Public service broadcasting the last flight tells the story of Amelia Earhart through her diary entries, backed by masterfully composed instrumentation, and this year they will be touring Europe and North America.
“I Was Always Dreaming,” opens the title track of the same name. A melancholic piece that builds to a huge crescendo of strings while, in the background, actress Kate Graham provides voice to Amelia Earhart’s own writings. She describes her passion for flying, her determination to take to the skies. “Everyone has oceans to fly if they have the heart to do so. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know about borders?”
Public Service Broadcasting (PSB), a genre-defying British outfit that originated in London in the late 2000s, has gathered a relatively niche but loyal following over the past fifteen years. Eschewing the norm in a way that seems like a natural endeavor for this band, the group’s leader, J. Willgoose Esq., decided early on that singing was “never going to work.”
Instead, working from a range of archival sources, including the British Film Institute (BFI) and the National Archives of the United Kingdom, narratives were assembled with carefully selected audio recordings from films, newsreels and radio broadcasts to tell the stories of the Supermarine Spitfire, the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, color television and even the British postal service. These formed PSB’s first full album, Inform-Educate-Entertainreleased in 2013 and peaked at number 21 on the Official UK Albums Chart.
Two years later, PSB launched The race for spacea concept album with a continuous narrative that follows the development of space flight during the 1960s. From President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech in which he declares, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are difficult,” the album flashes back to the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957 before moving forward to Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 and the American Apollo program.
The album has survived well beyond its initial tour, which included two special concerts at the UK’s National Space Center in Leicester, and saw a significant resurgence in 2019 when commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing took place. PSB performed the album alongside a live orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall during the world famous BBC Proms and the lead single. Go! performed live on the BBC news night program. On 20 July 2019, the anniversary itself, PSB performed to a crowd at Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, in the shadow of the site’s 1,118 tonne, 25.9 meter diameter ‘Arthur’ satellite dish. Built in 1962, the plate was Europe’s main downlink for the live television broadcast that showed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon.
Fast forward six years. The band take to the stage in Cornwall once again, playing to a crowd in Truro as part of the first tour in support of the release of the last flight. Up to eight performers fill the stage, with the band’s three lead musicians, their dedicated visual artist and set designer Mr B, who uses a camera to create the video graphics displayed on the band’s booth-themed stage backdrop in real time during the show, as well as a three-person brass section and the incredibly talented singer and keyboardist EERA. EERA provided live vocals for many of the songs on The last flight, and on the album recording made on the song. A different kind of love.
It is difficult to imagine in advance how well PSB’s work will translate into a live performance, given its reliance on inherently pre-recorded media. But you can never underestimate the musical genius of J. Willgoose Esq. and band members JF Abraham (bass, keyboards, trumpet) and Wrigglesworth (drums). In any case, the atmospheric sounds and emotions of the last flight It will hit you even harder in person.
As an aviation enthusiast, it’s hard not to feel captured by Amelia Earhart’s recreated words that resonate throughout the album. “The attraction of flying is the attraction of beauty. The dramas of the clouds. The glory of the stars. The wonders of the waters and the skies,” she says, accompanied by the relaxing sounds of Arab flight – at the time of writing, the most popular song from the original album on the streaming service Spotify.
main bachelor electra probably touches the feelings of aviation enthusiasts above all. A love letter to the Lockheed Model 10 Electra, the all-metal twin-engine plane produced in the 1930s that would serve as Earhart’s steed in her attempt to circumnavigate the world in 1937. “I could write poetry about this plane,” Earhart says. “How wonderful a machine and the mind that made it.”
Earhart’s quotes in the song are interspersed with newsreel clips: “The first all-metal surface design. The cruising speed of over two hundred miles per hour. Two five hundred and fifty horsepower engines. The future of aviation is the Electra.”” as well as returns of songs from the PSB archive: “Wings, body, tail, all in one” by Volcanoas well as “It is the perfect meeting between men and machines. The machines will do the heavy lifting. As the men will supervise the machines” from Progress (presented in 2017 every valley) and The rhythm of the machines (of bright magic2021).
When I visited London’s Science Museum earlier this year, where a Lockheed Electra takes pride of place in the museum’s Modern World gallery, these clips and songs resonated in my mind as I looked at the sleek silver design. It’s somehow still futuristic, even 90 years after its first flight, and yet, by today’s standards, it’s remarkably crude. The aircraft’s distinctive twin tail was the brainchild of Kelly Johnson, later the famous team leader at Lockheed Skunk Works, and contributed significantly to the designs of the U-2 Dragon Lady and the SR-71 Blackbird, among other aviation icons.
The pure joy that Earhart felt when flying is told by those equally cheerful and optimistic The fun of this. Flying, in contrast to the notion that becoming a pilot was simply a job (and, indeed, in contrast to the idea that there must be a productive end goal to any goal), the song combines Earhart’s writings with contemporary vocals performed by Andreya Casablanca. “Wherever I am in the world people always ask me ‘Why do you do it, why do you risk your life?’ My answer is always the same. I do it because I want to. “I do it for fun”
Casablanca follows with the equally moving “I want to feel it. Know the limits. In every moment, in every minute.”
The song also addresses the sexism of early aviation. Earhart was far from the first female aviator, but she is probably the most famous of them all. His Record-breaking solo transatlantic flight in 1932 It was the first by a woman and earned her the US Distinguished Flying Cross. In society at that time there were still many who said that piloting an airplane was not a woman’s business. Unfortunately, some similar attitudes still prevail to this day. “Not girls, girls can’t. I don’t understand binaries. That’s how I understand it. Life on earth, up in the sky. I want to feel alive, I want to feel alive.”
J. Willgoose Esq. noted this aspect of the album in interviews, counting MusicRadar “I had my antenna set on an interesting story based on a woman or women because most of the archive we have is overwhelmingly male-dominated, as is 20th century history.”
The heaviest song on the album, musically speaking, follows Earhart’s struggles while attempting to fly through dangerous weather conditions in East Asia. monsoons It has heavy, foreboding guitars that really convey a sense of panic to the listener while Earhart quotes play in the background. “It’s still no good. We can’t get through it, we’ll have to fly over it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
the last flightThe penultimate track, A different kind of love is a soft and melancholic song led by EERA’s voice throughout. Opening with a recreation of Earhart speaking to her husband George P. Putnam while she was on her circumnavigation attempt, knowing what we, as listeners, know about Earhart’s fate adds a level of heartbreaking foreshadowing. “Well, I’ll see you soon. Then we can take a trip together someday. And you can fly me to all the different corners of the world,” he tells Putnam, not knowing that he could never keep his promise.
We still don’t know the full story of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. the duo disappeared on July 2, 1937while en route to Howland Island, 1,700 nautical miles from Hawaii. The U.S. government concluded that Earhart’s plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean, where even after more than 80 years of searching, her, Noonan, and Electra’s remains may still be found. Other theories place them stranded on a Pacific island or even secretly captured by Japanese forces.
As such, the end of the last flight it strays away from the specific and relies primarily on strings to evoke feelings of tragedy. Earhart speaks in the background, but is barely audible for most of the song. howland It itself is over eight minutes long, with six and a half minutes of strings eventually leading to silence. The album ends with the sounds of nature: birds, wind, waves, all taken from a recording made on Howland Island.
Night flightreleased on October 10, 2025, it reimagines each of the tracks, some by J. Willgoose Esq. him and others by collaborators such as EERA, Gus Unger-Hamilton of alt-J and British post-punk duo The KVB. Following its release, PSB will return to tour, beginning on November 1 with sold-out shows at The Barbican in London before moving on to continental Europe and finishing in December with dates in North America. You can find more details about the tour and get tickets here.
