“Someone said, ‘This is what happens when the chess club kids don’t get their heads flushed down the loo enough!’ I liked that”: When Public Service Broadcasting’s geek chic took them all the way to the Moon

Public Service Broadcasting.

In 2015, Public Service Broadcasting released their second full-length album, The Race For Space. The bow-tie-clad duo had already attracted plenty of attention for their unique manner of merging archive documentary material with electronic music. But mastermind J Willgoose Esq hadn’t embraced the notion that he was creating prog – until he spoke to Prog.

There may be proggier ideas out there than a concept album about the Cold War superpowers’ rivalry for supremacy in space between 1957 and 1972, featuring iconic extracts of film and audio material courtesy of the BFI, the space agencies of America and the Soviet Union, all recounted over ambient, burbling techno, elegiacal electronica and passages of choral grandeur. There may be proggier ideas, but Prog can’t think of any.