interview by Clare Byrne | view as PDF

Simultaneously self-deprecating and confident, whim-sical and incredibly incisive, gently spoken and utterly precise in what she says, serious and very funny, speaking to Trish Keenan is an experience of apparent opposites that actually go together beautifully — an experience that echoes her music. Ever experimenting and pushing the boundaries, Broadcast elude all attempts to categorise or even to describe their innovative blend of electronica, library music, psychedelia, nursery rhyme, movie sound effects and a female vocal that is at once pure and strong, and evocative of childlike naiveté. Their new record, The Future Crayon, a collection of their B-sides and other rare tracks, draws attention to just how multi-faceted and exciting this band is and has been for ten years. Clare Byrne managed to grab Trish for a chat just before the band went on tour for the first time this year.

You’ve said that Haha Sound was a motherly record and that Tender Buttons was a fatherly record…do you see The Future Crayon as rounding up some of your forgotten song children?
The orphans! [laughs] I don’t know…we just liked the idea of putting out those rare singles. It’s ten years for the band and it seemed like the obvious thing to do really. There are some rarities there that I think people will be interested in. We don’t expect it to sell loads — it’s just a nice little novelty thing really.

It seems like this project has been quite long intended. Was it the tenth anniversary of the first single that made you decide to do this now?
It was always an option to release them, because they were quite limited. Like Distant Call was only on the B-side of the 7” of Come On Let’s Go. It’s nice to just put them out for people. Although I imagine most Broadcast fans have got them…everyone on the message board’s been swapping tracks anyway. But it stops them being rare. Sometimes I get fed up with ‘hard to find’ things; I think it’s nice to just put them out there.

The songs obviously span quite a long period of time, a period in which your band has changed quite a lot. Do you think this record functions as a sort of retrospective?
I think it does. It’s like the rings of a tree…the growth of the band. I think we’ve focused in a lot more over the ten years. We were very ambitious and wanted to try everything. We were obsessed with soundtrack albums and what’s brilliant about soundtrack albums is you get that funky track with the abstract sounds on it, and then you get that sweet female vocal track and then the nursery rhymey track that narrates some emotion in the film itself. You’re exposed to a broad spectrum of music on a soundtrack album, and I think that was always our ideal. Broadcast try to umbrella everything that a soundtrack album might…I’m not sure how much people can digest all of that from one band. I don’t know whether it’s been to our detriment sometimes that we’ve tried to do too much. Perhaps we’ve spread ourselves a little thinly at times, but I think there are some great tracks on The Future Crayon that really work. We’re much more focused in on what we do now though.

How did you choose which songs to put on The Future Crayon?
It’s all the tracks that were never included on albums, so they chose themselves. As far as I can think there are only two tracks that weren’t included. To be honest, we would have included those two tracks, which are Misc. and Stupido — Stupido was an extra track for the Japan release of Haha Sound and Misc. was off a cassette for the NME — but we just thought they were crap. So it isn’t quite everything, but almost…98% of what isn’t on the albums is on The Future Crayon.

You’ve said in prior interviews that you approach recording EPs differently to the way you approach albums…what do you think that means for the overall sound of The Future Crayon?
When you’re recording an album, you rework songs, you remix songs, you rearrange songs — your working process is developing all the time. And then all of a sudden that project finishes and then, when the pressure’s off, something pops out that’s great and really easy and fresh sounding. And that’s always what happens with our EPs. Because we record them after the album — we get the album out of the way and hit the deadline (if we can) and all of a sudden the pressure’s off and we can relax and then something brilliant pops out. So I wouldn’t say we really approach the EPs differently, I think the process is different. Most EPs are a quarter or a third of an album, so the arc of that recording is shorter and you can envisage it more.

You have EPs that are thought of as quite significant in the evolution of your work. Do you think EPs have been important to you as a band establishing a fanbase?
I think they have really worked for us because they’ve allowed us to explore different things and take a few more risks, particularly with song structures. We like to have a small vocal section and then it bursts into a groove or a sample, and you can really chop and change it and mess around with structures when the pressure’s off and you don’t feel like you have to craft twelve brilliant songs. By the time that’s all over, you think “I’m fed up with verse chorus bridge verse chorus bridge, what else can we do?” And then you throw in a few more random elements and it’s always more interesting. I think that’s why we’ve had success with our EPs, because we’ve experimented a bit more, and because we’ve been on form after recording for a long time and writing for a long time, they’ve worked. For that reason it’s perfect for us to compile them as a whole album. We thought of doing it all chronologically, as they were released, but that didn’t make sense at all. So we worked on a running order that would work.

The general consensus with us is that your B-sides are better than most people’s A-sides.
They’re better than our own A-sides! [laughs] But a B-side is that moment when you can do anything because the pressure’s off — nobody’s looking. The spotlight is not on the B-sides so you really can have a bit of fun.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to buy the single for the B-sides, whereas now singles seem to have nothing on the B-side or just crappy remixes.
Yeah, that’s very bad isn’t it? It’s so lacking in creativity. I think that’s the problem with a lot of British music. It’s scared to take risks. I always watch whatever music shows are on the TV, festivals and things like that, and I was just watching T In The Park. Not that I should expect anything brilliant from these kind of line-ups, but I’m always really gob-smacked at how little people try different things. I don’t know what these bands are holding onto. Whether they’re scared to take the risk because they’re going to upset the cog that they’re on. It’s always a real shame.

I think a lot of people who hit on a successful formula will just stick to it…
That’s it, because all of a sudden it employs a lot of people and it’s like you upset your agent and then your promoter…it’s so sad really. I think British musicians are really caged. When somebody’s kind of free everyone goes crazy for it! If somebody shows that spark and that risk-taking bravery, then everybody loves it. We should go crazy a bit more! We’re supposed to be mad anyway – we’re cooped up in a little country all living on top of each other. Why we’re not like Barcelona or somewhere where it is really crazy and heated and creative all the time…or maybe I’m being romantic about it, I don’t know. But what is it we British are actually holding onto?

I was wondering about the significance of the title The Future Crayon? Where did it come from?
It’s self-generated. It’s a cut-up. It was two words that we spotted — you know when two words go together and they take you further into an idea. To me it said that the future was in young people being creative. To me, that’s what it means. The future of any art is in the child. That’s why I liked those two words together so much — I thought it really really worked. And it really seemed to sum up the nature of the recordings and the songs. The modern, electronic element and then, like Where Youth & Laughter Go and Poem Of A Dead Song, they’re sort of crafted nursery rhymes…classroom kind of songs. And the two things do go together in the real world too. It was just such a lovely title. And I love that, just putting two words together like that.

It’s interesting that you write cut-ups as well. I know that you experimented a lot with automatic writing when creating Tender Buttons.
Yeah, Tender Buttons was all automatic writing. There was some small crafting to shape its course into a song, but the ideas and all of the lines were generated from early morning automatic writing. I would get up first thing in the morning and that would be all I would do for a couple of hours. I would let it all rush out of the pen. I wanted to suspend trying to make sense. I really got fed up with trying to mean something — songs having this weighty poignant meaning. I got very bored of that; I’m over that. I don’t have to mean anything any more. That’s how I feel — I don’t feel like I have to say anything about the world or about my emotions. I just wanted to be quite random about it. The subject matter chooses itself then and I think it’s way more interesting than thinking, “what am I going to writing this song about…?” I hate that — you can smell it a mile off in a song when someone’s got an agenda.

Do you think that experimenting with automatic writing has changed the way you write songs now? Do you think that’s the way you will write from now on or was it a one album experiment?
I think the next album will be different. I’d like to craft a little bit more and find a balance between the two things. [pause] I’m saying that, but we’ve been doing a lot of improvisation recently. I think our focus for the next album is all about playing. I’ve had quite a lot of success with just making stuff up as I go along, whatever comes to my mind, and that being it. I’m quite into vocal sounds at the moment. There’ll be a bit more emphasis on the music this time around. With Tender Buttons it was about the songs and them being simple, and the music took a backseat. It had a minimal, library music approach to the arrangements — quite quirky but sticking to very similar sounds — a drum machine, a distorted organ sound, which was a Reactor Software plug-in. Tender Buttons was a computer album. Especially songs like Michael A Grammar, Black Cat, Corporeal, America’s Boy, Goodbye Girls…these are grid-like songs.

Until now, you seem to have had one less band member with each album. Are you going to be using more different musicians on the new album?
Yes, we’re doing a lot of recording with different people, different local bands and musicians. We’ve done a lot of recordings so far that have really worked. We’ve been working with a band called Gas Shepherds — they’re two men and it’s all pedal work, it’s all one-off crazy analogue noise boxes. There’s a company called BugBrand and they make all of these one-off delay pedals and fuzz pedals, and they’ve got a whole array of wonderful colourful looking boxes that sit on the floor and move around and generate sounds. We’ve also been working with Cities Prepare for Attack — it’s one guy who does a lot of drone guitar stuff. We’ve been improvising with anyone and everybody. Chris Clark, who’s also on Warp Records, we’ve been doing some improv with him. Also Mark Sanders, who’s a well-known improv drummer in his own right — he puts out records and he’s busy playing with Evan Parker and all sorts of people all over Europe. We’ve been really focusing on playing – always playing and performing. It’s been a really refreshing change.

Do you think making the compilation of The Future Crayon made you nostalgic for the bigger sound or did you always intend to expand outwards again after Tender Buttons?
I don’t know. I enjoyed listening to it when we were compiling it but I don’t like to look back like that. For one, it doesn’t feel that long ago and I guess it’s almost like it’s not you anymore. It happened, but you don’t feel connected to it. I miss the people — your mind goes through all the people that were involved. We’ve had a lot of line-up changes and a lot of producers and engineers. You see all those faces coming back at you, that’s quite weird.

In relation to that, will you be playing the Future Crayon songs on the tour you have coming up? I was thinking that might be strange for you…
No, we won’t be playing anything from The Future Crayon. There’s going to be a lot of improvisation. There’ll be three or four or maybe five new tracks. But there’s also big gaps in the set where we won’t know what will happen until we do it. Older songs, I think there’ll be one or two off Tender Buttons. We’re opening the set with two new tracks. We’re also doing Colour Me In and The Little Bell. So we’re sticking to those nice little classroom folky songs. But again, with different arrangements and different ways of generating those computerized software sounds, so it’s looser and more performance-based. Oh — we’re doing Hammer Without A Master at the end — a nice wipe-out track. There’s a focus on drumming as well; we always like good drumming. We’re using Mark Sanders, the improv drummer I mentioned before.

Your music is often described as ‘mood music’, and I wondered what sort of mood you have to be in to write? Or whether you do what Gertrude Stein and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets did and make yourself write, whatever mood you’re in.
No, there’s no waiting for moods going on. In a way, I’ve been there and I think waiting for moods is symptomatic of writer’s block. And I think that’s when you have stopped developing and challenging the process. I don’t wait for moods — I can’t. If you give yourself a working habit – like, I had a period a few months ago where I would have to write a song in half an hour. And it would have to be in half a hour, you give yourself strict conditions. The pressure’s off — it’s like, if it’s crap it’s not your fault, because you had to do it in half an hour. And I wrote a song a day for two months. One of those we’re going to do in the live set, it’s about a girl who’s pregnant and the baby’s growing in her stomach and it’s about that progression, that narrative. Years ago, I used to sit down and go, “Oh god, I’ve got to write a song,” or “I’m trying to write a song,” and it all seemed so laboured and painful. It’s only been the last few years, since my dad died…I don’t know whether that has somehow been a psychological release for me, or whether it’s just changed the way I think about life and the opportunity that I’ve got. But I feel much more free to do stuff — I don’t put it off. I used to always put writing songs off. It’s like, the one dream I always wanted and yet when the opportunity came along I procrastinated, and I never understood why I did that. But my dad dying made me look at why I was doing that, and you grow up when you lose somebody close to you. I think my process and my whole attitude has changed — I’m intrigued now by songs more than scared.

You’ve recently had some poetry and prose published in The High Horse. I was wondering how your music relates to your poetry, or what the difference is in the process, because poetry doesn’t always lend itself to music.
No, it doesn’t at all actually. I thought that I should write poems because I write lyrics, but actually they’re really different. You can’t always figure poem into song, although I did do that with Locusts, which was a Garcia Lorca poem, and that worked really well, but we cut the vocals up with that and messed about with it a bit and it just kind of worked. I have crafted poems that have just not worked in songs and I’m never quite sure why. I think because they’re meant to be read on the page, they have a melody or a visual element to them that just doesn’t lend itself to melody singing. I don’t know why that is, it’s interesting. For me, the crafting and rewriting of pieces of written work is really different to lyric writing. How much melody plays a part in conveying a narrative in a lyric…it’s scary how powerful melody actually is. You can sing the most inane couple of words and yet the melody will give it real meaning, and can make it very tear-jerking. There’s one song in particular that does that for me and it always gets to me — Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs. All she sings in the melody is shapes. It’s a list song really, of different mathematical shapes, and it’s tear-jerking. That’s the power of melody. A lot of the time, really sad songs or really uplifting songs…to read the lyrics, they’re two-dimensional on the page. Melody is great for giving meaning to words. You can hold the note on one word, and all of a sudden change the focus of the meaning or bring out the meaning. It’s really interesting.

Do you have any bigger ambitions as a prose or poetry writer?
I really like short story writing and I’m always working on something. I don’t tend to write very long pieces, although I’m writing a 6000-word story at the moment. But I don’t know where it’s going and I’m not really interested in it going anywhere — it’s just something that I like doing. The pressure’s not really on me to do it for a living. I think it was Gertrude Stein who said, “don’t ever do what you love doing for a living,” because once you’ve got an audience you’re always writing for it and you’re trapped I guess. I have no ambitions for it — I’ll write it and I’ll give it away. I don’t want to earn money from it. Some people say “I’ve got a book in me,” but I never want to write a novel — god forbid! The thought of it makes me shudder! I like writing short pieces, I enjoy crafting them.

When you started as a band, there was a hegemony of white male Britpop; did you feel like you had to react against that or was it always incidental?
No, I don’t feel like I react to anything like that. I wrote my first song when I was thirteen and I did it without any wish to be famous. I just found myself doing it — I didn’t have any ambitions. It just happened — I wrote a song. There was no music, it was an a cappella song. I don’t remember seeing myself as a musician particularly, I just remember thinking, “I really want to write a song”. That’s me — it’s the act of doing it that I’ve been compelled to do. I don’t care what sex I am when I’m writing songs, it’s not an issue for me. There’s more of a feminist agenda in my everyday life than in my life as a musician. Throughout history men and women have been successful in music, although there is a gender split. A lot of female musicians are singers…I liked your article on female drummers. There is that gender divide and it’s interesting — but most girls don’t want to play drums and that’s fine too. A lot of women don’t want to be car mechanics and that’s absolutely fine. I think the problem will always come with how much we get paid. Like cleaning jobs are not well paid and a lot more women than men do cleaning jobs. Me and James have been together a long time — but the arguments we’ve had over washing up have been way deeper than arguments we’ve had over musical arrangements. To the point where we’ve smashed crockery to end the argument over who is going to wash it up!

Something that’s very interesting to me is what a big effect film and cinematic music have had on Broadcast. Do you see yourself ever being involved with an actual movie?
I’d really love to do that. We’re ready now more than ever to do the soundtrack to a film. I think we’ve had a romance for a long time about soundtrack music without ever really wanting to do a soundtrack. We’ve been offered things but they’ve never really been quite right. The ironic thing about our music is it doesn’t really work that well against film. It’s OK for the film-maker who likes a running order of songs that you can put on an album and release it as the soundtrack, but really it’s a compilation of songs that you like that you’ve managed to work into your film. A lot of Warp soundtracks are like that actually. Lynne Ramsay, for instance, the 'Morvern Callar' soundtrack was actually just a compilation of songs. And I’m not massively keen on that — I always find that flattens a film off. With a soundtrack, you have to have a group of musicians who are going to take on the film. In the same way as Richard Thompson did for 'Grizzly Man' — there’s an accompanying documentary of the making of that soundtrack, with Werner Herzog in the studio. I didn’t realise it happened in that way, but Herzog actually sat in with the musicians and directed them as they were playing and told them which bits he didn’t like. It’s was a really interesting documentary and everyone was open to what he was saying and there were no egos. The soundtrack that came out at the end was really amazing. I think we’re really ready to do that now, especially since we’ve been improvising a lot more and our approach to music has changed. I think we could really animate a film with the way we play music now.

So you’re really just waiting for the right project?
We’ve been offered a really good thing actually, which is quite unusual, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s with Doug Aiken — he’s asked us to do some music for the sculpture garden outside the museum. So that’s the next thing we’re going to be looking at. He projects big moving images onto buildings and things like that. I don’t know what he’s going to do for this project but we’re really chuffed that we’ve got that. It’s a dream job really, so we’re going to get our teeth into that next. We can’t wait!

The Future Crayon is out now on Warp Records. Read Trish’s prose and poetry at www.thehighhorse.net.