Thread by @PSB_HQ

INFORM - EDUCATE - ENTERTAIN

The last track to be written for this album, with good reason as it contains elements of all the others. I’ve used that same trick a few times.. I like to think it’s clever & symphonic but it’s probably just lazy #timstwitterlisteningparty

We used to start the show with this song and I’d tune in to a radio live - it normally went fine apart from the night at @thetradesclub Hebden Bridge where I managed to tune in to a BBC R4 discussion on anal sex (I kid you not) #timstwitterlisteningparty

This quote is Marie Slocombe, the founder of the BBC Archive. A few reviews seemed to think it was Margaret Thatcher, which I think is the angriest I’ve been about any review before or since. It is not Margaret Thatcher. #timstwitterlisteningparty

Listening to this record is a little painful for me - I don’t think it sounds that great, but then again it did cost about £400 to make. Here’s what my studio looked like back then (or bits of it, as I was putting it together after moving house)… #timstwitterlisteningparty

SPITFIRE

There was a bit of discussion about whether this should go on the record, seeing as it was already released on The War Room.. management thought yes, I thought no. In retrospect they were probably right, I think #timstwitterlisteningparty

I’d originally intended this song to be based on the RAF film Target For Tonight, which is a pretty prosaic account of a bombing raid on Germany. The BFI got in touch to say they didn’t have a copy so perhaps I should try something else… #timstwitterlisteningparty

… I ended up finding The First of the Few and hearing these magnificent lines delivered by Leslie Howard, and the song Spitfire was born. It was one of the (very many) lucky moments I’ve had #timstwitterlisteningparty

Using a Krautrock beat on this track helps undercut any potential nationalist tub-thumping, & thankfully those types have stayed away. I do feel that us left-leaning types shouldn’t be shy about celebrating a machine that helped defeat fascism, though #timstwitterlisteningparty

I know it’s a song about a machine of war, but it’s also always been about creativity as far as I’m concerned. These lines sum that up, the difficulty in stretching for something just out of reach… #timstwitterlisteningparty

… and one of the grimmer ironies of war is that out of so much destruction often comes such creativity. It has been a quite horrifically effective driver of technological innovation (good and - mostly - very bad) #timstwitterlisteningparty

Live, I figured out a way to play the guitar riff with the left hand and this descending keys line with the right. It’s one of those nice tricks that looks really impressive but is a bit of a swizz really.. it took a bit of practice I suppose #timstwitterlisteningparty

THEME FROM PSB

A lot of the speech elements on this record were inspired by acts like Jurassic 5 and DJ Shadow.. I thought it’d be a fun idea to write a very corduroy theme / hype song for PSB, hence the title (and song) #timstwitterlisteningparty

This introduction is taken from a film called ‘Forty Years of Human Service’, a 1930s film about the work of the National Jewish Hospital in Denver. Obviously I cut around that bit… #timstwitterlisteningparty

I trawled through the Prelinger Archives for ages trying to find anyone saying ‘Public’, ‘Service’ or ‘Broadcasting’ and ended up with a handful… it was quite a labour-intensive process #pluscachange #timstwitterlisteningparty

Here’s a photo of Wrigglesworth* recording the drums for this record.. I’m pretty sure we did them in a day and a half in and around tour dates in late 2012, up in Glasgow in Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio #timstwitterlisteningparty

(* it’s Wrigglesworth I - a lot of later PSB fans might not realise that there have been two Wrigglesworths, but there have. They gig-shared towards the end of 2012 so you might have seen one or the other around then) #timstwitterlisteningparty

Here she is.. my top-of-the-range (ahem) Countryman banjo. The banjo seems to divide opinion but I’ve always loved it.. both the sound and the rhythmic qualities it has, when played well (no comment) #timstwitterlisteningparty

Again.. this is not Margaret Thatcher. The odds of her appearing on one of our records are fairly long, shall we say. Live, we use a (ahem harder to clear) quote from Ed Murrow’s wonderful speech on television as a medium to illuminate and inform #timstwitterlisteningparty

SIGNAL 30

This is based on several driving safety / information films, although the only bit taken from Signal 30 itself is this opening monologue. That film is really, really grim and I don’t recommend watching it… #timstwitterlisteningparty

… the others, though, like None for the Road and The Bottle and the Throttle, are as great as they sound, and highly recommended #timstwitterlisteningparty

We did a fair bit of driving in those days too.. Here’s Wriggles (II) interacting (not sure how, or why) with a beer bottle and our tour manager’s old transit van, Stella #timstwitterlisteningparty

Genuinely no idea what he's doing there. Is he trying to open a bottle of beer on the door handle?! #timstwitterlisteningparty

This song owes a fairly obvious (if poorly realised) debt to QOTSA. It’s great fun live. The guitars (my beloved Rickenbacker) also owe a debt to Chris Olley and Six by Seven #timstwitterlisteningparty

Here’s us playing Signal 30 in Guadalajara, September 2013. I think it’s safe to say that it was raining (lots of love to the @rmxgdl folks and @goliveros for taking us to Mexico!) #timstwitterlisteningparty

NIGHT MAIL

This was the second-to-last one to go on the record.. I was a bit wary of using this film as it’s so well known and we’d tended to use more obscure archive. Writing it was quite a painful process as I remember… #timstwitterlisteningparty

… it’s funny because even though it was a single and still a live favourite of some fans, I still carry a bit of the scarring from the repeated head-bashing-against-desk that it brought about while writing it #timstwitterlisteningparty

I remember one draft that sounded like Beautiful Day by U2. No. No, no, no. #timstwitterlisteningparty

More tour memories from 2013.. here’s our former sound engineer Bobby Goldenears (Rob Sadler) boarding our private jet #timstwitterlisteningparty

Reliably informed by our current engineer (‘Grammy-nominated James Campbell’) that this is always the loudest part of any live set. Interesting fact eh #timstwitterlisteningparty

Listening to this ending I’m having quite horrendous flashbacks to the days I spent time-stretching every line (and syllable, more often) to try to match our tempo rather than the original… #timstwitterlisteningparty

QOMOLANGMA

This is the Tibetan name for Everest and means ‘Mother Goddess of the Earth’ (a bit more poetic than naming it after the Surveyor General of India, but hey ho) #timstwitterlisteningparty

It’s a reworking of the horn parts from Everest, and intended as a bit of a counter-balance, both in terms of the colonial overtones of the record and sonically, too. It’s a nice rest for the ears after a fairly relentless opening 5 tracks #timstwitterlisteningparty

ROYGBIV

This was our first single proper and I’ll always remember coming out of a gig we’d just done and being texted by my friend to say @gidcoe had just played our song.. #timstwitterlisteningparty

.. we've had such wonderful support from @bbc6music and definitely wouldn’t be here today without them. Thanks 6 xxx #timstwitterlisteningparty

This is one of the better videos I cut together for the live show, I think - the dancing couple playing at this point in the video are actually dancing around fridges as part of an advert #timstwitterlisteningparty

Some of the quotes in this song are also among my favourites. ‘The entire world will stream into our living rooms with the velocity of light.. spectacular.’ There’s a real lyricism to these old films that is such a big part of their charm #timstwitterlisteningparty

‘I believe in this world to come.. I think it’s going to be a pretty good world’. A big part of our appeal, I think, was tapping into this kind of optimism.. strange as a naturally pessimistic person to have made such optimistic music, but there you go #timstwitterlisteningparty

Also that makes it sound cynical.. I don't think it is, or was, cynical, and I think the naivety of this record helps too. Naivety is a much-underrated value when it comes to making music #timstwitterlisteningparty

THE NOW GENERATION

This is the daftest song we’ve ever made, by a distance. I’d happily consign it to the ‘live rarity’ list, but @psb_wriggles loves it so we have to play it now and then to keep him happy #timstwitterlisteningparty

Having said that, corduroy has been the one constant in PSB-world, a thread literally running through and around the band’s history, so it’s probably only right that it gets its own (thoroughly naff) theme song #timstwitterlisteningparty

We did a lot of gigs for this record.. over 250 I’d guess, and 156 in 2013 alone. Some backstages were more interesting than others (this is in Estonia in 2014) #timstwitterlisteningparty

'Skirts will disappear entirely' - that's not quite how they pictured it, I'm sure #timstwitterlisteningparty

(That posterior belonged to the band’s chef - he was only on stage to cook pancakes and throw them into the crowd. It was a great show) #timstwitterlisteningparty

LIT UP

This was the second song I ever wrote as Public Service Broadcasting and the oldest to survive as (occasional) part of the live show.. It has a special place in my heart #timstwitterlisteningparty

Those notes are B - B - C, in case it wasn't self-evident #timstwitterlisteningparty

This is an outside broadcast in the early days of the BBC gone very wrong. Thomas Woodroffe spent the whole day drinking rum with a captain on board a ship in the fleet - the Beeb threw to him for the commentary & in those days couldn’t switch him off.. #timstwitterlisteningparty

.. so he just rambled away, drunkenly, for 30 minutes or so. It’s one of the most famous mishaps (if you’d call it a mishap.. I probably wouldn’t) in British radio history #timstwitterlisteningparty

And as is so common with drunk people, if you wade through enough of the nonsense they speak you’re struck by occasional nuggets of true profundity. ‘There’s nothing between us and heaven.. nothing at all.’ Thanks Tommy W

EVEREST

This is still my favourite of our songs. It meant a lot at the time and still does. I can’t (and don’t want to) envisage a time when we don’t close the live set with it #timstwitterlisteningparty

Again there’s just a lyricism in this commentary (voiced by Meredith Edwards) that you just don’t get these days, possibly because it’d seem quite melodramatic. But there is real craft and quality to the writing #timstwitterlisteningparty

I've even turned this one up, so I must like it. #timstwitterlisteningparty

Up, and up… I think the fact it’s in 6-bar progressions (as a lot of our choruses are) that helps give it that running-away / up and up feel. Definitely the best melody I’ve written #timstwitterlisteningparty

I remember playing a rough version of this to my now-wife - she listened attentively, said 'it's quite good', and wandered off to the kitchen. I heard her whistling it five minutes later - cue a Willgoose eyebrow-raise and quiet nod to self #timstwitterlisteningparty

LATE NIGHT FINAL

End on a downer.. all our albums seem to! This is based on the film ‘What A Life!’, a post-war satire on overly miserable folks. Can't think why I was drawn to it #timstwitterlisteningparty

That’s a mandola there (a mandolin but pitched an octave down).. I used it a fair bit on this record, along with my great uncle’s banjolele and of course my banjo. Most of them haven’t seen a great deal of action since, sadly (or not!) #timstwitterlisteningparty

‘This is it.. this has been my go’. I think at the time I thought that’d be the case with this record- it might be my only chance to make one, hence the melancholy (although we’ve gone from A minor to A major, so maybe I was secretly optimistic) #timstwitterlisteningparty

That’s it folks.. thanks for listening along with us. As a bonus here’s a video I’ve just found of that band we supported in Tallinn, complete with pancake-cooking chef. Long live rock and roll. Sound on #timstwitterlisteningparty

Also - please stick around / migrate to @LNF_HQ for the listening party for A Wonderful Hope which starts at 9pm! Will try to catch up on any Qs later xxx