LIVE REVIEW: Public Service Broadcasting

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Public Service Broadcasting

Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow

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Public Service Broadcasting are one of those bands who came up with a fairly distinctive idea at the start of their career and decided to doggedly stick with it. This is almost certainly the only way in which they resemble the monomaniacal likes of Motorhead and the Ramones.

As any regular listener of BBC 6 Music will tell you – if they didn't already exist, that station would have to invent them - PSB's retro-futurist shtick involves festooning their crisp synths and guitar-driven art rock with audio clips taken from old films, documentaries and news sources.

While this isn't an entirely original conceit - PSB are basically '70s Pink Floyd with a laptop and unlimited access to the BFI archive - the overall effect is often quite haunting and powerful.

But there's no denying that their second album, 2015's typically conceptual The Race for Space, is still the high watermark of everything they set out to achieve. Fortunately, it featured quite heavily during this balmy summer evening outdoor performance.

Although I quite like some of their music, I wasn't expecting to be particularly moved tonight, and especially not by the sight of several hundred people holding their twinkling white light smartphones aloft.

But when they did just that - in what would appear to be a band-endorsed fan ritual - at the precise moment during The Other Side when a late '60s NASA operative welcomes Apollo 8 as it emerges from the dark side of the moon, well, it was a genuinely magical moment.

The other spirit-lifting highlights: an unexpected cameo from a boisterous brass section, a joyous race through signature tune Go!, and every time guest contributor EERA blessed us with her crystalline Sandy Denny floating in space vocals.

In a word: cosmic.