Public Service Broadcasting: 'It's a rich seam with Amelia Earhart'

Willgoose says there were “two main draws” to Earhart’s story. “Number one was looking at what the last record was (Bright Magic was a love letter to Berlin) and wanting to react against it and do something different, which is what’s motivated every record since The Race For Space – and as part of that wanting to do a female-fronted record,” he says.

“I was keeping my eyes and ears open for something interesting and I remember trying a few things on for size and they just didn’t work for one reason or another. Then I just stumbled across Amelia Earhart and thought, there’s something here. Even just seeing a picture of her, it was, right, there’s a very interesting character to get stuck into here.

“But the main other factor was that she wrote her own account of a lot of it. There’s her book, The Last Flight, but there’s also contemporary press interviews and reports and a lot of articles that she wrote. So it was an opportunity to do it about a remarkable woman but also one who was adept at telling her own story, so it didn’t feel like we would have to write too much of it for her.”

The more Willgoose delved into Earhart’s life, the more he wanted the record to celebrate her achievements (which included becoming first female aviator to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean). “I don’t think you can get away from the very sad ending – not just sad in terms of the voyage she was on particularly but also sad that the world was deprived of her presence for another 30 or 40 years on Earth that she would’ve had,” he says.

“I’m certain that she would have gone on to have done even more extremely interesting things, and not necessarily in the field of aviation but possibly in politics and all kinds of things.

“But also what you can’t get away from when you read anything about her – and particularly accounts of this last journey – is the sheer sense of fun and the spirit with which she entered into all of her amazing adventures.

“I think it would be a misrepresentation of her motives but also her character to come out with a really brooding, doom-laden record. It was trying to highlight the joy in doing something for the sake of adventure and how inspiring that is, no matter how that ends.”

By coincidence, Laurie Anderson has also this month released an album about Earhart. “She is obviously a topic of great interest to a lot of people,” Willgoose notes. “But I suppose our job as artists is to find subjects that we find inspiring and interesting and translate that via whatever medium we’re working in to other people and let them come to it themselves and see if they find anything interesting in it that speaks to them. It’s a rich seam with Amelia, certainly.”

Willgoose was struck by Earhart’s “general demeanour...just how strong and determined she was and how she rose above the prevailing attitude of the day, especially to women’s involvement in aviation”.

“She didn’t really engage with it, she lived the life that she wanted to live, and that was her own answer to it,” he says. “I think the big surprise for me was her marriage arrangement with George Puttnam, and that letter that she sent to him on the wedding day, that was quite an eye-opener and quite a bold move for anyone, especially in the 1930s about what she wants and what she’s willing and not to accept going into a marriage.

“I think that’s what led directly to the song A Different Kind of Love, trying to look at a romantic relationship through a different lens. It’s not how I would approach a marriage necessarily but it’s interesting to put yourself in those shoes when you’re trying to write something.”

Where on previous records, Public Service Broadcasting have woven original archive material into their music, here they used Earhart’s words spoken by the actress Kate Graham. Willgoose found that the few audio and film recordings that exist of the aviator were either such poor quality or so stilted “that they didn’t capture her personality very well”.

“It’s not something that she would have been used to doing because the technology was so new, it wasn’t a common thing to be presented with, to be sat down in front of a camera,” he explains. “It’s so wooden and stiff. In some cases she appears to be reading cue cards behind the camera. It’s really not a reflection of her dynamism and her grace and her humour.”

On the record, he says, “a lot of it is first-person but there’s a slightly blurred line in that some of it is paraphrased or one or two are purely imagined maybe but were based off familiarising myself with her character for many months”.

“That was the challenge and it was something that I knew going into it and (the archive material) wouldn’t exist. I had to find a way of making this work without using that. It’s another way of testing our own skills and the limitations or not of the concept of the band. Those are kinds of things that you need to keep doing to remain interesting as a creative person.

“That was the headache for the record – how are we going to do this and can we do it,​​​​​ is it going to sound awful. I don’t know how to direct actors, or what’s going to come out the other side of this, basically. That was the real challenge.”

​​​​​​​The Last Flight is out now. Public Service Broadcasting play at O2 Academy Leeds on Saturday October 19​​​​​​​. https://www.publicservicebroadcasting.net/