Trish Keenan, who died last friday, was not only a great, clear and unpretentious singer with subtle phrasing but a thoughtful artist. No matter what you think of Broadcast’s music (I happen to like it very much), the thought and ideas invested in it are admirable and uncommon in much of today’s popular music.
Broadcast changed the way I thought about making music. They introduced me to a lot of new things - the United States of America, White Noise, the Free Design, Linda Perhacs, and a lot of library music amongst other things. The very tangible presence of their influences in the music is uniquely inspiring. It creates a timeless quality that has always seemed to me worth pursuing, the music is saturated with sketchy references but still striving to be new; as Simon Reynolds would have it, hauntology. The resulting product is often brilliantly uncanny, and singularly British. It’s a valuable lesson in all creative pursuits, not just music.
Keenan also showed me the value of being vague. In an interview with the Wire she described how she used exercises from Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing to help with lyrical ideas. The book comes from Hugo’s time teaching creative writing at the University of Montana, and is a disarmingly personal treatise on the merits of automatic writing in poetry. In it he encourages one to “get off the subject”, to “give up what you think you have to say, and you’ll find something better”. “Your words used your way will generate your meaning”, and a well constructed lack of clarity will encourage your audience to find its own meaning in what you produce. The way Keenan used these ideas in Broadcast’s music and lyrics are obvious, and they have helped me not only in my rather clumsy lyrical efforts but in most other areas too (and by the way, Miss Mia Vigar, I want that book back…).
All that aside, they’re great pop songs, which is the most important part. “All truth must conform to music”, as it says in Hugo’s book.
