Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The first time US aviator Amelia Earhart crashed a plane, she immediately — and before her instructor had time to react — cut the engine and collected herself. Her companion turned round to find the 24-year-old powdering her nose. “We have to look nice when the reporters come,” Earhart told her.It was only a matter of time before Earhart’s remarkable character and career made it into the music of Public Service Broadcasting. Since their first album in 2013, the British band have sought out stories of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, of impossible circumstances and humanity’s use of technology to overcome them. Their idiosyncratic use of archive audio recordings has spanned the second world war, the ascent of Everest, the space race, the Welsh miners’ strike — and now the exploits of the Kansas-born pioneer.Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, the first to fly nonstop from the east coast of the US to the west, and the setter of numerous speed and altitude records. She was also a charismatic, compassionate woman with a background in nursing and social work. “I don’t want to be known always merely as the first woman to fly the Atlantic,” she said upon arriving in London in 1928. “Aviation is a great thing, but it cannot fill one’s life completely.”“She’s one of those rare people who has that drive and acts upon it, even when to the rest of us it seems unfathomably crazy in terms of the odds of survival,” says Public Service Broadcasting’s founder and self-confessed “benevolent dictator”, J Willgoose Esq. “That’s a different level of humanity.”The Last Flight, the band’s fifth studio album, focuses on Earhart’s ill-fated attempt in 1937 to become the first woman to fly around the world. She had completed about 35,000km of the 46,000km journey when her Lockheed Electra 10E disappeared between New Guinea and Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. The exact circumstances of her death are unknown and the aircraft was never found.It’s not the first musical tribute Earhart has inspired: Joni Mitchell wrote of “the drone of flying engines” in her 1976 song “Amelia”. And last month, American artist and musician Laurie Anderson released Amelia, her own interpretation of the aviator’s final journey. “The more you read about her and her story, the more you realise that it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of who she really was,” Willgoose says. “She wanted to feel alive in every moment.”Public Service Broadcasting found fame repurposing old public information films for their vocals, but celebrating luminaries such as Earhart is another motif. Whether they concern Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin or BBC sound archive founder Marie Slocombe, the band’s songs act as striking portraits, personifying them not just in soundbites but in rhythm and instrumentation too.This is all the more apparent on The Last Flight, which takes a step back from the archives towards a more original approach to Earhart’s vocals. This was partly driven by necessity, as the few interviews with her that have survived were the product of rather flat 1930s broadcasting styles. “She comes across as quite stilted and wooden, and that is really not a reflection of her character,” says Willgoose. To remedy this, the band approached actor Kate Graham to play Earhart, reading lines that Willgoose put together from press cuttings, radio logs, scrapbooks, journals and the two books that she wrote. “How marvellous is the machine and the mind that made it” was one line jotted in a journal that Willgoose chose to feature on the track “Electra” — “pure lyricism”, as he puts it.The question of man versus machine recurs throughout Public Service Broadcasting’s work, be it the space programmes that emerged from the nuclear arms race, the creativity that went into building the Spitfire or the mechanisation of the coal industry that made it both safer and less reliant on human workers. “It’s that double-edged sword of human progress,” Willgoose says. “There’s also the slightly more tongue-in-cheek element that when you come and watch us play live, the machines are doing the heavy work.”With the band’s back catalogue continuing to expand, they now draw as much on their own history as that of their subjects: on “Electra” you can hear the same choppy drumming motif mimicking a propeller from “Spitfire” (from their first album, Inform-Educate-Entertain), or a callback to the idea of machines taking over the duties of man that appears on both “Progress” on Every Valley and “Der Rhythmus der Maschinen” on Bright Magic.For all the technology involved, though, Willgoose is reluctant to make the themes of the records themselves overly modern — about, say, the Covid pandemic or Brexit. “I think there’s something about the distance that helps,” he says. “A lot of the big subjects of today that people suggest, I just don’t want to go anywhere near.”Instead, Public Service Broadcasting aim to contextualise the present through the past. Every Valley, for example, was recorded in the town of Ebbw Vale, which had one of the highest Leave votes in Wales despite receiving millions in EU funding. The album’s themes of industrial action and discontent reverberate in the way it voted in the 2016 referendum.The Last Flight looks to balance the poignancy of Earhart’s fate with her indefatigable character. On the eve of her round-the-world flight, she wrote to a friend: “As far as I know, I’ve got only one obsession — a small and probably typical feminine horror of growing old — so I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back.”The final track on the album is named “Howland”, after the island that Earhart was searching for when she disappeared. Muffled, frantic dialogue cuts across strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra as Graham reads lines from “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The day returns, but nevermore/Returns the traveller to the shore.”After a short silence at the end of the song, the sound of wind and waves and birdsong cuts through, recorded on the Pacific Ocean outpost. After the roaring engines and pulsing propellers, the sudden quiet speaks volumes. We are staring out to sea, waiting for a plane that will never arrive.‘The Last Flight’ is released on October 4. A tour of the UK and Europe begins in October, publicservicebroadcasting.net
