About forty minutes into BROADCAST ’s set a fan, and quite a fan judging by his determined efforts to stand in front of every other member of this not insubstantial Sunday night crowd, appealed to the band to, “Play 'The Book Lovers!'” Now, this is possibly one of Broadcast’s best known tunes and the chap in question was certainly justified in wanting them to play it. The only problem was that they already had. And Trish Keenan, Broadcast’s somewhat austere lead singer, didn’t hesitate in pointing that out.
This brief vignette served to sum up the Broadcast live experience. No matter how great they sound – and they do sound great at times – there’s a problem when as a band you have carved out such a distinctive sound. And that problem is that after a while one song starts to blend into another. Initially this is no bad thing. Broadcast create a wall of sound effect that can be quite mesmerising, especially with the addition of the ‘A Clockwork Orange’ style projections that form the backdrop, bombarding the audience with magnified insects, scientific diagrams and space rockets taking off.
That said, the best songs certainly rise to the surface, much like the oil in the water of their retro light show. They open with "Pendulum" from the new album ‘Ha Ha Sound’, Trish resplendent in a hologram festooned Mary Quant style dress, her fringe a perfect post-modernist right angle to her long bangs, ethereal vocals juxtaposing with the discordant, angular synthesiser riffs and jazz bass lines. If Grace Slick ever fell ill and Brigitte Bardot had had a short stint with Jefferson Airplane, it wouldn’t sound a million miles from this.
There’s a real cinematic quality to much of the set, veering between menacing Lalo Schifrin-esque incidental music and futuristic space marches, the soundtrack to a future as foreseen in the sixties by Arthur C Clark. A future where we all wear tin foil clothes and commute to the moon on a daily basis. It’s no surprise that Lynne Ramsay used their song "You Can Fall" for the soundtrack to her strange and otherworldly adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel Morvern Callar.
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At times, however, perfect, if slightly twisted, pop punctuates the proceedings; "Unchanging Window" and "Come On Let’s Go", both from 2000’s ‘The Noise Made By People’, are sublime for example. Trish’s voice drifts and soars, almost oblivious to the mechanical musical experiments of her bandmates, creating genuinely affecting and emotional music best described, not by me but by Bob Stanley, as the ‘oddest space lullabies I’d ever heard’.
A cover of Nico’s "60/40" forms part of the encore, which the band tackles with no great enthusiasm, so much so that it might have been better if the band had finished their set and left it at that. Broadcast live is something to experience - to nod in appreciation of - but even their most ardent of fans don’t appear to go crazy for them. For much of the show you can’t help but feel that the show would have been much the same had we not been there at all, so little do they engage with the audience.
The highlights of the gig were high indeed but on listening to Broadcast in the comfort of my lounge I found myself enjoying that more - the delicate touches of their sound were all the more subtly played out, each song more distinct. Broadcast live though is something of a cold, and at times a monotonous, experience and I was left thinking…“If a Gallic flavoured, space age pop/electronica group perform and no one is around, do they still make a sound?”
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