Throwing the chronological approach out of the window once and for all here, as we enter the finishing stretch of the Facebook Fifteen, and our story moves to 2000.
(It’s weird, thinking about it. The gap between 1990 and 1999 felt tangible, immense, whereas whenever anyone talks about this decade, it usually takes a moment for it click to that 2000 was almost ten years ago; it’s just difficult to keep track of time with all those zeroes, I guess. Or maybe it’s because people say “two thousand and nine” instead of “twenty-o-nine”, and my brain can’t parse it properly. Plus, it still sounds futuristic; listening to Pulp’s Disco 2000 always throws me for a loop because it still sounds like an invitation for the future, rather than for something that happened almost a decade ago. Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there. Carry on.)
By 2000, I’d moved out to university, to Cardiff, been to a lot of gigs, listened to and bought a lot more different records. Many of the Britpop horrors I’d bought languished unlistened and unloved on the shelves; I’d moved on to what might best be described as my “I’ll listen to anything” phase, a phase which shows no sign of coming to an end as of the time of writing, and my collection had become a lot more diverse. (Still not terribly diverse by most standards, but definitely more diverse). Crucially, I’d also dusted off (or rather bought new CD copies of) my old Kraftwerk and Beach Boys records, and started re-listening to other stuff I’d written off years before.
Broadcast, then. Warp Records’ first pop signing since Pulp (who did three singles for their short-lived subsidiary, Gift), they’d already issued a compilation of their three preceding EPs under the title Work and Non-Work, but this is their first real album, and it’s still the best thing they’ve ever turned their hands to.
Calling them a pop band isn’t really giving the full picture. Their most stunning songs always seem to take their cues from older alternative pop artists like the Free Design and even Motown girl groups, but the band were always keen to show off other influences like psychedelic weirdos the United States of America, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Seventies arthouse film music, Sixties French pop records, and early Krautrock plongs and drones. The result of all those things being chucked in a blender should be arch and artificial, an arid, impersonal, confrontational record, especially if that record happens to be titled The Noise Made By People. It’s really not like that at all, though. The band’s uncanny pop sensibilities and ear for a lovely tune mean Broadcast’s records are always surprisingly warm, far more so than supposed kindred spirits (i.e. other female-fronted sixties-tinged electronic indie bands) like Stereolab and Electrelane. Although they do quite often sound rather like Stereolab or Electrelane.
I can’t really conceive of a time that I didn’t love Broadcast. I was almost completely unaware of their existence beyond reading about their admiration for the United States of America in the Melody Maker. This caught my interest because I was, and am, fond of a lot of that late-60s experimental hippy stuff – USA, the Silver Apples, the aforementioned Free Design, not that I’d heard more than a couple of songs by each at that stage – but I only really remembered reading this later on, after I’d already bought a copy of The Noise Made By People, because it really does sound very much influenced by the United States of America and their 1968 self-titled album, their one and only real LP. Which I’ll cover in a future post.
(Annoyingly, you can listen with ease to snippets of the Silver Apples or the Free Design on any decent mp3 site, but it’s difficult to find USA records because the searches – on iTunes, on Amazon, on 7Digital, on Hypemachine, on Google, bloody EVERYWHERE – are clogged with pondweed from 90s novelty rockers the Presidents of the United States of America, very much not a major influence on Broadcast, or indeed on anything. Nonetheless, take my word for it, The United States of America *do* often sound very similar to Broadcast circa The Noise Made by People – or more correctly vice versa, I suppose – and if you’re a fan of one, chances are you’ll find something you like in the other.)
By 2000 I’d stopped buying the Melody Maker regularly, watching helplessly as it transmogrified from an intellectual, superior rival to its IPC stablemate the NME, first turning into its indistinguishable clone, then to its witless sister mag for younger, slower readers, and then into a tatty A4 magazine complete with free posters, celebrity darts and sinaglong song lyrics, apparently aimed at ADD tweens theoretically buying magazines in some non-existent gap in the market alongside Smash Hits, before finally succumbing a few unsurprising months later to absorption into the NME and complete oblivion.
“The magazine was doing exactly what it should have been doing but the readers just weren’t there in the numbers to keep it viable”, Mike Soutar, managing director of IPC Music & Sport, told the website NME.com.
Bollocks.
Well, that was my musical bible gone, and with it went a distinct phase of my life, now definitively over – the phase where I went out to shops to buy new records after reading about them, and probably the phase where I tripped over more great new records than any other time, as opposed to actively seeking out new things to listen to based on word of mouth or half-heard snippets on MTV.
Anyway, without the Maker, and with the Internet still fairly useless for finding new music in those pre-broadband, 56k dialup days, I might have missed Broadcast altogether, except when The Noise Made By People came out, it was being played in HMV. Specifically, the lumbering, shaking end-of-side-one instrumental Tower Of Our Tuning, which actually doesn’t sound much like the rest of the album, and which – combined with seeing the Warp logo on the sleeve – gave me the impression the whole thing would be a dense, brooding, analogue groove. Instead, I got an almost perfect pop record. Having bought it thinking it would be something quite different, and not having got around to playing it immediately when I got back home, I was quite unprepared. When I did give it a listen, bracing myself for unlistenable noise, I instead ended up with it on repeat, discovering something new and surprising and lovely each time, and I fell for them so completely that a few hours later, I’d forgotten my student poverty and spent all my food money ordering their entire back catalogue from the Warp site.
I thought I was beyond being floored by pop music. There’s nothing that inventive on show here, nothing that leftfield or unexpected; what there *is* is beautiful pop music, and it’s here in abundance, in melodies so perfect and sung so beautifully and surrounded by such perfect harmony or cacophony that they instantly transport the listener somewhere else entirely. (At least, they do if the listener happens to be me. Your experience may vary.) While you may not be sure it’s a particularly happy or safe place you’re being transported to, it’s certainly worth the trip. It more or less knocked me over, especially since it found me so inadequately guarded against such things.
The thing I love most about Broadcast (I do wish I wouldn’t keep typing “Broadcats” by mistake. Except just then, when I was actually trying to type “Broadcats” and instead typed the band’s name correctly. That’s clearly the trick.) The thing I love most about Broadcast is that they, more than any other band, seem to have picked up the long-abandoned thread of all those Sixties and Seventies records whose influences they wear so openly, and followed that thread to a different destination than almost any other band I’ve ever heard. This is their most “Sixties” album, in that it’s not a massive leap to imagine that it *could* theoretically have been made in 1969, and for most bands that would be a criticism – but here, it’s not. It’s a missing link between then and now that somehow never actually got made until Broadcast got round to it, and it’s mesmerising.
It helps, of course, that it contains two utterly, utterly fantastic pop singles, the jealous, bitter Papercuts, a song to sing with eyes half-closed in disdain, and Come On Let’s Go, which is a warm, joyful, perfect song, effortlessly accomplishing everything Stereolab ever aimed for in three beautiful minutes. Both still rank among my favourite songs of all time, and both are easily heard a couple of clicks from here if you’ve never done so.
Yet neither of these was the lead single; instead, the band opted for the minimal Krautrock lullaby of Echo’s Answer, which one friend – after I’d excitedly played it to him – declared to be “not even a song at all”. He meant it as an insult, I’m sure, but I love it. It’s hypnotic, even spellbinding, wrapped in a series of sparse, atonal chimes, appropriately drenched in echo reverb, and it’s one of the great “non-singles”: a term I use to describe records picked for single release which seem to serve no purpose, being unlikely to be played on the radio except on shows where most of the nineteen listeners have already downloaded a copy.
The rest of the album is full of very good songs, delivered with the utmost conviction and avoiding any hint of self-aware knowingness, embarrassment or pastiche, none of which it seems fair to elevate above any other, all of which add to the mood of a lost link to the end of the Sixties which just hadn’t been pulled into existence before now, and bookended by the opener and closer, titled Long Was The Year and Dead The Long Year respectively, really the only places on the album where psychedelia outright overrides the goregous lush Sixties pop; they’re both staggering.
The album isn’t the whole story, either. Those other records I ordered, along with two subsequent singles from this album, were packed with B-sides and EP tracks that just sounded like natural growths budding out of the album, as if the album had created such a powerful world of beautiful, heartbreakingly beautiful pop melodies and psychedelic noises that it had started to germinate and spread across more records.
The high point is the beautiful slow almost-ballad Illumination, still the single most beautiful record I’ve ever heard, which is *so* lovely and *so* effortless and *so* perfect that it’s almost like they were just showing off. (I’ve used the word “beautiful” a lot here, I note; it’s not (only) because I have a limited vocabulary, it’s because for so many of these songs, there’s simply no other appropriate word that comes close to describing them. And in Illumination, there’s a bit towards the end where Trish sings “…Walk from your dream to mine” and the music suddenly kicks up a notch and flowers and vines start bursting out of the speakers and wrapping themselves around everything in the room, and the English language comes off badly because such a moment can only be described as “beautiful”. But there we are.)
Wow.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love Broadcast – and I can’t remember a time I’ve ever fallen for a band so completely and so fast. Even today, every time I listen to The Noise Made By People, I’m reminded of the first time I heard it, and how overwhelmed I was, and it makes me need to sit down and catch my breath. As I say, your experience may vary. I don’t care. This is beautiful.
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