'60s Space Race - The Musical

On their second album The Race For Space, British duo Public Service Broadcasting delve deep into the history of the space race between the US and Russia in the ‘60s, incorporating propaganda films and archival footage and setting it to music that’s equal parts uplifting and exciting.

J Willgoose says the band poured over countless hours of audio for the album to weave their own narrative about man’s first steps into space exploration. “With the first album we could kind of pick and choose a bit more easily but with this album there were just weeks and weeks of audio from the Apollo missions alone that I spent quite a long time going through,” Willgoose says. “I used the transcripts of the Apollo flight journal because I was downloading like 4GB files of audio at a time and it was quite daunting but as long as I had some kind of reference I could kind of cut the time down quite dramatically. It was definitely much more in-depth on this album than it has been in the past.”

For Willgoose the album was a labour of love and he admits the experience of making the album wasn’t without some hardships and frustration. “I just took a bit too much on myself really and it’s probably quite obvious from the way it’s kind of put together that I’m something of a control freak,” he says. “I think that kind of just wore itself out with this album just from spending sort of the best part of the month doing 12-, 14-hour days with not much company and putting a lot of pressure on myself. It wasn’t particularly mentally healthy I don’t think and it got a bit stressful toward the end, and I think it would be best to avoid working in that way in the future, but it’s always hard sort of finishing something and sort of letting it go.”

The band will be in Australia for the first time to play the new material as well as songs from their first album Inform-Educate–Entertain as well as other releases. While the band will be playing with a smaller set-up than they’re used to, fans will still get to see the pair in the flesh along with their exciting live visuals. “On this trip it’s just going to be me and Wriggles[worth, the other half of the duo]; he’s going to be playing the drums and I’m going to be sort of doing banjo, electric guitar, synth and stuff and we’ll be screening the films we’ve re-edited on screens on either side of the stage rather than kind of bringing our own sort of set design stuff over I suppose. But you know if this goes well hopefully we can kind of come back with the full kit and caboodle.”