Paperjam

Broadcast - Birmingham Sanctuary - 12th Dec 2003

Gigs // Steve // 21st December 2003

Last time we saw Broadcast, at the end of May, they were previewing new tracks from Haha Sound, and they seemed to get a bit lost in the space of ULU. Six months on, we're at the final date of their tour which has taken them round America and back to the UK, and we're in the slightly eerie surroundings of the very top room of the Sanctuary in Birmingham. I'm just pleased they didn't choose the shit-awful Academy 2 for their last gig of the year.

I was a bit nervous about bringing drinking partner The Judge to see them; Broadcast have never been the sort of band I felt I could recommend to my mates, 'cos they sound so quiet and ambient, and even a bit noodling here and there. Now they sound different - quieter songs (like "Colour Me In") now seem to have been dropped, and everything else sounds faster and harder. "Still feels like tears" doesn't seem as quite glorious as on record, and the otherwise blissful waltz-pop of "Ominous cloud" doesn't end where it should, aahing on and on for days, but everything else sounds better than perfect. The thrashier ones seem to work best live - the ticking squall of "Drums On Fire", "Illumination" which starts as a whisper of a martial drum roll, before building and building to an triumphant stomp, and the ace fairground-gone-bad chaos of "Hammer Without A Master", with the shit-yourself bass booming away under the freak-out noise. Allied to the retro scientific visuals - neutrons and protons, cars, people, and concrete buildings flickering over the band, then it becomes rather thrilling.

Microtronics mini-album

On sale at the gig was their mini-excursion into library music - "Microtronics", 11 unnamed tracks all about one or two minutes long, all frenzied drumming, whoosing ambience and wheezing organs. Not amazing - some of it will test your patience, but a couple of them are rather lovely.

Actually find Broadcast rather inspiring - because they're also from the endlessly derided West Midlands (cue the usual schtick about heavy metal, Roy Wood, and Duran Duran), they still live in Birmingham - when other bands seem to ship out to London as soon as they possibly can, and they make their music without a huge studio or a producer.

Listen

If you want to hear what they sounded like, there's a couple of bootlegs doing the rounds in the usual places - a really good quality one from September 2003 at the Cafe de la Danse in Paris, and an audience recording from the London gig the week before the one I went to, which proves that people really can't stop fucking talking even when they go and see a band, but other than that it's pretty good - they really are at full throttle on "Pendulum" in that version.

Links

• Official site
• Press release - came with 'Haha Sound' promos, written by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne
• Warp - home of Broadcast in the UK