Corduroy suit, spotted bow-tie, professorial spectacles: J Wilgoose Esq takes to the Barrowland stage dressed as the sort of chap who comes to a sticky end in an MR James ghost story. Which is apt as his band, Public Service Broadcasting, are in the business of raising the dead. In this case, Amelia Earhart, the aviator whose life, achievements and disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 are chronicled in new album The Last Flight. The stage is dressed to resemble the interior of her cockpit. Newsreel of Earhart looking happy and gallant plays on the instrument panel.
Public Service Broadcasting specialise in evoking 20th-century history. Their previous work includes meditations on Berlin, the space race and the Welsh mining industry, selections from all of which make the set. Although their sound mixes rock and electronica, the band’s exploration of themes places them within a classical tradition: Holst’s The Planets, Britten’s War Requiem – these could, with a little tweaking, be their records, too.
Always, though, it is the human voice that gives their music emotional punch. Tonight that includes archive audio from the National Coal Board and Nasa mission control. Live vocals come from the singer-songwriter Eera, who sings from the back of the stage, underlining that these songs are presentations of other lives, not expressions of ego. Her performance of A Different Kind of Love, inspired by an extraordinary letter Earhart wrote to George P Putnam on the day of their wedding, is exquisite.
One might expect a Public Service Broadcasting gig to feel chin-stroking; it’s anything but. In part that’s down to the playing, especially the funk workout of Gagarin, for which the three-piece brass section come up front and hype the crowd. Besides this, though, it’s because the spirit of a more hopeful age is being expressed in the samples and footage, and intensified by the energy of the music. Take one moment: Wilgoose locks into a guitar solo as, on the screen behind him, a mail train – bringing the cheque and the postal order – steams past factory chimneys and across sunlit moors in a heart-lifting elegy to a vanished Britain.
