MUSIC: Alice Through The Test Card

Britpop had curdled; all but blinded by the light of public scrutiny; trip-hop scuttled back beneath the rock from whence it came. In fact, just beyond the halfway point of the 1990s, I don’t remember very much going on at all. In a week that also saw the release of debut solo singles by Ian Brown and Bernard Butler, Broadcast’s debut EP The Book Lovers stood effortlessly out from the pile. The brutalist, blocky blues of the sleeve and the impersonal typeface told you immediately that if you interviewed the creators of this music and chanced to mention modernism or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, they wouldn’t look at you blankly. In time, I realised that, if anything, the reverse was true.
 
Having incubated into a fully operational pop group in the Birmingham bohemian enclave of Moseley, Broadcast, made even the most learned of music journalists – and no I didn’t count myself in that category – feel like utter philistines. They had trawled the second-hand shops of the Midlands and amassed all the analogue equipment needed to emulate the esoteric Italian arthouse soundtracks and obscure library recordings that they had bought, presumably, from the same second-hand shops. I told them that the febrile interior monologues of the songs on The Book Lovers propelled me back to a mindstate I had all but forgotten. A time in my childhood when the eventless rainy day afternoons that predated CBeebies Britain found a default soundtrack in the test card music and educational TV themes of the day. The opening credits to Picture Box seemed to portend the beguiling spell of those early Broadcast songs. Trish Keenan smiled politely and thanked me. Had I heard The United States of America? No, I hadn’t. A while later, when bands started to have websites, I looked at one of Broadcast’s playlists and realised the degree to which she had been politely humouring my gushing. There was nothing even as well-known as the United States of America on there. In fact, I hadn’t heard of any of it, but far be it from her to make the nice journalist feel thick.
 
At the centre of Broadcast’s sound though was a voice that defied all precedents: the strangely airless melancholia of Trish Keenan herself. Her voice had a quintessentially English reserve, that seemed to sit apart from her contemporaries in the same way, years previously, that Anne Briggs’ voice sat separate to her folk revival peers. I thought I was too old to follow bands around and find myself lost for words when we happened upon each other, but briefly, that’s what seemed to be happening with me and Broadcast. I visited them in their HQ in Birmingham arts complex The Custard Factory. Trish played me some songs which they were considering for inclusion on their first proper album The Noise Made By People. They sounded astonishing, more poppy than anything they had previously recorded. In spite or perhaps because of that, I don’t think that most, if any of them, ending up on a record.
 
I heard they were doing a live session for MTV and I managed to get myself in. They looked mildly surprised as they brushed past me in the corner of the empty studio, lurking between two cameramen. When they played, they looked and sounded incredible. The soft jazzy syncopations of drummer Steve Perkins called to mind the work of Terry Cox in Pentangle. The other men in the group – Tim Felton, Roj Stephens and Trish’s partner James Cargill – prodded unsmilingly at their instruments like lab technicians. Even better was the show they played at Dingwalls to mark the release of The Noise Made By People, which looked resplendent in its Saul Bass-influenced artwork. On the screen behind them, molecular structures separated, rotated and met just like they used to on early 1970s Open University programmes. Silhouetted in the light, Trish sang Come On Let’s Go, Unchanging Window and Papercuts; her daydreamy la-la tones suggesting denial of a secret she could never quite bring herself to share with the world.
 
They never sounded quite as instantly accessible again, but if you dropped your avant-guard, their finest music was to come. 2003’s Ha-Ha Sound gave the impression of a group – now down to a three-piece – whose creators were slipping away into a musical Narnia of their own making. As ever, Trish’s voice provided these songs’ emotional gravitational pull. On Lunch Hour Pops and Colour Me In, she sounded like you imagined Alice might have done just as the point where she realizes she may never make it out of Wonderland. On Ominous Cloud, she sang, “The wind through the frame whistles your name/Though you said goodbye you did not leave my mind.” Many of us have a tendency to dwell upon might what might have been. Sometimes, it felt like Trish Keenan was laying down roots there and building a minimalist apartment block there.
 
The last time time I saw Broadcast, in April 2010, there were just two of them: Trish and her partner James Cargill. The shadowy Hammer-horror psych-noir of Investigate The Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (recorded in collaboration with The Focus Group) had emerged to unanimous critical approval. Also, Paul Weller’s Wake Up The Nation had just come out, bearing with an improbably unmistakable sonic debt to Broadcast. At the South Bank, Trish and James were playing the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Ether Festival.
 
Two days previously, I’d seen Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio defying their audience to find beauty in their blizzard of feedback noise, gong-bashing and saxophone-honking. Perhaps by sheer force of will, some diehard fans  had risen to the challenge; others merely tried their best and nervously deemed the whole thing “interesting.” All of which is worth dwelling on, because the Broadcast show – whilst no less experimental ­– served reminder that noise really can bypass melody and leave you breathless. It was, on every level, a triumph. The first piece that Trish and James performed that nioght was entirely improvised. Taking their places opposite each other, they stood at desks placed wide enough apart to allow a view of the screen behind them. What happened after that was, at times unsettling, but never less than enthralling. Nightmarishly muffled rhythms and, from James’ ancient keyboard, a thick analogue hum encroached on Trish’s balefully wordless vocals. On the screen, a flurry of monochrome images whizzed by. Bare branches in winter came juxtaposed against elementary geometric patterns.
 
And yet for all of that, it was Trish – a smiling, appreciative presence between songs – on whom your gaze most regularly alighted. For In Here The World Begins she stepped in the projector beam, at once turning human screen and looming thrice the size over herself in silhouette form. I remember a lullaby-like monologue whose prettiness was undercut by eerie door-knocks and accelerating footsteps. Then, I remember her donning what looked like an anorexic balalaika and thrashing out a modal psychedelic drone with heroic gusto. The lights went up. Not for the first time, Broadcast had left me with a sensation tantamount to having the most outermost recesses of my subconscious scooped out and served up like melon balls. Moreoever, it felt like, having come this far, Broadcast were on the cusp of becoming left-field national treasures. I guess that the news of Trish Keenan’s death will no doubt hasten that transition. But even those now coming to her incomparable, irreplaceable voice for the first time will come to realise that posthumous recognition is a hideously unjust swap for all the magnificent music that Trish was destined to keep making.  

Pete Paphides has been writing about music since 1992 for The Times, The Guardian,Observer Music Monthly and Mojo  

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