A Willgoose Writes @jwillgoose - Tumblr Blog

Bristol Fleece Screenprints

Dear Listeners,

SORRY ALL SOLD OUT IN A STUPIDLY QUICK TIME

After the flurry of screenprints discovered at the back of storage towards the end of last year (which flew out of the door very quickly), I thought these other discoveries might be of interest:

As you can see, it's a design for our gig at The Fleece, Bristol in 2013. We had no idea these prints were being made up - the artist, Chris, just turned up at the venue with them and said 'here you go' (I think 1/3 went to us, 1/3 to him and 1/3 to the venue maybe), which was a nice surprise. It was a fun gig, too.

Anyway there are about 25 of these up for grabs, hand-numbered by the artist and signed by him, too. I am happy to sign them as well if you like, but rounding up the others will be too difficult / boring I'm afraid.

If you're interested, please email [email protected] - I'll provide payment details in a strictly first-come, first-served order.

ALL SOLD OUT ALREADY BLOODY HELL THANKS

There aren't any more posters lurking in storage, sadly, so this is it in terms of these homebrew sales - thanks to everyone who's expressed an interest, I had no idea they'd prove so popular still.

Yours surprisedly,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

PSB Patreon

Dear Listeners,

A few words about the PSB Patreon offering, which launches today. I'll explain a bit about what I'll be offering and - crucially, from my point of view - why.

I've always been a bit reluctant to limit PSB material (besides albums and gig tickets, of course!) to only those who can afford to pay for them. I like to think that our online presence, such as it is, is fairly democratic and open by nature - and before I go any further with details of the Patreon stuff, I should add that nothing will change on that account. We'll still be present online, still engage with and reply to comments and so forth. This isn't the digital drawbridge being pulled up in favour of a paywall of some kind.

Instead, it's a chance to offer fans something I haven't generally had the time or motivation to offer in the past. Whether that's video demos of how to play some of our songs, a monthly test pressing giveaway allocated randomly, a regular Q&A session or just more frequent written posts (I'd love to write more on here, and more regularly, but I struggle to find the time to do so), actually making it a paid service will give me both the impetus and the capacity to do a bit more.

The launch of the PSB Patreon comes at a time when I've also just taken on some studio premises. This may well prove to be a fantastically unwise venture, especially given the current economic situation and the ongoing dire state of the live music industry, but running a studio and working with other artists (as well as having a dedicated PSB rehearsal and studio space) is something I've wanted to do for so long and I don't want to die wondering. Having a fairly reliable monthly income stream from the Patreon should help to make the dream a reality, and of course I'll be providing updates in terms of what's going on and what I'm doing as time goes by.

I haven't stratified things in terms of what you get vs how much you pay, again trying to keep things democratic. There's an option to pay a bit more and to receive a grovelling thank you from yours truly, but otherwise you're either subscribed and receive everything or you're not, and you don't.

Anyway, I'm just getting it off the ground and will be adding more posts and media as the month rolls on, and as I get past my deadline for mixing the Proms stuff for release later this year. As an incentive to join, subscribers will receive a downloadable mp3 of the very first PSB demo created all the way back in 2009, Three Things.

You can have a look at the page here and subscribe, if you feel inclined / able to. Thanks a lot for all your support anyway, however you contribute, and happy new year to everyone.

Yours experimentally,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

(Very) Limited Edition Screenprints sale

Dear Listeners,

UPDATE: All sold out! Sorry and thanks everyone!

A recent storage sort-out ahead of a studio move unearthed a few precious rarities that were - miraculously - mostly undamaged. The below screenprints are almost certainly the last of their kind (we don't own any more and all of the originals were sold long ago), so if you missed out at the time and want to get hold of one of these, please don't hang about.

If you'd like to buy one of the below posters, please email me at [email protected] and very clearly state which poster you'd like. For the really rare ones I'm going to have to limit it to one design per transaction (ie you can order more than one poster, just not more than one of the same kind). I'm also happy to sign any, but it'll just be me (rounding up the others will take too long and, frankly, be too much hassle for me. Sorry).

For those further afield please bear in mind that you may well get hit by customs charges. It'll be sending payment to our Paypal address and I'll give you the details when you get in touch.

Onwards, then...

NB: in case it's not obvious, these are all A2 size!

LUKE DROZD TRIPTYCH (v2) SCREENPRINTS! SOLD OUT

This is the slightly altered version Luke created for our second run of these fabulous posters, with different colours. Most of these are in excellent condition, better than the rest of the prints below I'd say, with the exception of the Green Man ones maybe.

SOLD OUT

GRAHAM PILLING BRIXTON ACADEMY 2015 PRINT! SOLD OUT

These are pretty rare - not seen any for a long time. Created for our first, memorable show at Brixton back in 2015. They're a little bit curled around the corners but when framed these should look great. Either way, it's your last chance to get one.

SOLD OUT

EVERY VALLEY GRAHAM PILLING PRINTS! SOLD OUT

A personal favourite of mine, these were released towards the end of 2018 around the time of our Welsh dates and the Royal Albert Hall show. Fond memories. These are in mostly excellent condition but with the odd slightly curled corner - again they'll frame up fine.

SOLD OUT

LUKE DROZD TRIPTYCH v1 PRINT! SOLD OUT

Wowee, this is a rarity. It has a small tear / fold in the bottom left (see photo) but again I think it'd be fine in a frame. This is almost certainly the last unsold one of these in existence.

SOLD OUT

GRAHAM PILLING GREEN MAN 2015 PRINT! SOLD OUT

Is it ok if this is another personal favourite? Only four of these beauties (only 60 ever made according to the numbers on the prints), don't hang about.

SOLD OUT

PRIMAVERA 2018 PRINT! SOLD OUT

Very, very rare - so rare I forgot that they existed. I have 7 of these, designed by Munster Studio in Barcelona for Primavera. Lovely design, lovely thick mottled card too. They've been in a poster tube for several years so are slightly curled, but then all of these will be once they've been posted, so, you know...

SOLD OUT

Once again please email me at [email protected] (annoyingly tumblr won't let me turn that into a link any more) and let me know which one you want, if you want me to sign it etc. I'll aim to get them posted within a week of ordering so you should have it in time for Christmas.

Thanks for reading folks,

Yours entrepeneurially,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

Sputnik, Gagarin, Valentina, Korolev and Ukraine

Dear Listeners,

I received an angry and disappointed email today from a fan who left last night’s Sheffield gig when we started playing Sputnik. To quote a selection from it: ‘With all the atrocities going on in Ukraine it's offensive to play a song celebrating Russia. Surely you have sufficient material after several albums to put together a more considered playlist, and keep the audience happy. Where is your filter?’

In case anyone else has had this - in my view - reductive and simplistic (and misguided) response to our setlist choices, I thought it might be useful to publish my reply here. I think we treat our audience with the respect they deserve so I’ve never felt the need to make the below explicit or overt before, but if anyone felt uneasy about it hopefully this gives some kind of illustration of my thinking on it.

‘Dear [name redacted],

Sorry to hear that you and your partner left early and were clearly so upset by us playing Sputnik.

When the war in Ukraine started earlier this year I gave the matter long and serious thought, especially ahead of our dates in Ireland in May which were our first shows after the invasion. I spoke to several friends and thought about it for a prolonged period. In the end I decided to continue playing these songs having thought that our fanbase was discerning and intelligent enough to appreciate the differences between historical actions and current ones.

For me, what it comes down to is that Sputnik, Gagarin, Korolev, Valentina - all of those achievements, milestones in the development and progress of the human race, should not be tainted by the actions of the current Russian government. History is complicated and with many interweaving factors; I don't personally believe that the awful crimes that the current gangsters and kleptocrats in Russia have perpetrated should mean that any and all positive aspects from their historical culture are instantly erased, or cancelled. I think such thinking is reductive, simplistic and misplaced. Where do you draw the line? Should we stop reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, stop listening to Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich? Stop celebrating incredible and beautiful art that has come out of Russia?

I also strongly disagree that the song (or any of those mentioned above) are celebrations of Russia, whether modern day or retrospectively. They are not. They never were. Sputnik itself has a considerable air of menace and is mostly framed from the American side in that respect, this ominous metallic object hurtling through space and sending a clear message of threat and vulnerability. But it is possible to hold both that idea and the one that the first satellite in human history - with all that it has enabled us to do in the subsequent years - is worthy of recognition (and even celebration - celebrating the object and the development, not the culture which created it) in one's head, I think. Again, history is complicated.

The inherent irony here is that the Soviet government at the time were clearly not a pleasant bunch either, treating both their own peoples and those they subjugated with often appalling brutality and callousness. But again, if one were only to look at historical events which were somehow free from the tainted actions of their governments - even at the time - then should we really be playing Spitfire, when the RAF was levelling Dresden? Should we really be playing Go!, when the US government at the time was embroiled in a disastrous and destructive war in Vietnam? Should we play any of the songs celebrating Berlin as a creative and cultural catalyst, when it has also been home to some of the darkest forces in human history? That way madness lies.

Hopefully you can see my point of view here. I don't agree with yours but I would at least ask you to consider mine in good faith, and take from the fact that as a band we raised over £26k for the Ukraine Refugee Emergency Fund (considerably more than we will earn ourselves from this tour) that we are clearly no fans of Putin and his gangsters, and are not in any way celebrating modern Russia by pointing to some of its historical technological feats.

Best wishes

This New Noise - programme notes

Dear Listeners,

I thought it might be useful for those of you listening again (or watching again, once it goes live on Friday 2 September) to our BBC Prom, This New Noise, to make the programme notes accessible. These were printed in the programmes on the night so those in the room would’ve got them, but for everyone else perhaps they’ll provide a bit of helpful context. Here we go...

THIS NEW NOISE

It is both a tremendous honour, and tremendously daunting, to have been asked to write a special piece in recognition of the centenary of the BBC; not only to write it, but to perform it with a group of musicians as talented as the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the guidance of conductor Jules Buckley, performed at the Royal Albert Hall. As a group, we’ve often tackled big subjects before, but there’s something uniquely intimidating about trying to reflect, in musical form, all of the BBC’s history and influence on our own country and the wider world. The question of knowing where to start is often the hardest obstacle to overcome.

In the case of This New Noise, that question also became the answer, in its own way. It sounds obvious, but: start at the beginning. How did the BBC start? Why? What did its creators and original managers, directors and creative thinkers think it was, and what was it going to become? How did its many technological and practical innovations change the course of the country’s history? How did it become, in the words of Charlotte Higgins’ book, whose title we have very appreciatively borrowed, ‘the greatest cultural institution our nation has known’?

To my mind, the biggest answer to the first of those questions (and one which may disappoint any Proms-goers hoping for a kind of ‘greatest hits of the BBC’s TV theme tunes’ compendium this evening) is that most wondrous of inventions: the radio. It’s easy to forget now how truly otherworldly these devices must have seemed to ordinary people. For the cost of a radio set and a modest annual sum, a new machine would enter your world; switch it on, and human voices, music, the miracle of sound would suddenly manifest themselves in your home, transported via the ether. That is how our concert tonight starts, an attempt to remind us all of the apparently simple but world-changing magic trick of transmitting and receiving radio waves, and featuring a recreation of the first transmission made in the name of the BBC, then 2LO in London.

From there we launch into the bombast of the title piece, a musical attempt to recreate the chaos, confusion and opportunity of the early days of broadcasting and featuring some of the musings of first director general Lord Reith and, then, former chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC J. H. Whitley on the purpose and duty of broadcasting as an idea and an ideology.

Reith is a towering figure in the history of the BBC (and therefore this nation), and the third piece (‘An Unusual Man’) seeks to portray the kind of man he was, and the skills which he possessed and brought to bear on the nascent Company (later Corporation). The BBC still has, to this day, an air of ideological, quasi-religious fervour to its mission and purpose, and Reith’s childhood as the son of a Presbyterian minister in Glasgow, coupled with his unique qualities described in the piece, helped shape the BBC more than any other person in its history. He was only there for sixteen years but his influence and thinking have echoed down the corridors of Broadcasting House for decades since.

Reith’s BBC arguably did more to unite the country (and later, the Empire) than any other twentieth century institution. The opening of the transmitter at Daventry in 1927 enabled listeners across the whole nation to listen to the same broadcast simultaneously, for the first time. It also, depending on the atmospheric conditions, drew in listeners from further afield. Seth Lakeman guests on the fourth piece, A Cello Sings in Daventry, featuring the translated poetry of German poet Robert Seitz, who tuned into the first broadcasts from Berlin and found himself moved enough to write these beautiful words.

We are also taken on a guided tour of the venerable ‘temple of the arts and muses’, Broadcasting House, courtesy of the GPO film ‘BBC: The Voice of Britain’. The inner workings of this most innovative and august of buildings, the beating heart of the company even to this day, are revealed via Stuart Legg’s film, as well as a radio documentary from the early 1930s.

The Corporation had significant time and resources with which to attempt to overcome many of the technical and technological hurdles it faced. Expensively imported ribbon microphones were one such hurdle; such was the BBC’s scale, it simply designed, manufactured and subsequently sold its own Type A microphone, as well as countless other innovations. George Bernard Shaw’s amusing observations about the power of the microphone are a nod to the BBC’s influence in this quarter; and, having been forewarned about the dangers of taking a drink and then taking to the airwaves, it felt only right to revisit one of our earliest tracks (Lit Up) and the gloriously, and occasionally profoundly, drunken commentary of Thomas Woodrooffe.

Penultimate piece A Candle Which Will Not Be Put Out seeks to address the unique lines along which the Corporation was instituted, with a heavy emphasis on public service and a disavowal of capitalist influence on the almost sacred rights and duties for which the BBC assumed responsibility. Its mission statement, as reported here by such luminaries as Sir Ian Jacob, Basil Binyon, William Haley and Lord Reith himself, could not be further from James Murdoch’s infamous Edinburgh Television Festival address over 70 years later (‘the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit’, he informed us in 2009).

Attention in the final piece of the evening turns to the events to come. ‘What of the Future? (In Touch with the Infinite)’ are the titles of, respectively, the final chapters in Arthur Burrows’ book ‘The Story of Broadcasting’ and Reith’s ‘Broadcasting over Britain’. It is, in my view, a simple and inarguable fact that if the BBC continues to be whittled away at by governments on either side of the political divide, and even - potentially - expires, there will be many areas which it covers, and functions which it provides, which will simply cease to be. No private organisation, motivated by profit alone, would fund the BBC Proms season; nor Radio 3, nor 4, nor 6Music (without whose patronage our band wouldn’t exist), nor the various BBC orchestras (including the one performing so skilfully tonight), nor any of the multiple commercially unappealing but culturally vital services it provides to us on a daily basis for what - when compared with other, much-lauded delivery systems - amounts to a pittance. It will leave a vacuum, a void; there will be no more ripples in the ether, no more public-minded attempts to improve the education and experience (and cohesion) of this country. No organisation will truly take the BBC’s place; there will simply be an empty stage, and perhaps its influence and importance will only be truly felt if - and it sometimes feels like when - the BBC disappears.

I’d like to dedicate this piece to the memory of my friend Rebecca Teulet, and her family, some of whom I hope will be in attendance this evening. Rebecca worked for the BBC and believed passionately in its mission and purpose, even if, like many, she was occasionally frustrated by the way in which it functioned. I hope our concert is a fitting tribute to her life. She is much missed.

J. Willgoose, Esq.

London, August 2022

Streaming payment rates

There has been a lot of chat around Spotify's ethics (or lack of them) lately, and certainly from the sounds of things their $100m podcast poster-boy Mr Rogan has not exactly been establishing himself as a beacon of scientific rigour. Lots of artists and lots of customers are leaving the platform, for which I applaud them; to be honest, if we could afford to do so, I would seriously consider it too. Sadly, two years into a pandemic with touring income still extremely precarious, we can't. Spotify accounts for over 70% of our streams, although a smaller amount of our streaming income, as we'll see.

Rogan aside, as this article from the Washington Post makes clear, there are lots of other reasons to leave Spotify. Not just the clumsy and insulting posturing of their tech-bro leader, Mr Ek (I'm really pleased he's got enough cash to try buying Arsenal FC, fund weapons technologies and sponsor Barcelona for upwards of $350m), or their minimal and, again, insulting efforts to support musicians during the worst earning crisis of our lifetimes (compare their token 'tip jar' to Bandcamp Fridays, for example); no, the main one for fans of music, I would argue, is that they are the most popular streaming service but the rates they pay to labels (and therefore artists) are the lowest. In some cases, by far.

Tumblr seems useless at inserting tables and so on, so please excuse the formatting of the following information, but it is based on a comparison of rate paid per stream on the most popular, or available, premium streaming services. I have removed all trial periods (hint: artists don't get paid anything), downloads, ad-supported models (hint: artists barely get paid anything), YouTube's disgracefully low 'Audio Fingerprint' rate and just compared the streaming services that music fans might use if they want to feel like they are, even in some small way, supporting the bands they like and listen to.

Spotify is the lowest-paying of these eight services, so I've called its nominal rate multiplier "1". Every other service pays the multiplier above that rate so, for example, a Tidal stream earn us 2.11 times more than Spotify's, and a Qobuz stream 6.57 times more(!).

Streaming service rates, where the lowest = 1

Spotify: 1x Soundcloud: 1.01x Tidal: 2.11x Deezer: 2.35x Apple: 2.45x Amazon Prime / Premium average: 2.60x YouTube Premium: 2.89x Qobuz: 6.57x

Some notes on that data then - it's all based on Q4 2021 receipts of actual streams by our label Test Card Recordings. These figures aren't theoretical, as Spotify likes to keep them - they are real for those three months.

We have currently been opted in (without my agreement, but that's a separate story) to Spotify's Discovery mode, whereby some algorithmically generated plays are deemed 'sponsored' and a lower rate is paid accordingly. This may be lowering the rate that Spotify are paying, but I wanted to try to keep this simple and just look at the basic equation: on a paid-for subscription service, excluding free trials and the like, how many streams did we have and how much did we get paid for them (and therefore what is the per stream rate). So that's what I did.

Spotify's rate to us, as an indie going through a pooled indie distributor, is likely to be both a) lower than that paid to major label acts, as the major labels are part-owners of Spotify (convenient!) as well as controllers of most of the largest and most popular playlists (also convenient!); and b) higher than that paid to individuals or self-distributors. Our distributor can negotiate a higher rate as they represent more catalogue; I don't know how much higher, but we're probably getting paid a bit more than some out there doing it entirely off their own bat.

I am slightly surprised YouTube Premium is as high as it is, but it's offset against YouTube's otherwise borderline criminally low payments for ad-supported and other models. Still, if you're thinking of subscribing to a digital music service, the numbers show that YT Premium is the second best option. For us, that is!

I also don't really understand the difference between Amazon Prime and Premium; both claim to be premium subscription services, and Google tells me Premium is just Prime but in Latin American countries, yet we still have some UK streams falling under that category and the rates of Premium are quite a bit higher than those of Prime. I've just averaged them out anyway in a very non-scientific fashion, so number of streams across both platforms divided by total income across both platforms.

This can all be a bit theoretical and hard to absorb, so if we were to assume a theoretical payment rate of €0.003 per stream (we get paid in € as our distributor is based in the EU) on Spotify (it's not that high, sadly), 100,000 streams would pay as little as €300 on Spotify vs €1,971 on Qobuz. Payments of this kind are often further diluted though; assuming you're on an indie label on a 50:50 profit split, and all advances are recouped and so forth, 100,000 streams would earn a band the following amount:

Spotify: €150 Soundcloud: €151.50 Tidal: €316.50 Deezer: €352.50 Apple: €367.50 Amazon Prime / Premium average: €390 YouTube Premium: €433.50 Qobuz: €985.50

So on these theoretical rates, even between, say, Tidal and Spotify, that is clearly a massive difference. For an average 4-piece band in the above scenario, each member (assuming an equal split) could expect to take home €37.50 from 100,000 plays on Spotify, €91.88 from Apple Music and €246.38 on Qobuz. That's assuming they don't have a management % to pay up front (typically 20%), too. Either way, some of those numbers are very different to some of the others. And again, all of them are higher than in the real world; I am trying to keep a modicum of discretion by not divulging our actual income, which is lower than this.

For a major label act on a more typical (but still probably unrealistic) split of 20% of profits, and assuming that their advance is recouped (even more unrealistic!), the artist split would be as follows per 100,000 streams:

Spotify: €60 Soundcloud: €60.60 Tidal: €126.60 Deezer: €141.00 Apple: €147.00 Amazon Prime / Premium average: €156.00 YouTube Premium: €173.26 Qobuz: €394.04 A 4-piece band split on that rate (sans management) would leave each member with €15 on Spotify's rates, €36.77 on Apple's and €98.51 on Qobuz's.

I should add here that I like streaming. We earn ok from it and I can see how, if you had a large back catalogue and a decent listenership, you could do quite well out of it. I use it myself, and up until now have been a Spotify subscriber; I am going to leave the service, though. But I have nothing against streaming intrinsically and I love its convenience and portability (nothing beats sitting down with an actual record or CD though, especially for a more concentrated listening experience with liner notes and credits etc). I just don't think Spotify should be able to get away with their profligate spending in some departments while continuing to pay insultingly low rates to artists. Their chief competitors all pay at least double what Spotify pays. I feel that if more fans and listeners start to wake up to the fact that the alternatives are readily available and a better choice in terms of supporting musicians, two things will happen: 1) musicians will find it easier to make a living - it still won't be easy, but it'll be easier than in the current scenario; and 2) Spotify will see their customer base dwindling and will be forced to address their low rates of payment. Daniel Ek might have to do a bit less swanning around being mates with Thierry Henry, but we all make sacrifices in life.

Maybe I'm naive, but we all have a very small power here in terms of where we spend our money. My family's own subscription will end at the end of this month.

The excitement of possibility

Releasing new music, especially after a relatively lengthy period away (to say nothing of the relentless background noise of living through a pandemic), is an exciting if somewhat nerve-wracking time. I’ve not always been the best at focusing on the exciting part, my brain seeming to have a natural tendency instead to latch on to the more worrisome or vexatious aspects (things like other people’s opinions, you know), so here’s an attempt to do things differently for once.

In truth it’s extremely exciting, and hopefully not just for us, to be mere days away from putting new music out into the world. At this stage, on both sides of the fan / musician equation, it’s the possibility which is most exciting. For us, the music could meet with any kind of reception, and these songs could take us everywhere and nowhere. For waiting fans, who don’t even know what the record is about yet, almost everything is possible. (This one might even be good!)

I think given the year we’ve just been through it’s worth focusing on that feeling for a while. For those of us who live in cities, who have come to depend on the hum and thrum of a thriving metropolis, with all its collisions of noise, light, ideas and people, the last year has seen a particular kind of melancholy descend on the places in which we live. When I climb to the top of my local hill and look out upon the City, or the Shard, or St Paul’s Cathedral, where previously I used to derive a tremendous sense of energy and excitement at being part of all this mess and madness, I have instead only felt sadness. The city has been unable to perform its function as an incubator of all of that energy, creativity and excitement, and looking out over buildings you know to be ghostly, empty shadows of their normal selves has been particularly sobering.

I’ve been trying to read more widely since the pandemic began, which hasn’t always been easy since the arrival of our daughter in January 2020, but one of the books I managed to make it at least two thirds of the way through was Carlo Rovelli’s ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’. I’ve always reflexively shied away from trying to grasp even the basics of subjects like quantum mechanics, but I was struck by the sheer absurdity of events at the atomic scale (to say nothing of those below that). To understand that, at any given moment, we cannot know where an electron is unless or until it collides with another particle - that it otherwise exists in a ‘cloud of probability’, and that its reality is defined by coming into contact with other bodies - struck me as a cruel reflection of life at the more macro level since March 2020. In cities we are constantly barrelling around, literally and metaphorically bumping into people and all the flotsam and jetsam that they drag in their wake, seeing and feeling our selves reflected, defined - possibly even refracted - by our surroundings. Confine us to a more solitary existence without any of that day-to-day rambunctiousness and it has felt easy to feel adrift, ill-defined, lost.

Above all it has been the removal of much of the possible from my everyday life that has been hardest to adjust to. In previous years I frequently wondered at how I could love living in London so much yet take so little advantage of all it has to offer; I must have only scratched at the surface of all the museums, places, events, culture, ideas, people, the sheer weight of fascinating history which the city offers to all who care to investigate it. But I think what I’ve come to realise is that it’s not actually being here and doing those things that makes the city such an exciting place to be - it’s the possibility of all of those things being within reach, all of those potential collisions on a daily basis, too many to comprehend let alone undertake, which gives the modern city its vibrancy and edge. As August Endell wrote, ‘Despite all the ugly buildings, despite the noise, despite every fault that one can find in it, the big city is, for him who has eyes, a miracle of beauty and poetry.’

Life is the gradual narrowing of possibilities, until the only certainty that awaits all of us remains. Until then, and with great hope as the places which I love start shaking themselves down and preparing for life again, it’s worth embracing what Laurie Lee called ‘the excitement of doubt’; in keeping with my new positive outlook on life (ha), I prefer to think of it as the excitement of possibility.

Yours ponderously,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

PS - for those craving something less pretentious and waffly - new music on Tuesday. As Yuri would have it: Поехали!

The record is finished... what now?

We finished our fourth album last week, so I thought it might be interesting (spoiler alert: it probably isn’t) to do a quick post about what happens once a record is ‘finished’ these days, and why it can seem to take so long between an album being completed and actually being released.

Before I stumbled upon a career in making music, my attitude would’ve been similar to that of many fans, I imagine - why not just put the record out as soon as possible? It’s done, you spent (presumably) ages on it, surely you just want people to hear it and shower you with praise and damning reviews? After all, that’s what Radiohead and Beyoncé seem to do, and they don’t mind if the vinyl follows several months later.

Well, Radiohead are Radiohead and Beyoncé is Beyoncé, and both of those artists (and only a handful more) releasing records is Big News in and of itself. Smaller bands and artists need to use their new record as something to build around, to try and fight desperately for attention in a very competitive industry, to route tours around, even simply to remind people that you still exist (often, admittedly, to their distress). Otherwise it’s all too easy to put something out only to see it burn out very quickly, for it to fall to the bottom of people’s ‘recently played’ streaming algorithms and swiftly fall out of the public consciousness pretty much altogether.

That's why it’s better for 99% of bands and artists to wait until everything is ready and to try to go for one big, focused ‘bang’ (often still a whimper, admittedly), rather than trying to hit the front page of Pitchfork with a near-instantaneous release. And the main thing we’re all waiting for these days, especially with its continued resurgence and importance to artists, labels and fans, is vinyl.

Vinyl lead times pre-pandemic were already a bit ridiculously long because a large number of the pressing plants from back in the day went under or severely reduced their capacity, so we’ve been left with a relative handful of potential suppliers and an awful lot of demand from all corners of the music industry. I think The Race For Space (released Feb 2015) was mastered at the end of October 2014, so made it out there in just over 3-and-a-bit months, and that was with two test pressings after the first failed. By the time Every Valley rolled around (released July 2017) we were already at four-months-and-counting, and don’t even get me started on the White Star Liner EP (tail end of 2018, and the vinyl was late because of test pressing issues).

Anyway, you get the picture, and that’s all pre-COVID, which obviously has done precious little to improve any aspect of the economy, besides enhancing Jeff Bezos’ already undignified / obscene wealth. We were initially quoted 7 months for this album but have managed to get it down a bit from there - still, you’ll no doubt have noticed a lot of delayed releases recently and I am taking nothing for granted, on any level, with this record.

We might seem like a modestly successful band but we are also still very much a small team of people. The sheer amount of work it is to get everything ready, besides ‘just’ the music itself, necessitates a bit of a delay between completion and release. Even now, the artwork, liner notes, credits, administrative aspects (PPL IDs and so on) are queueing up for attention; that’s to say nothing of band photos, press releases, updated bios, pitches for various media features (often with ridiculously long lead times of their own), music videos, remixes, instrumentals... in short, a lot.

Then for a band like us there’s the whole tricky chicanery of designing, building, programming and rehearsing a quite fiendishly complicated live set, all while navigating the risks and uncertainties of doing so during what we hope is the tail-end of a pandemic. It normally takes me about 2-3 months to get an album ready to play live, and that’s just the music side of it - then I need to edit videos to run concurrently, give various assets to Mr B so that he can have more to play with than just an on-rails video, then all get together in a room to see what works (hint: not much) and what needs more work (hint: nearly everything). Mr B also needs a lot of time - justly so - to put together his fiendish set creations as well as creating a lot of original video output himself. Popping up on the radio to do a quick session somewhat belies the amount of work it takes to get new material ready for that stage (should it arrive - we certainly don’t assume it will).

But the main thing, still, is to try to garner as much attention, wake as many people as possible up to the fact that yes, you still exist and yes, you’re still flogging the dead horse that is your band and creative output in a perhaps vain attempt to try to prolong an unlikely career and yes, you can order the Amazing New Record soon in at least 5 different colours to ensure its safe arrival in your homes at the very second of its official release. Hello! We’re still here! Hello! We have a new record! Er.. anyone?

Anyway, that’s just a few items from the very long list of things preoccupying me and the other denizens of PSB Towers between now and release. Hopefully everything will run smoothly, the record will come out when we say it will come out and we can even entertain modest hopes of another reasonably-well-charting album. On that note, a brief aside - chart positions are still incredibly important, if only within the record industry itself. A high chart position makes a lot of people sit up and take notice - bookers, agents, festival promoters and so on - which is another reason why it’s important for those of us who aren’t in Mr Yorke’s merry gang to try to get everything out all at once (in its right place, if you will) rather than staggering digital / vinyl release dates.

Hopefully you found this mildly diverting. It’s mostly served as a nudge in the ribs for me to remind me how much I still need to get on with, so without further ado, off I will go, and on with I will get.

Yours pre-releasedly,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

(PS I’d like to make it clear I love Radiohead, and none of this is even a mild dig at them. They are one of the most wonderful musical outfits ever, and they also have the rare privilege of being able to do what they want, when they want to, which really must be lovely.)

PSB crew & friends fundraiser

Dear Listeners,

I hope you are all well and looking after each other, especially those who need the most help. These are very worrying times but all we can try to do is offer comfort and kindness to each other.

As a band, we are in the very fortunate position of being ok financially for the next few months - most bands larger than us are probably in the same boat. One group of people who aren’t as fortunate, though, are touring crew members and musicians; they don’t have the benefit of PRS and PPL payments, streaming income, record sales income, advances against future records and so on.

Even though we had no gigs announced for this year we’d like to do our best to help those we work most regularly with, a group of around 10 to 15 people. All of the below items are being sold by me personally and any funds raised will be placed into an emergency PSB crew and musician fund, to enable anyone who needs help to take advantage of any available money. In the absence of any help from the government (as at lunchtime on March 17, anyway) it seems the least we could do. One of our most regular crew members has lost 14 weeks of work, already; clearly that is going to have a devastating impact, which is why we are doing what we can to help. (We have also made various behind-the-scenes efforts, too, to the extent to which we are able to afford to.)

In the event that none of our crew or session players needs assistance, we will find a suitable charity to donate this money to. Either way it will all end up going to a good cause, and none of it is for the band.

Obviously an unprecedented number of people are going to struggle financially over the coming months - to those with uncertain short-term financial futures who, in normal circumstances, would dearly love some of these items, we can only apologise. It’s not a competition - one group of struggling people isn’t more important than another, but these are people with whom we regularly work and communicate and who are part of our broader family, and we feel obliged to try to help them.

To try to accommodate those without the financial resources to buy these items off the bat, we’re running a raffle for one of the copies of EP One. See below for more details.

HOW THIS WILL WORK

If you’re interested in any item, please email [email protected], clearly stating which item(s) you’d like to buy. I am doing all of this manually so there is a chance the item will be gone by the time you email - apologies if so. I will try to respond as quickly as possible.

Some of the prices may seem high, but they are for the most part very rare PSB items and they are also the last that I have of most of them, so I am trying to get the most out of what I have in order to help others.

The sealed auction will run as an email auction until Sunday, March 22. I will hopefully be able to post the record on Monday, March 23. To place a bid, please email [email protected], clearly stating that it’s for the sealed auction and the amount you’re offering.

The raffle will run until Sunday, March 22 too. Tickets are virtual and are £5 each, to enable those with less disposable income to bid on an extremely rare item (after this fundraiser I will only have 2 left, from an original 250, and they won’t be re-pressed). You can buy more than one ticket but please do so in multiples of £5. If you are interested in taking part, please email [email protected] and clearly state the number of tickets you’d like to buy. You will be emailed further instructions.

Again, I am doing all of this myself, so please do bear with me if demand is higher than I anticipate.

ITEMS FOR SALE

First off - a word about test pressings! They are exactly what they sound like they are, ie pressings sent from the vinyl plant to us for approval or, indeed, rejection. They are often slightly poorer quality than the final version, for various boring reasons, and in some cases some of these have actually been rejected by us for being poor quality. But the value in these items doesn’t lie in their fidelity, rather their scarcity, so hopefully you won’t be expecting a pristine listen, rather an extremely rare edition of a cherished record.

Ok, here we go:

2 x copies of EP One

This is the first PSB vinyl release ever, pressed on 10″ in only 250 copies. After this fundraiser I have 2 more, forever, so they are extremely rare. They regularly go for upwards of £150 on eBay.

One will run as a sealed auction - please send your name and your highest bid to [email protected]. The auction will close on Sunday at 7pm GMT.

The other, to allow those with less disposable income to take part, will be a virtual raffle. Tickets £5 each. You can buy more than one ticket but please do so in multiples of £5. If you are interested in taking part, please email [email protected] and clearly state the number of tickets you’d like to buy. You will be emailed further instructions.

NB - both items have ever-so-slight damage to the covers so they are not pristine! They’ve been in a cardboard box that was taken to numerous gigs and festivals in 2010 and 2011 with me desperately trying to flog them to uninterested parties, before The War Room came out and they started selling online!

TEST PRESSINGS

The following are rare test pressings of various albums, EPs and so on. There are a very limited number of copies available and it’s first come, first served. Please also read the disclaimer on audio quality above. I will try to update this list as they sell, but please don’t be disappointed if you email me and they’re already sold.

Dispatch will probably happen sometime next week (March 23 onwards) provided the postal service is still working; if it isn’t, I will post them as soon as is feasible.

THE RACE FOR SPACE - PLASTIC INNER SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £100 each + p&p

THE RACE FOR SPACE - REPRESS, PROPER SLEEVE 3 of 4 SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £100 each + p&p We had to get TRFS re-pressed from a different master in 2018 so had new test pressings. I have 4 of these newer versions, 3 of which have proper, sealed sleeves.

EVERY VALLEY SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £100 + p&p

INFORM - EDUCATE - ENTERTAIN SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £100 each + p&p

WHITE STAR LINER SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT! £75 each + p&p To buy, email [email protected] - also let me know if you’d like it signed. NB - this test pressing was rejected so it is not great quality, but it is extremely rare!

THE WAR ROOM SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £75 + p&p

PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS NEED COAL (RSD 2018 REMIX RELEASE) - SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £75 each + p&p

THE RACE FOR SPACE - REMIXES SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £75 each + p&p

LIMITED EDITION VINYL

These are all, with the exception of the TRFS remix release, limited editions that have sold out (I think!). I am happy to sign any of them.

SIGNAL 30 RSD 2013 7″ SOLD OUT!

Extremely rare. Orange vinyl, backed with New Dimensions in Sound. SOLD OUT! £100 + p&p

ELFSTEDENTOCHT PARTS 1 & 2 RSD 2014 7″ SOLD OUT!

Very rare. SOLD OUT! £80 each + p&p

THE OTHER SIDE PICTURE DISC - RSD 2016 7″ SOLD OUT!

NB because this is a picture disc, the audio quality isn’t great - that’s the nature of the medium. It looks amazing though! Backed with the Datassette remix. SOLD OUT! £50 + p&p

GO! 7″ SOLD OUT!

Backed with the Errors remix. SOLD OUT! £50 each + p&p

THEME FROM PSB 7″ SOLD OUT!

SOLD OUT! £50 + p&p

PROMO & EARLY CDs

ROYGBIV (FIRST OFFICIAL SINGLE) SOLD OUT!

Backed with a different version of Lit Up, not the album version. Rare. SOLD OUT! £50 each + p&p

THE WAR ROOM (ORIGINAL RELEASE) SOLD OUT!

From back before we had a distributor so I was still selling and posting these myself - relatively rare although a few hundred were made up. In a plastic CD wallet. SOLD OUT! £50 each + p&p

ORIGINAL / RARE STOCK OF PSB VINYL

EVERY VALLEY (CLEAR INDIES VERSION) SOLD OUT!

Still sealed, limited numbers were pressed up and these are 2 of the last 3 I have. SOLD OUT! £50 each + p&p

THE RACE FOR SPACE - REMIXES SOLD OUT!

On orange vinyl. One has slight damage to the shrinkwrap. Price is based on being expected to be asked to sign them! SOLD OUT! £25 each + p&p To buy, email [email protected] - also let me know if you’d like it signed.

POSTERS

GREEN MAN 2018 TRIPTYCH SCREENPRINT SOLD!

NB - this has different text to the image above - instead of ‘Informing...’ it has Green Man Festival and the date of the show (I can’t find the original image). It was a limited edition run. SOLD! £50 + p&p

THE RACE FOR SPACE DOUBLE SIDED A2 POSTERS SOLD OUT!

No image, sorry, but we have a handful of these left. They’re on decent, thick paper, A2 size, one side has the USA cover and one side the Soviet cover. Happy to sign as required. SOLD OUT! £30 each + p&p To buy, email [email protected].

That’s it for now - thanks a lot for any support you can help us extend to our folks.

Yours hygienically,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

Boring, but perhaps it will help someone

I have been struggling a bit recently with my mental health, as a lot of people do. (My mum and dad will probably read this - don’t worry, I’m fine.) I was speaking to someone recently and they suggested I needed to work on my self-esteem, which they thought would lift my overall mood. As an aside, it might seem strange to those who have paid to come to shows to watch us that anyone on stage might have low self-esteem, but then people are strange, aren’t they?

I had read about parkrun’s recent anniversary (15 years of the free, global gathering of walkers, joggers and runners for a 5km event) and thought - well, that sounds nice, and in a perfect world I’d like to have a go, but it poses many problems for me. Number one is that I hate running. I have always found it to be extraordinarily boring, and found myself to be extraordinarily bad at it. I look and feel stupid when I run and therefore try not to do it in public. Furthermore, I have always very strongly been of the opinion that not only is running itself boring, but people who run are boring, and even worse than that are the people who talk about running. It’s just boring. Stop it.

However, I really needed to change something so, after a false start last week when I bottled out of going, this week I made myself do it. I really didn’t want to, and was worried everyone else would hare off leaving me trudging along on my own and feeling even worse. On turning up, there was a broad mix of people - I tried to avoid the ones proudly wearing marathon t-shirts and doing ostentatious stretching (note: in my opinion any stretching is ostentatious) and look for others who, like me, had cobbled together various bits of ill-fitting kit and, thankfully, there were quite a few of them.

When the event started to change for me was when the head local volunteer (parkrun events are run by volunteers and free to attend) started to speak. There was a ‘welcome’ round of applause for any new joiners (I belatedly put my hand up) and separate rounds of applause for those who’d reached 25, 50 or 100 parkrun milestones. I thought - well, this is nice. And then they mentioned the Halloween run next week and invited people to dress up and I thought - yes, this is nice.

As a generally anxious person I was concerned about a few things - mostly, what on earth do I do with this barcode (answer: you just hand it in at the end along with the token you’re given when you finish) and what happens if I’m at the back and get lost? Thankfully the route was fully and carefully explained (and signed along the way, along with volunteers clapping as you walk, jog or run past - I’ve never been clapped in my life for any form of running, and I have to say it was a welcome novelty) and, when we set off, I found to my great relief that there were plenty of people like me who were fairly intent on going as slowly as possible.

Anyway - long story short, I did it, even though I didn’t want to, even though I worried about looking like an idiot, being embarrassed, hate running and hearing about running and nearly all forms of exercise. And I know this is hardly a novel revelation, but despite all of that, I felt really good afterwards, like I’d actually achieved something. It helped a lot that the atmosphere was so friendly and non-competitive (and non-judgmental, unlike me). But basically all of this is really to say that I suspect there are lots of people like me out there, and this is something that I think really helped my mood and will hopefully continue to as I am now intent on going back. I promise not to become (even more) boring by banging on about it, though.

So if you are struggling, feeling low, maybe just about getting by - from one sufferer to another - please give it a go. I think it will make you feel better.

Thanks and bye,

J.W.

Justice For Orgreave

Earlier today, my band, Public Service Broadcasting, revealed details of a t-shirt that we’re releasing in aid of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC). All profits from the sale of the shirt, which was generously designed for free by our talented and long-standing collaborator Jamwah, will go to the OTJC. I thought it would be a good idea to explain a bit more about the reason for the shirt, our support for the cause and our involvement in the campaign.

When we wrote, recorded and released Every Valley in July 2017 we were mostly focused on the geographical area that the album centred on, namely South Wales, and its proud history of coal mining. We have an ongoing commitment to donate a small share of the profits to the South Wales Miners’ Benevolent Fund, administered by the NUM South Wales, who do a lot of great work supporting ex-miners and, increasingly, their families and dependants. We also made donations to the Ebbw Vale Institute, where the album was recorded, to try to support younger bands finding their feet in the Valleys. The album was as much about community as commodity, and although we didn’t shout about these efforts, they seemed an appropriate reflection of the support and encouragement we received from a wonderfully generous local population. Although Orgreave was in our minds as one of the most violent clashes in police-industrial relations history, it seemed our focus was best kept on the people we had directly worked with in the making of the album.

It was only when we embarked, several months later, on our first full UK tour in support of the album and played our show in Leeds that I started to think more seriously about explicitly mentioning Orgreave. Playing in Yorkshire, it seemed appropriate to mention the ongoing campaign and the links between the South Yorkshire Police Force’s tactics at Hillsborough in 1989 and Orgreave in 1984 - tactics which, as David Conn’s excellent journalism has revealed, seem rooted in the police violence of the earlier event. I said a few words on stage prior to playing All Out, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t that, as I started to feel that the microphone in front of me on stage - a microphone that gives me, and PSB, a voice, one that has been hard won over many years - represented not just an opportunity but a responsibility. The rich and powerful have bought or inherited their microphones, and use them to advance their own interests. We have earned ours, and we should certainly feel free to use it to advance less self-interested causes - justice, injustice, police corruption, government complicity and the like. (For the record, if you’re one of the tiresome brigade of people tempted to tell me and other artists to ‘stick to the music’, I can make it very clear that I have no intention of doing so - especially when the subject matter of the music is so closely linked to the cause we are championing.)

I mentioned Orgreave every other night of that tour, from memory, and each time the audience gave the mention a warm reception. As we started to wind down our touring towards the end of the year, though, something didn’t quite sit right with me - if I was happy to grandstand about the campaign on stage, I really ought to make our support of the cause more explicit and try to use our position to make some concrete difference to it.

For those not well-versed in the history of Orgreave, the aforementioned article by David Conn makes clear, in a thorough and compelling manner far beyond my capabilities, the extent of the police violence, cover-up, obstruction of justice and perjury, a pattern of behaviour which tormented, for so many years, the miners who were assaulted, lied about and wrongly prosecuted. As Conn’s article makes clear, police falsified their own statements, those of the alleged perpetrators (perpetrators, allegedly, of ‘riot’, a charge which would have carried a life sentence) and fed false accounts to the media - just as the same force would do 5 years later at Hillsborough. Instead of being held to account by the government of the time, the South Yorkshire Chief Constable was among a group of officers invited into Downing Street for a celebratory drinks reception at the end of the miners’ strike to recognise their ‘very considerable contribution to resisting mob rule during the strike.’

Conn details Theresa May’s laudable efforts as Home Secretary in advocating for a full inquiry into the tragedy of 1989, quoting her as saying: ‘We must never underestimate how the poison of decades-old misdeeds seeps down through the years and is just as toxic today as it was then. That’s why difficult truths, however unpalatable they may be, must be confronted head-on.’ Her then-chief advisor, Nick Timothy, echoed her sentiments in an article for Conservative Home: ‘Since 2010 the government has shown it understands that justice must be done no matter how long it takes, and that to get things right in future, we have to understand what has gone wrong in the past.’

Sadly what was good enough for May as Home Secretary does not seem to have carried into her tenure as Prime Minister. Her own Home Secretary, Amber Rudd - running scared of a rightwing press who are still extremely protective of the ‘victory’ that Orgreave represented at the time, and still represents - ruled that there would be no inquiry. Most scandalously, and memorably, she revealed that one of the main reasons was that ‘ultimately, there were no deaths’. Lives were ruined by a year-long malicious prosecution, severe injuries were sustained, the police perjured themselves and falsified statements, but ‘there were no deaths’.

Policing in the UK is by consent. As the government’s own definition states, that means that ‘the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.’ They are not our masters; we are theirs, and they serve at our request and by our consent. To suggest that police wrongdoings should only be investigated if they have actually managed to kill a member of the populace is not only setting an appallingly low standard for justice, it also runs contrary to the government’s own definition of what policing is, and should be.

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign is an explicitly non-party political entity who, in their own words, are ‘determined to get justice for miners who were victims of police lies and cover ups at Orgreave in June 1984.’ Our effort to support them - a fundraising t-shirt - may well just be a small gesture, but it is the right thing to do, and any gesture is better than none. We are happy to use our microphone on their behalf.

If you would like to help, you can write to the Home Secretary here: [email protected]. She is on Twitter as @AmberRudd_MP, and the Home Office can be reached on 020 7035 8817. As per the OTJC’s advice, always use the hashtag #orgreavejustice, and always be courteous and polite in your communications. If we all keep the pressure up, and keep demanding that Theresa May’s government confronts head-on - in her own words - ‘unpalatable truths’ and ‘decades-old misdeeds’, we may one day be able to deliver justice for Orgreave.

Thanks for reading.

Further reading..

I’ve had a few requests via social media / email to recommend some books or documentaries that might help shed a bit more background light on the recent album, so I thought I’d compile here some of the things I most enjoyed reading, watching or listening to, in case you’re interested in following up on any of the materials or subjects the album deals with. This is in random order, too - please don’t ascribe any value judgements to the way my brain remembers things.

(You’ll also have to forgive me for linking to Amazon occasionally - I don’t recommend buying from there, but it does sometimes seem the easiest way to get hold of some of these things.)

It might be wisest to cover the broadest bases first though, and the most accessible way in is probably through film and documentary. At the most populist end of things, the film Pride is fantastic - it could easily have been formulaic and poorly scripted, but it really had a great heart to it and it’s a fantastic story. (As a side note, Hywel Francis, whom I had the fortune to meet and speak to while I was at the South Wales Miners’ Library, told me how interesting it was that the other common link - besides persecution - between the miners and the LGBT community was a high level of Communist Party membership, which was left out of the film for, one presumes, commercial reasons.) And if you’ve already seen Pride, have a look at Dancing In Dulais, the film which helped inspire it.

Although it was set in the north-east and for some people might seem a little hackneyed, I certainly wouldn’t rule out Billy Elliott as an easy way in; similarly, Brassed Off is a great film.

A film with more direct links to the Valleys is Paul Robeson’s Proud Valley. Robeson is - to put it mildly - a fascinating character and his story and part in the Welsh mining community is an extremely moving one and shows, I think, how artists and activists from all eras and backgrounds have been moved by the particular communities and geography that make up the Welsh Valleys.

On the documentary front I also used large portions of the BFI’s fantastic Portrait Of A Miner collection. As ever with BFI releases, it contains a wide range of interesting material and a thorough and detailed booklet helps give context and extra background.

Another important film, which I accessed through the South Wales Miners’ Library, is Smiling And Splendid Women. We used some clips from this for All Out, and it also forms the basis of the live video for They Gave Me A Lamp.

At the more obscure and hard-to-find end is a documentary kindly loaned to me by Glyn at the Ebbw Vale Institute, The Welsh Miner. We were lucky enough to be able to license some clips from this film for use on All Out, Go To The Road, Mother Of The Village and more on the album. Similarly, the British Transport Film Every Valley, clips from which bookend the start and finish of the album, is a fascinating snapshot of Valleys life, although I can’t seem to find an online version (we acquired ours through the BFI).

I also greatly enjoyed Still The Enemy Within - an excellent documentary looking back on the miners’ strike, and featuring Ron Stoate, who I subsequently interviewed and whose voice appears on Mother Of The Village - and while I can’t say I enjoyed it as such, as the subject matter is too harrowing for words, I thought the BBC’s The Green Hollow was an extremely moving and well-made reflection on the tragedy at Aberfan. It doesn’t seem available on the BBC at the moment, though, yet it was when I checked a few days ago. Odd. (As a side note, Michael Sheen’s excellent documentary on Port Talbot’s steel industry appears to have suffered the same fate, but perhaps more resourceful (ahem) searchers may be able to find both films online.)

Anyway, that’s a few of the many films and documentaries I watched - on the written front, I can recommend the following (amongst many others, which I’m sure I’ll forget!):

Hywel Francis’ excellent History On Our Side (which now contains a new chapter, following the film Pride, and which postdates the edition I own) is an excellent, personal history of the times; on a more small-scale publishing level, Deborah Price’s How Black Were Our Valleys is a really illuminating read and Deborah helped put me in touch with some ex-miners and the NUM in South Wales. Ron Stoate again features in her book. The title is obviously a play on How Green Was My Valley, which I had naively assumed to be a bit clichéd and trite just based on various jokes made down the ages, but I found the book to be very moving and apt for the project I was working on (not least because it appears it was written by an Englishman after extensive conversation with local miners, although at least I made that clear!).

Along similar lines but in verse form, Idris Davies’ poetry - and Gwalia Deserta in particular - is incredible. It’s rich, striking and very evocative of Eliot (who nurtured Davies as a protegé). We were kindly allowed permission to use the poem for the basis of our collaboration with James Dean Bradfield, Turn No More. I’ve been struck by a few people mentioning online that the album doesn’t seem to deal with the environmental issues caused by coal - presumably they either skipped that song or failed to listen to the lyrics particularly closely. It is a searing indictment of a landscape and a people exploited by outsiders for their personal gain, and a defiant shout for those who live in the shadows of the ‘ransacked’ hillsides and static pitwheels.

Perhaps the most comprehensive account of the South Wales miners is that put together by Dr Ben Curtis, in his exhaustively researched (and still very readable, despite its academic origins) history, The South Wales Miners: 1964-85. Ben is thanked on the album sleeve for his assistance in the research of the album and, in particular, for introducing me to the team at the South Wales Miners’ Library and their oral history collection (interviews mostly recorded by Hywel Francis - it’s like a big virtuous circle), but I’d like to thank him again for his particularly kind words on the release of the album. Coming from an authority on the subject like him, it’s especially gratifying and humbling.

It was a privilege to be granted permission to use the title of Phyllis Jones’ excellent memoir, They Gave Me A Lamp, as one of our own songs - thanks once again to Patricia Mee for allowing us to do so. The book is a fine read and a reminder that it wasn’t just men working a dangerous and dirty job underground.

I also read more widely, further afield; at one time I’d toyed with the idea of including Gresford, or The Miners’ Hymn, in some form on the album, but I moved away from that idea as I thought it really wasn’t our place to use it, the piece being so closely associated with miners and their ability to face up to, and overcome, tragedy. The Pitmen’s Requiem is an excellent account of the writing of this incredible piece of music - at the very least I urge you to listen to it.

I also read Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within - Mr Milne is certainly no stranger to controversy, and I don’t share some of his political ideas, but the book was nevertheless an interesting account of the lengths the government went to at the time to use (some might say subvert) the machinery of the state to attempt to crush the miners and their cause.

In terms of artwork, I was drawn to the abstract landscapes of Hannah Benkwitz, whose piece ‘Viaduct’ we used as the album cover. I found her artwork by browsing through a cupboard of books at the South Wales Mining Museum in the Afan Valley - her work was amongst a list of publicly-owned and displayed oil paintings. I love her use of colour and texture. The colours reminded me of some of Sir Kyffin Williams’ work, which I also loved. A more frenzied variation on the same theme is that presented by Peter Prendergast, whose incredible, vivid, often violent landscapes are very striking indeed. I also enjoyed Valerie Ganz’s (less abstract) works and toyed with using something more literal for the album, but I found Hannah Benkwitz’s abstraction really suited the way I’d tried to put the album together.

That’s just a brief list of some of the research and materials that went in to the making of the album - there were many others, some of which may be egregious omissions for which I apologise in advance. Whether or not you want to delve into some of this background reading / watching / other, I hope you’re enjoying the album and the story we tried to tell.

Yours warmly,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

EDIT - Arghgh. I forgot the single most important piece of writing, for me, related to the album: Down the Mine by George Orwell. [NB this version is incorrectly transcribed and riddled with errors - please do read the proper version from The Road To Wigan Pier if you can.] I’m more than aware that putting yourself up alongside Orwell is just asking to be shot down, but it says so many of the things that I was hoping to say with Every Valley - the debt that we all, in our country, owe the miners for the tough and terrifying job which they carried out. That makes what was to come - the false promises, the betrayal, the persecution, the abandonment, the neglect, living in the ruins of previous (relative) prosperity - so much the worse.

Every Valley

Our third album, Every Valley, is a story of industrial decline. It’s centred around coal mining in the UK, and in south Wales in particular, but it’s a story which has been repeated the (western) world over and which has particularly striking resonances given the current political climate.

The album starts in a golden age, when miners were the ‘kings of the underworld’, as a certain Mr Burton puts it; it takes in life in the pit itself, moves through the recruitment drive of the early- and mid-1970s, stops briefly to think about mechanisation, automation and the march of ‘progress’, before beginning a downward spiral from the closures of the mid- to late-1970s into the all out conflict of the miners’ strike and its sad, lingering aftermath. It’s a subject that first came to mind as I was finishing our previous album, The Race For Space, and the more I thought about it, the more I interested I became.

I have no personal ties to mining, be it coal or otherwise, and I have no family links to the area, but something about the story drew me in. This is an album about community as much as it is about mining; it’s the story of an entire region centred around one industry, and what happens when that industry dies. Perhaps something about the romanticism of the valleys and their geography drew me to south Wales in particular, perhaps it was their solidity during the strike of 1984-5 - or, far more prosaically, perhaps it was a response to the furious (mostly Cardiff-based) response to our 2015 ‘UK tour’ which featured not a single Welsh date. You can’t always explain these things, as I’ve learned. What’s certain in my mind is that this album isn’t just about mining, and isn’t just about Wales. It’s a story reflected in abandoned and neglected communities across the western world, and one which has led to the resurgence of a particularly malignant, cynical and calculating brand of politics.

We recorded Every Valley in Ebbw Vale, historically a steelworkers’ town but one surrounded by coal mines, in the former lecture hall of their former workers’ institute. It seemed important to record in the valleys, as I wanted this album to feel connected to the area it was written about in ways our previous albums hadn’t been. I wanted the album to have a rich, earthy, full sound, and to carry some of the lilt and lyricism of the language itself, something embodied by its title, taken from a 1950s transport film. It hints at peaks and troughs, at the strength and solidity of the community, and the geographical reality of the industry.

Shaping this album’s narrative was something that saw us yet again plundering the BFI’s back catalogue, as well as working with new archives and resources and even, in a few cases, conducting our own interviews with ex-miners and their families. We also worked with a far wider cast of collaborators and musicians than ever before, leading to it being by far our most ambitious (and definitely the most difficult) recording to date.

For me it’s an album about pride, anger, strength and, ultimately, loss, and it raises far more questions than we could ever hope to answer. I think Every Valley is the best thing we’ve done by some distance, but ultimately that’s not for me to say; I hope our listeners enjoy it, and we’re really looking forward to sharing it with them.

Clocking off for Christmas

I’m about to hang up my boots (so to speak) for Christmas, but before I head off into the land of mince pies and mid-afternoon sozzlement I just wanted to update some of you on our fundraiser from November.

We’re still waiting - for a number of VAT-based reasons far too boring to delve into - for a final total on the amount raised, but we believe it is definitely north of £15,000 and probably closer to, or even more than, £20,000.

We’re really happy to have helped Bowel Cancer UK and one of the most touching things on the night, besides the personal importance of the whole thing, was seeing how genuinely chuffed the charity were. They really were over the moon (thematic pun only slightly intended), and for that we’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who donated online, came along on the night or more generally helped to make it a great evening.

I’ve known for a long while now that our fans are a good bunch. I’ve lost count of the number of support bands I’ve reassured by telling them that our crowds are warm, open, attentive and welcoming, and it’s not just a platitude I tell them to settle any nerves - it’s genuinely true. We’ve done a lot of support gigs ourselves and I can tell you, if you’re one of the people who makes up our crowds, that you really are a nice bunch.

I told the folks from Bowel Cancer UK that on the night too, and before long the volunteers selling raffle tickets or collecting donations were gleefully telling me: ‘Your fans are so lovely!’ It really made me proud - obviously we put a great deal of thought and love into what we do as musicians and it’s so nice not just to have found a crowd as a result, but a crowd to be proud of.

We’ve had lots of emails and tweets from the charity and further afield saying thanks a lot for the fundraiser, great work and so on, but it’s really not us who deserve the congratulations. You, our crowd and our fans, put your hand in your pocket and gave to a very worthy cause (among thousands of worthy causes); you came along and made the atmosphere really special; you raised close to (or over) £20,000 from a night when only 850 tickets were sold. That is quite exceptional and all of us at PSB would like to thank you for it.

Righto then.. off to hit the red wine. Have a lovely Christmas everyone - we’re in the studio on January 3 to record an album that is pretty much fully written and sounding quite promising, so let’s hope 2017 is a good one, eh?

Lots of love

J. Willgoose & all at PSB HQ

A note of thanks

It’s been a long while since I posted anything here, for a number of reasons - chiefly that there’s been a great deal going on in my personal life and I haven’t particularly felt the energy or drive needed to write lengthy diatribes on here. This isn’t going to be a long post either but I do believe it’s important to take stock now and then.

It’s amazing how quickly you come to take things for granted in life. Things that would have seemed unimaginably brilliant in years gone by - festival appearances to happy crowds, international travel, actually having a career as a musician - somehow they all get pushed to the background by a mixture of anxieties and distractions. If you’re particularly prone to being affected by anxiety, as I am, it can sometimes be hard to focus on the positive things. (Incidentally I’m aware of the irony of a relentlessly anxious and pessimistic person writing well-received songs of positivity, optimism and achievement - that’s the human brain for you, I’d suggest.)

Anyway. To counter my occasional myopia there is one moment during shows where I try to take stock and reflect on my surroundings. It’s towards the end of Theme From PSB, when I’m holding the sample of Edward Murrow’s “this instrument can teach…” line. I’m pretty sure if you watch the one song from Glastonbury 2014 that the Beeb captured before their systems failed you’ll see me doing exactly that.

The reason I choose that particular moment is because it was during that sample, in my first ever gig as PSB in The Selkirk pub, that I finally plucked up the courage to look up at the crowd. It was a free show and I was shocked to see the room very full, and seemingly full of happy faces. I was so instantly terrified that I promptly looked straight back down again and carried on trying not to be awful.

Over the past two nights I held down that sample and looked out upon the space shuttle Enterprise and a happy and, dare I say, reverent crowd in New York City, a city I’ve always loved and held to be the epitome of a certain kind of brash, daring cool. We were playing a set filled with songs full of optimism and achievement, of faith in technology, progress and the human race. We were the first band ever to perform in the space shuttle pavilion on board the USS Intrepid. Some of the people directly involved in the songs - or their descendants - have been in touch to tell us how much they love what we’ve done and how much they appreciate their stories still being told.

In short, even in my tired, jet-lagged and generally anxious brain, it was a moment to savour and reflect on.

We go from New York to play at Jodrell Bank for Bluedot festival - from the wings of a space shuttle to one of the most important radio telescopes in the world. These gigs and the current success we have won’t last forever (trust me, you haven’t heard the demos for album 3), but as I’ve said, it’s important to take stock every now and then. We all have so much to be grateful for, even in times of hardship.

Thanks for all the support folks. It really is appreciated, in ways I can never fully articulate.

Lots of love

Music & Politics

Earlier today (21 September) we confirmed that we’d be playing at an event in Manchester called ‘Beat Back’. It’s organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity and takes place during the week of the Conservative Party Conference. The rest of the bill comprises Super Furry Animals and Charlotte Church, with more (possibly) TBA.

I thought very hard about joining the lineup when we were first approached. I’m not really one for courting controversy, soapbox-style grandstanding or getting into arguments in general. I have an almost pathological fear of confrontation. And as a musician, sticking your neck out for any cause, politically, feels as if it has somehow become a lot riskier in the modern era; an era where bands accept corporate sponsorship with barely a moment’s thought, and corporate branding is all over pretty much every level of the process of making, performing and, indeed, selling music. Nevertheless, we all discussed it, and decided it was something we felt strongly enough about to say ‘yes’ to.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it became unfashionable, or somehow not the done thing, for bands to be explicitly political beasts. Certainly not the ’80s - the continued existence of The Clash would disprove that by itself, never mind the huge number of artists and musicians who backed the miners in their year-long strike. Even well into the ’90s bands like the Manic Street Preachers were fiercely blazing a very political trail, and continue to do so today. Radiohead got behind a variety of campaigns, including one for Friends of the Earth, and while the Levellers were roundly mocked (not least by the Manics!), it’d be hard to deny that their music had a political edge. Without even resorting to Google I can remember Beastie Boys, Massive Attack, even Noel Gallagher playing at and promoting protest gigs. (These days I’d bet a lot of musicians would baulk at the chance to play a Free Tibet gig, pressured by their labels into not upsetting an emerging and probably very lucrative Chinese market.)

Flash forward to the bands who have emerged over the past ten years and it’s much harder for me to think of examples of people who’ve willingly put their necks on the line or explicitly aligned themselves with certain causes. Young Fathers’ post-Mercurys stance was admirable, but it’s an exception amongst a host of rules. It’s almost as if the musical marketplace, squeezed and pressured by external forces on all sides, has had to become more conservative and mass-appeal-focused to survive. ‘Don’t upset anyone - we might not sell as many records.’ It’s quite a horrible irony to me that I’m expecting more flak online today for being willing to share a stage in support of traditionally left-wing or liberal ideas than we got for appearing on a stage with ‘Barclaycard’ emblazoned all over it. I know which one I find more unsettling, certainly.

Perhaps playing it a bit more safely is what bands have to do today to survive, I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t have a go at anyone for not wanting the fuss, the attention or the criticism they’d face for championing a cause (I simply don’t know how Charlotte Church puts up with the abuse she receives simply for having, and expressing, an opinion on today’s political issues), and that’s certainly not what this post is about. But I firmly believe that artists, writers and musicians should be free to challenge orthodoxy where and whenever (and however) they see fit. You could very convincingly argue, even, that it’s part of the job. We don’t exist in a vaccuum. We should not have to apologise for expressing political beliefs or taking a stand for something. I am not apologising for doing so.

Getting back to today’s announcement, if there is some surprise and resistance to us revealing a political opinion or two, there’s perhaps also some surprise that those opinions aren’t as conservative as some of our critics might like to believe. It’s always been easy - and lazy, I’d say - for critics and naysayers to dismiss us as pure nostalgia, distracted by some of the clipped tones and sounds we use and associating them with the tiresome keep-calm school of rebranded, fetish-ized history. It wouldn’t be much of a leap to extrapolate that outwards into assuming that we were espousing conservative (small or big C) values, or somehow wanting to hark back to those mythical ‘good old days’. That’s never been what we’re about, as far as I’m concerned - the clue’s in the name, for a start (how many Conservatives these days are in favour of Public Service Broadcasting?).

Taking a closer look, the overall feel of The War Room is intended to be one of fear and loss, opening with the former and closing very definitely with the latter. It is not a celebration of conflict. Even the sole more celebratory song, Spitfire, is laced with irony; it explicitly addresses the beautiful design and creativity that goes into making a vehicle of death and destruction. At the same time, it salutes a machine which helped keep fascism out of this country and, ultimately, contributed in large part to its downfall. I have never felt there is anything wrong with that, and I don’t believe the left should shy away from celebrating machines that have helped to defeat the evils of fascism, in whatever form they come. The fact that the song does all this to the backing of krautrock, using samples from a propaganda film designed to stir up patriotic feeling while bearing only a partial resemblance to actual events, only further underlines the ironies for me. But I understand how some people might, on a more superficial level (and without much serious thought going into it), want to paint it and us as more conservative than we are. They’re wrong, though.*

Similar thoughts and themes were behind the writing of The Race For Space, a period of enormous technological growth only made possible by the peculiarly unique geopolitical alignments of the time. When else would America be able to justify spending over a billion dollars on sending a geologist to the moon? And rather than reading the album as some kind of celebration of imperialist flights of fancy and flag-planting nonsense, one could just as easily regard it as an endorsement of the enormous benefits countries and economies can reap from a massive public-spending commitment. Think how many jobs, industries even, were created by the roughly $110 billion dollar investment in today’s money in the Apollo program. $110 billion dollars invested in what was essentially scientific and technological research! Imagine if we could persuade today’s governments to make similar commitments to the environmental changes we’re unleashing (and yes, you could ironically add the millions and millions of tons of fuel burnt in pursuit of the stars to those changes).

Anyway, I firmly believe that I don’t get to say what our music means. That’s part of the process of releasing it - once it’s out of your hands, you no longer have control of its meaning and it belongs to the people who listen to it. I think it’d be fair to say, though, that our music nearly always seems to end up celebrating triumph over adversity, human endeavour and the things we can achieve when we work together. Those are things I earnestly and strongly believe in, and it’s those beliefs that made me sick to my stomach on seeing the photos of that little boy on the beach, or reading about the families dying in vans, dinghies or whatever desperate means of transport they’re reduced to taking. It’s those beliefs that make me want to argue against cuts harming the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor; similarly, against the privatisation by stealth of the NHS and the running down of the BBC to appease private media owners. You might not necessarily agree with our beliefs, but I don’t believe anyone can deny us the right to hold them or to express them. If anything, I think it should be encouraged - I may not get to say what our music does, or doesn’t, mean, but I can certainly say what I believe in.

Yours riskily,

J. Willgoose, Esq.

* Having said all this about Spitfire, it’s hard to put such a nuanced description across in a live performance, especially when we don’t use a microphone to speak to the crowd; I’m still undecided as to whether or not it’s ‘right’ to play it at an event supported by Stop The War. We’ll see.

Female Musicians

Earlier this year we went on tour in the UK & Ireland to promote our new record, The Race For Space. The album features a collaboration with Smoke Fairies, a duo consisting of Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies, who are ably backed by a three-piece band when playing live. They had co-written and sung on a track on the album, Valentina, a song about the first woman in space. It seemed like a great billing to me – our fans would get an excellent opening act, and we’d be able to perform the song together live every night, too, adding something different to our live show.

Everything was confirmed on both sides and the ‘announcement’ (I really hate bands ‘announcing’ things all the time – it seems so self-important, even if it has become the standard word for any kind of gig-related news) went onto all the usual social media sites. The reaction overall was very good and tallied with my own opinion of the bill. Then I noticed a comment lurking amongst the nice ones – it said something along the lines of this, and I paraphrase: ‘I wonder why you two young lads want the beautiful and glamorous Smoke Fairies on tour with you!’ You can add your own knowing winks and nudges on the end there, if you like.

Now, we tend to have very nice fans on the whole – they’re very polite, very enthusiastic, sometimes very earnest but almost always charmingly so. Sometimes they make jokes that I don’t find very funny – especially the laboured Fawlty Towers references that always emerge whenever we announce a German show – but that’s hardly a criminal offence. And this comment, too, was almost certainly meant as a joke. Out of all the comments we’ve ever received though this one still makes me bristle the most.

I don’t bear any particular malice to the person who wrote it – indeed I can’t find the original comment now – and I don’t view it as anything other than representative of a very dated but sadly still-prevalent mindset. It’s hard, though, to work out what’s more casually offensive about it: the hilarious ‘joke’ that we’d put our own flirtatious advances ahead of our consideration of the audiences who are paying to come and see us, not to mention our fairly obvious wedding rings (clue: they’re large and shiny and are visible in most photographs and almost every live performance); the total ignorance of our collaboration (which was made very clear in the post being commented on); or the casual slur on Smoke Fairies being there primarily as that most hideous of modern phrases, ‘eye candy’, rather than excellent musicians in their own right.

Actually, it’s not hard. The last part is clearly the most offensive. But the post was at least useful in one regard; it opened my eyes more clearly than anything has before or since to the casual sexism slung at bands containing female musicians – sexism that, just like the wolf-whistler on the street, is defended as being a compliment (‘Smile, love!’) when actually it is anything but. Being a man in a band you tend to remain oblivious to these kinds of comments, and it was only (to my shame) when I was directly brought into it personally that I began to recognise exactly how offensive such comments are.

That post was just the harbinger of what followed on the tour itself – I’d read tweeted comments about how we were excellent and Smoke Fairies were ‘gorgeous’, I’d see snippets of internet reviews where our musical stylings were praised and Smoke Fairies would be lauded as ‘sultry’, and even some of the ‘professional’ outlets descended into predictable territory, focusing firstly on how Smoke Fairies looked rather than on how they sounded.

As the tour went on, I remember seeing Smoke Fairies replying directly to one such tweet, in which we’d been ‘amazing’ or some such adjective and they’d been merely ‘beautiful’. They replied, with a tone of tired exasperation: ‘Why are we ‘beautiful’?’ I’m not sure they received a reply. Twitter can be a pretty depressing place to while away the hours, sometimes, and it has seldom seemed more so to me than when I read that exchange.

Now, perhaps some of those amongst you who were at those shows and made similar comments in public or private are feeling somewhat defensive at the moment – after all, I hear you say, they’re clearly attractive women and hey, they come on stage in glittery gold dresses, so, you know, if they want people to focus on the music why don’t they tone it down a bit? But as this HeadStuff post wryly highlighted, it’s the discrepancy between the focus applied by the male eye – and music reviewers are still overwhelmingly male – to female musicians’ appearance, first and foremost, rather than their talent, that really sticks in the craw – especially when contrasted to the treatment similar male musicians receive. Yes, certain female acts may well be good-looking – but why on earth would you make that the first adjective or comment when passing judgment on them as a musical act?

I suspect I’ve lost a few of my handful of readers by now, branded as part of the modern PC collective where ‘you can’t even pay a woman a compliment any more without being arrested by the internet police blah blah persecuted minority blah blah UKIP blah’, but my experience on tour with Smoke Fairies has made me particularly sensitive to this kind of damning-with-misguided-praise and particularly keen to re-think my own approach to working with and talking about female musicians. First and foremost – I’m just going to stop calling them female musicians. They’re musicians. Just as Neko Case’s memorable Twitter exchange with Playboy pointed out (excuse the profanity but ‘DON’T PEGGY OLSEN ME, MOTHERFUCKERS’ remains one of my favourite comebacks ever), and just as Savages’ pointed striking out of the words ‘all-female’ in their New York Times caption showed, there is no need to differentiate between male- and female-fronted bands. They’re all just... wait for it... bands. It’d be nice if we all did our bit to try and reflect that in the real world, and stopped making the way a musical act looks seem more important than how they sound.

J.W. (E)

As a postscript of sorts, I’d like to point out that such differentiation can still be useful when properly applied, as in the series of doctored festival lineups that started appearing earlier this year (the first was Crack In The Road’s modified Reading / Leeds poster); it’s clearly helpful in identifying the continuing under-representation of female musicians and artists at the highest level. But when describing an act in a review or caption (as per Savages’ tweet, above), it serves no such useful purpose.

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