ghost Box, 2009) Broadcast’s close friend and sleeve designer Julian House formed modest DIY record label Ghost Box in 2004 with school friend Jim Jupp; the label’s manifesto was to issue dispatches from imaginary worlds steeped in English surrealism, educational programming, occult practices, archaic technologies and the dark underbellies of psychedelia. The label’s unique sounds and esoteric points of reference tied together disparate worlds of fringe culture, and a devoted cult following soon flourished around the label. Alongside the founders’ respective solo projects were releases by peers like The Advisory Circle and former Broadcast keyboardist Roj Stevens. Roj’s 2009 solo debut The Transactional Dharma Of Roj is an immersive travelogue of atavistic electronic seances channeled through Eastern philosophies, Radiophonic tomfoolery, and the pop intellectualism of Marshall McLuhan (whose album version of The Medium Is The Massage is essentially one of Ghost Box’s American ancestors). Its narcotic synth drones, softly clattering South Asian hand drums and disassociated spectral voices are grafted together with an attention to detail that encourages the listener to follow the album’s journey from start to finish. Aside from just one other recent 7″ single and music from a new trio including Julian House and James Cargill, Roj has been conspicuously absent from the recording world.

Broadcast & The Focus Group

‘Make My Sleep His Song’

(From Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, Warp, 2009) While a former member of Broadcast was releasing new music on Julian House’s label, House himself was actually collaborating with Broadcast sonically as well as visually for the first time. 2009 saw the release of the first joint release by Broadcast and The Focus Group, an ambitious concept album with an equally ambitious title. The trio sought to make an EP that paid tribute to classic Hammer horror cinema and the idea of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), but what emerged was a full album constructed from fragments of improvised recordings that Cargill and Keenan made together, vocal loops and incantations that Keenan recorded in her local church, and components of fully recorded songs that the duo had written. They then sent these to House, who helped assemble everything in a series of weekend editing binges that interwove Broadcast’s pop universe with the cubist concrète abstractions of House’s Focus Group recordings. The album is easily the densest project either party has released, yet it somehow manages to transcend its parts to unify into a mesmerizing whole; like Roj’s Ghost Box album, it’s a journey that’s best taken from start to finish, but amidst all the wilful abstraction there are a number of satisfying moments that wink in the direction of Broadcast’s past. ‘The Be Colony’ welcomes the listener in to a tongue-in-cheek pop séance via a chorus of spectral Trish Keenans as a bass guitar plays itself in the corner, an electric organ toots in the next room, and a jazz drummer keeps time from two floors upstairs. ‘I See, So I See So’ features a stroll along a seaside boardwalk with multiple Trishes singing a nursery rhyme to the sounds of a harpsichord accompaniment, while ‘Libra, The Mirror’s Minor Self’ is a cut-up recitation of Keenan’s horoscope set to soft domestic clatter and a series of otherworldly bass tones and will-o’-the-wisp aural phenomena. It’s ‘Make My Sleep His Song’ that provides the album’s most truly haunted moment. Amidst the collage of murmuring EVP and an ominously droning organ, Keenan sings an incantation from A Witches’ Bible in which the participant becomes complicit in the ritual. It’s a lovely break from the rest of the album’s incidental samples, disjointed musical cues, and chopped up vocal fragments. The album’s construction plays like a tribute to and recreation of an old practice that the duo were known to utilize when renting films from their former local video shop in Birmingham, which carried plenty of obscure cinephemera – they’d record the audio of the film to tape or Minidisc in order to get the soundtracks, but would also get the ambient sounds and dialogue, which Keenan often preferred to the actual soundtrack albums. Again, she loved the escape these recordings provided, and on Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, she crafted her own cinematic elseworld.

Broadcast

‘Elegant Elephant’

(From Mother Is The Milky Way, Warp, 2009) Prior to Witch Cults’ recording, Cargill and Keenan had relocated from Birmingham to the country town of Hungerford, a place the duo soon discovered was ripe with nearby witchy and occultist phenomena, from the haunted Littlecote House Hotel to nearby Stonehenge. While Witch Cults symbolized a cosmopolitan party thrown by occultists and country witches, Broadcast’s 2009 tour EP Mother Is The Milky Way was a fully bucolic recording, comprised of home-recorded demos of a more folk-inspired aesthetic quality, with the density of its predecessor stripped away to make room for twittering birdsongs, the laughter of children, and ambient marketplace chatter. Keenan is our guide through an imagined Hungerford, and the record feels at times like a fictitious collaboration between Virginia Astley and Nurse With Wound – Kurt Schwitters even pops in for a beer and a bit of Ursonate babble. ‘Elegant Elephant’ is one of the EP’s more traditionally lovely moments and a perfect encapsulation of the quiet magic the duo achieve on Milky Way; it provides a rare peek into the more intimate domestic side of Keenan and Cargill’s life together, and even though it’s a fabrication, it’s no less striking.