Inform-Educate-Entertain is the manifesto of this special band. Tim Hughes reports

An air raid siren goes off. A giant TV screen shows grainy newsreel footage of bombed-out houses and blazing anti-aircraft guns, and against a backdrop of pounding beats and uplifting banjo, the voice of American correspondent Quentin Reynolds tells us: “London can take it.”

Welcome to the engaging world of Public Service Broadcasting. The Brainchild of a corduroy and bow tie-clad musician known only as J Willgoose Esq, the mission of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) is to “inform, educate and entertain”. They do all — especially the last, which they achieve through a hypnotic symphony of clips and samples from public information and propaganda films set to soaring guitars, electro-rock and bass-heavy dance beats.

It’s a heady mix and has turned a solo bedroom project for its dapper creator into one of the best bands of the summer, as festival-goers will see tomorrow when they they play Truck festival, joining the likes of Horrors, Ash and Spiritualized at the two-day gathering in Steventon. “We are just a two-piece electronic outfit who are influenced by heavy rock, indie and all sorts of other stuff,” says J, who is joined on stage by drummer Wrigglesworth (both modestly decline to reveal their true identities, revealing only that they met at a lawn bowling club).

“We sample old public information films and archive footage, writing new music around it. With the sound and visuals it does become a full-on audio-visual assault.”

Thirty-one-year-old J says the idea came from listening to a Radio 4 documentary about archive material, which he crafted into a song. He says: “I thought it would be great to do a concept album, basing each song on a public information film. Now, four years later, we have a studio album.” That album takes its name Inform-Educate-Entertain from the band’s manifesto pledge.

It was preceded by last year’s The War Room, an EP which spliced wartime broadcasts, samples of Neville Chamberlain’s speech on the outbreak of war, an entreaty to ‘dig for victory’, and a description of the evacuation from Dunkirk, with trademark electronica and rock. It is a stunning achievement which reminds, and in the case of younger listeners, tells for the first time, the inspiring story of Britain at war.

It was their tribute to an aircraft, however, which saw their reputation fly. Spitfire, which coupled footage from the 1942 film The First of the Few, with soaring rock riffs, is one of the best tunes of the year, and its championing by BBC 6 Music presenters Marc Riley and Gideon Coe saw PSB become a fixture on national radio.

J admits it seems to have struck a chord. “We have gone from playing to 40-odd people in London to 1,300 in Glastonbury. But I don’t know why. Like other bands we borrow heavily from other people we like, but maybe we are becoming different from others in what we do.

“Perhaps people are tired of the usual set-up of guitars, bass and drums and a moody, angsty singer. We are energetic and fun on stage and hopefully people warm to us. Nothing we’ve done hasn’t been done before, but what’s new is the way everything comes together cleverly by accident, hangs together well as a live concept.”

The album sees Willgoose and Wrigglesworth giving the PSB treatment to peacetime public information films. Their song Night Mail interweaves extracts of WH Auden’s rhythmic poem (“This is the night mail crossing the border, bringing the cheque and the postal order...) with a dream-pop soundtrack, chunky beats and footage from the eponymous 1936 GPO film. Everest, meanwhile, fuses clips from 1953 documentary The Conquest of Everest to ambient pop, while Late Night Final evokes the gritty despair of the postwar years with samples from the Central Office of Information’s 1948 film of the same name.

“We are bringing these films into the present with the music we are making, and there are interesting parallels by placing it in today’s world,” says J. “London Can Take It, for example, was made during the blitz but grim things are still happening on a daily basis — yet it can still take it. “There is an amazing spirit.”

Despite their quarrying of the past, J insists there is no nostalgia. Neither is there any “tub thumping”. “It was very studiously not about that,” he says.

“Writing Spitfire with a ‘krautrock’ soundtrack gives it quite an ironic undercurrent. And the sample of Neville Chamberlain saying ‘ this country is at war with Germany’ was changed, after consultation with the missus, to just say ‘this country is at war’.”

And it’s not just going down well with younger listeners here. “There was a 90 year-old man at a gig in Coventry who loved it, and we have played two shows in Germany, and had the same reaction,” says J.

“I am not a historian,” he adds. “I was totally ignorant of the Second World War and had to do some serious reading. Hopefully if other people are interested in what they hear it will prompt them to find out more about it.”

Even the British Film Institute, which provides most of the samples, are fans.

“Initially they were a bit confused, which was fair enough,” says J. “But, now they have seen, it they are 100 per cent behind it.”

  • Public Service Broadcasting
  • Truck festival, Steventon n Tomorrow (Friday)
  • Tickets from truckfestival.com