Jan
15
Trish Keenan with electronic music legend Jean Jacques Perrey, backstage at AV Festival, Gateshead, 2008. Copyright S O'Neill
It was with sadness I read through the Twitter-vine that Trish Keenan from the seminal electronic band Broadcast passed away yesterday. For a musician who is taken before her time (she was just 42) the outpouring of tributes reveals how much the band’s music meant to those whose hearts it touched.
I met Trish several times through my own music work and mutual friends, but first and foremost I was a fan.
I first came into contact with Broadcast in the late ’90s when I was studying in Birmingham. I became intrigued and later involved in the emerging ‘lofi electronic’ scene through the ‘We Brought Our Friends‘ band night and publication. Like-minded bands like Plone, Pram and Avrocar were blending analogue synthesizers, 1950-70s lounge and library music with more contemporary aesthetics. It was cool, but it was pretty much our secret. In 1999 I produced my dissertation paper which cited the revival of early electronic music in Birmingham, ‘Space Age Music and the Moog‘.
But the emerging, most reputed (and arguably the best) of all these bands was Broadcast. They were starting to cut an international path, signed to Warp Records and touring Europe – soon appearing on mainstream media shows like ‘Later With Jools Hollands‘ (it was slightly cooler back then). I saw them play small gigs on home turf at the Jug of Ale pub in Moseley, South Birmingham; later seeing them blossom and their fanbase grow to perform big multimedia visual shows at venues like The Scala in London.
For me as a post-teen’indie kid’ living in South Birmingham at a time when the city was still emerging from it’s grimy manufacturing cocoon, it was the angst of early Broadcast material that first drew me to them, augmenting my interest in early electronic music. ‘Work and Non-Work’, their collection of early EPs brought together on an LP vinyl release with its distinctive orange sleeve in homage to library music, became the soundtrack to the more introverted, isolated times of my college days. Spending long Sunday mornings trying to write an essay by hand or compose music, pondering the experiences from some gig that week. Today, it is still my favourite of all their records and one of my favourite albums from this period in my life.
Broadcast’s melancholic songs about boredom, frustration at attending parties and traversing back to Chelmsey Wood were rich mead to a disenfranchised, precocious girl in Birmingham. The time I spent living in the heart of the music scene’s neighbourhood, Moseley, was a seminal time for me as a musician, quietly studying the development of the bands. The spirit of these times was entirely ‘DIY’ – anyone could create music or start a band, with plenty of boys – and importantly lots of girls – doing it. For a brief moment it looked like I would stay in Birmingham and join one of these bands, but fate twisted another way and instead I came to London and got involved in very different types of music there.
As someone so entrenched in British indie music then, I saw the links between Broadcast and classic indie bands. Come On Let’s Go” (from the ‘Noise Made By People’, their first full length album and the best) is one of my favourites:
“What’s the point of spending time / with people that you’ll never know? / Come on let’s go”
For me this was a softer echo of The Smiths:
‘In my life/ Why do I waste valuable time/ with people who don’t care if I live or die?’ (“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”)
My favourite track from this period was ‘The Book Lovers‘. The sweeping melody, the mystic but earthed lyrics and the haunting harpsichord are sounds I’ve absorbed into early Hypnotique solo work.
In recent years I met Trish and her musical and life partner Jam through gigs and mutual friend Wolfram Wire (who I met through a fansite as a fellow Broadcast fan, he later went on to collaborate on music projects with them and I with him). She was always beautiful, warm and appreciative of those who cared about music – not at all like the detached figure seen in their videos and interviews which I think showed her naievity and discomfort at being part of the business of music.
I remember listening to Joe Meek for the first time at her house in Kings Heath and how enthused she was about exploring music and discussing it – despite relative ‘fame’, she had lost none of her passion for authentic and unusual music.
Broadcast’s path was a lonely furrow: spending many years creating a perfect album does not a good bank balance make. Broadcast were a ‘sonic’ bands people wanted to admire and emulate but not necessarily buy their music ( like fellow Duophonic label mates Stereolab), but seeing, despite their comparative ‘fame’ how they lived within such basic means, without access to good studio space (they were recording drums in the local church) or producers, made me sad and increased by scepticism of the means to survive in the business of music. Yet this did not detract from their pursuit of their life project, Broadcast, bringing with them many voyagers with them on their path.
I became less commited to their later work – it seemed more abstracted, focused on the software’s technology rather than the beautiful melodies that drew me to them originally – before drawing back to a very fragmented version of their early 1950s sci-fi and library influence with the recent Focus Group collaboration. But throughout their shifting styles I was always drawn to her voice – haunting tones reminiscent of Nico - a pure voice from a more innocent era many decades before.
In smaller live shows Trish and Jam performed as a duo, the sound became freer, perhaps away from the scrutiny of the music media and pressure to be a ‘proper band’, Trish appeared more beautiful and confident. They were, like all of us, music lovers trying to find the optimum means of self-expression – a lifetime’s work with its peaks and troughs.
Trish Keenan with electronic music legend Jean Jacques Perrey, backstage at AV Festival, Gateshead, 2008. Copyright S O'Neill
This picture was the last time I saw Trish in Gateshead, 2008. Her and Jam were DJing to support my good friends Jean Jacques Perrey and Dana Countryman. She had asked if she could meet Jean-Jacques as she was a fan, so of course I made the introduction. It was nice for me to bring together two people I had such respect for individually, and I like this photo (Trish said it made her look like a curious little child) which shows two magical people immersed in a discussion about their passion for music.
It’s a cliche, but it goes without saying that she was taken from us too soon, but the legacy of her music, her purest voice, shines.
Farewell, my lovely.
Come on, let’s go.
