The Brangwyn Hall – tonight’s venue for this live Public Service Broadcasting show – is possibly the most vertical venue I’ve ever attended: the room feels at least as tall as deep, tapestries (I assume any hanging fabric is a tapestry) on the walls and enormous rectangular chandeliers hanging from a lavish, distant ceiling. It might be my first gig in a concert hall, too, but I now know why this Swansea venue is famed for its acoustics.
Support act Pale Blue Eyes were similarly new to me, but their set was tight and their songs organic shoegaze-pop with muted drums, precise bass and singer Matt Board’s sometimes aching harmonies filling the gaps and washing in and out of the backing track and loops.
Public Service Broadcasting open their set with a short announcement condemning and calling for direct action against the inconsiderate monsters who spend entire gigs waving brightly lit phones over their heads and taking pictures with the flash on (the actual message may have been a bit more politely phrased). Thereafter, Bowie’s Sound And Vision serenades a stage empty but for the three tall screens placed behind the band’s array of laptops, desks and more traditional instruments. After a couple of minutes later, the band arrive launch straight into a brace of tracks from 2021’s Bright Magic.
I first heard Public Service Broadcasting circa 2014 album The Race For Space and have been a paid-up fan since Every Valley, from 2017. Night Mail, though a relatively old song in PSB’s repertoire, was my personal highlight – indeed, the song and its videos playing in accompaniment introduced me to and defined my internet rabbit hole for the following day, namely fast-moving trains catching bags of mail from flimsy sticks next to the track with what appeared to be fishing nets. (I challenge any modern distribution company to invent something as amusing.)
Generally, I feel the best live performances add another dimension to the music, whether by the performer’s personality or by favourite songs being deconstructed, changed or obliterated by raw energy. Live, though, Public Service Broadcasting don’t sound significantly different from their recordings. What their performances bring is the other band member, their visuals.
These add more dimensions to the songs you already know and love: the chaotic and vibrant dancers who rise from the rubbish in Blue Heaven, the pride and majesty of the sheer accomplishment of the Titanic in White Star Liner, the very human struggle of the Apollo astronauts disappearing behind the moon, hidden behind the beeps and clipped military language of mission control in The Other Side, and the anger and desperation of those affected by the Welsh pit closures in All Out.
Public Service Broadcasting tell stories; their songs are narratives and exposures and never more clearly than with all the band members on view. Go and see them live if you can.
Public Service Broadcasting, Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, Wed 12 Oct
words and photos JIM MOIR