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Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Public Service Broadcasting: Tiny Desk Concert

These guys don't speak or sing a word, but each song sends a clear message. Public Service Broadcasting is a duo featuring the nerdy J. Willgoose, Esq. on guitar, banjo and electronics and Wrigglesworth on drums. The source material for the music is British public-service films from roughly the 1940s through the 1960s.

The band projects carefully crafted films from those public-service messages that sync to the music, liberally using footage and voices from the past as a way of looking at the present. Public Service Broadcasting puts it all together in a powerful way — it's sometimes melancholy but mostly good fun. It's entertainment as education for the head and feet alike.

In this Tiny Desk Concert, we project a few of those films in the bright daylight of our office. It frankly works better in a dark club, but the music made in this small setting remains huge and powerful.

Set List

  • "Signal 30"
  • "Spitfire"
  • "Everest"
  • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Olivia Merrion, Meredith Rizzo; photo by Jim Tuttle/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.
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