Public Service Broadcasting

Band statement below:
“Due to some of those aforementioned slips, timings going in to the start of the tour didn’t work as planned, so regrettably we have to move the Cork, Belfast and Dublin dates back a few weeks. They will now take place on 2 November: Dublin, 3Olympia Theatre, 3 November: Belfast, Telegraph Building, 4 November: Cork, Cyprus Avenue.

All existing tickets for the old dates are still valid for the new ones, and, if you can no longer attend, refunds will be available from the point of purchase.

We’re really sorry to have had to move these dates, and wouldn’t do it if there was any other way of making it work – it’s not something we do lightly, as we know many of you will have already booked time off work, paid for travel and so on. Unfortunately, given the revised plans at our end there was just no way of making the original dates happen any more.”

Public Service Broadcasting will be releasing brand new music this summer, as well as a full new album prior to this Autumn tour – more news to come.

The Last Flight concerns the final voyage of America’s pioneering female “aviatrix” Amelia Earhart. In 1922, aged just 25, Earhart flew higher than any woman before her, and in the years that followed she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, setting multiple speed and distance records. In 1937 she announced that she would circumnavigate the globe in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra aircraft. She crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She left Papua New Guinea to fly to Howland Island in the Central Pacific but never made it, instead ascending to the level of myth reserved for the bravest adventurers.

The Last Flight is similarly full of life-force, evoking adventure, speed and freedom as well as the psychological depths of a unique and admirable individual. Recorded in the band’s southeast London studio, with one day for strings at The Church in north London with the London Contemporary Orchestra, The Last Flight’s guests include Carl Broemel from My Morning Jacket on Eno-esque pedal steel, Berlin voices Andreya Casablanca and EERA who both appeared on Bright Magic, as well as This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables. Listeners may be surprised that the album does not feature original first-person testimony, but dialogue newly recorded by actors, including Kate Graham who read Amelia. This was then sensitively manipulated to give thirties sonic characteristics and distortion. Earhart’s first-hand writings including 1937’s Last Flight was used as a start point, along with the biography East To The Dawn by Susan Butler.

Speaking about the album, the band’s first studio album since 2021’s Bright Magic, J. Willgoose Esq. said “I wanted to do a woman-focused story, because most of the archive we have access to is overwhelmingly male. I was initially drawn in by Earhart’s final fight, rather than the successes that she had, but the more I read the more I became fascinated by her. Her bravery and her aeronautical achievements were extraordinary, but her philosophy and the dignity that she had… she was an outstanding person.

The final flight is the spine of the journey: the story jumps off at different points, and examines different facets of her personality, her relationship with her husband, her attitude to flying, her attitude to existing. She gave herself, I think, less than a 50% chance of survival when she flew the Atlantic alone. To put yourself, willingly, in those situations… I think it says something about that drive at the heart of humanity.

However The Last Flight isn’t doom-laden or covered in grief. There’s adventure, freedom, the joy of being alive. The reason why she wanted to fly was to find the beauty in living – ‘to know the reason why I’m alive, and to feel that every minute.’ The flight did fail, but she was right. Of all the people we’ve written about, I have the deepest respect and admiration for her.” 

Public Service Broadcasting also play a one-off, sold-out show as part of Durham BRASS Festival on 5th July where they will perform their album Every Valley in Durham Cathedral with the 38-piece NASUWT Riverside Brass Band. Demand for tickets was so high that despite the website crashing on launch, it sold out within hours. Released in 2017, Every Valley was a moving exploration of community and memory via the rise and fall of the British coal industry. The show marks the 40-year anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike.

Their most ambitious undertaking yet, their fourth and most recent studio album, Bright Magic, brought the listener to Europe’s heart and de facto capital, the cultural and political metropolis that is the ‘Hauptstadt’ of the Federal Republic of Germany – Berlin. The album featured two BBC Radio 6 Music A-Listed singles, “People, Let’s Dance” [ft. EERA] and “Blue Heaven” [ft. Andreya Casablanca], and featured in MOJO, Electronic Sound and PROG magazines’ albums of the year. Last year, the band released This New Noise, a newly remixed and remastered live recording of their acclaimed 2022 BBC Proms show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. A celebration of the power of radio written in recognition of the centenary of the BBC, This New Noise saw the band joining forces with the 88 piece BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley.