Fourteen years have passed since the sudden and devastating loss of Trish Keenan at the age of forty-two, her absence becoming the inescapable shadow looming over Broadcast’s music and any attempt to grapple with their legacy. It’s tempting and all too easy to fold everything the Birmingham duo achieved into the tragedy of Keenan’s death, to imagine a kind of preordained melancholy running through their work, only fully revealing itself once you already know the ending. But at the same time, there is an uncanny appropriateness in the fact that Keenan is now only reachable through the archive of the art itself, and in the memory of those who connect with it. Equally uncanny is how both she and Broadcast’s music, though clearly made by humans in a specific era, never felt fully anchored to time or place. Instead, they crafted something that exists solely on its own parallel dimension, with a few scattered brushes reminiscent of ours. And in that mission, right up until Keenan died of pneumonia in 2011 and even beyond it, Broadcast succeeded with flying colors.
Emerging from Birmingham’s late-’90s indie scene as outsiders, their fondness (alongside Pram, also from Birmingham) for retro-futuristic, space-age pop music that hinted at neo-noir and classic Bond flicks was almost unparalleled in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. This was especially true when mixed with Keenan’s spellbinding, cold voice and a tinge of the same pillowy yet towering treatment given to synths, distortion and noise that had made certain shoegaze contemporaries so resounding. Having released some of their earliest singles on Stereolab’s Duophonic label, the comparisons to Laetitia Sadier’s equally legendary band were all too constant, but any of Broadcast’s defining features accounted for a different (and stranger) kind of magnetism. In the few releases they had to their name twenty years ago, Broadcast seemed to have grasped how past and future could actually collide into one another, how they could sound like a ‘60s legacy act making records in the 2000s that already felt like they were soundtracking the years and decades to come. This sensibility had roots in Keenan’s own upbringing. While attending Catholic school, she was casually exposed to the unsettling and bizarre British ‘70s television, from Children of the Stones and Sky to The Owl Service. And given the influences that permeate their early work, it only seems fitting that Keenan met James Cargill, her eventual bandmate and partner, at a 60s-themed psychedelic club known as Sensateria. They would spend the rest of their time together transforming those same reference points into uncanny, marginal creations that somehow sounded believable to common people, made to fill a void and provide solace where words and even the company of others fell short, using the endless echo chambers of music as their vessel.
It wasn’t long until Broadcast signed to Warp, who gathered those early singles into Work and Non Work in 1997, but the group would spend three more years sculpting their first proper studio album. With keyboardist Roj Stevens, guitarist Tim Felton and drummer Steve Perkins completing the lineup, Broadcast immediately stood out on a label long synonymous with experimental electronic visionaries like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards of Canada. For Haha Sound (2003), their second full-length, they even received production guidance from labelmate Squarepusher after deciding to produce the songs by themselves. But it’s The Noise Made By People - which just turned twenty-five last March - that remains the clearest early declaration of Broadcast’s refusal to align with earthly rules. An album unequivocally indebted to the life-changing power of cinema, its tracks bear the mark of composers like Ennio Morricone, especially on "Unchanging Window", while "Papercuts" conjures a timeless yearning that feels alien to both the pre-digital and the internet eras alike. Even "Echo’s Answer" seems to emerge from another realm entirely, Keenan’s angelic presence rendered all the more eerie against the vague and ominous background instrumentation, still managing to channel elegance out of such dissonance.
But by the time Broadcast reached their third album in 2005, reality itself had begun to dissipate further into their music. Financial constraints had pared the band down to a duo once again - the track "Minus 3", perhaps by accident, seems to nod towards this paradigm shift – on what Keenan herself described as a painfully necessary change: “We came back from America on the Haha tour and it just felt like we were really sick of how we worked. We always wear our references too much on our sleeves. We needed to do something that was more us, other than in the shadow of all the 60s bands”. Stripping away the layers of homage and influence that had weighed on earlier releases, Tender Buttons captured the most distilled version of Broadcast up until that point. Minimalist in construction, yes, but also the perfect setup to bring the most out of Keenan as a vocalist, but especially as a writer and storyteller.
Like author Gertrude Stein in her 1914 book of the same name, Keenan drew from her own life experiences and reframed them through a mystical lens, in an attempt to get rid of all the burdens that come with talking about who you are and what makes you human. To achieve that, she treated words as a playground for abstraction and the songs themselves as vehicles for self-exploratory freedom. On the danceable and straightforward "Michael A Grammar", Keenan literally puts that thesis into practice during the song’s catchy chorus: “if you're feeling like you're looking for that chance, then let go”. That framework is also keenly reflected in "Goodbye Girls", where Keenan explores her mother’s past experiences with sex work. “I imagine what it’s like to be a prostitute, what you have to turn off inside to do it”, she confessed in an interview conducted just before Tender Buttons’ release. “To a certain degree it’s a description of my mum. She has a blankness to her some times. There’s reasons she ended up as a prostitute”. This recurring theme of letting go is, however, also tied to the loss of her father to cancer while making the album. "Tears In The Typing Pool", the band’s greatest case for a ballad so absolutely heart-wrenching in its toned-down simplicity, is a silent cry of anguish at the helplessness of watching a loved one slowly succumbing to death and the need to process the everyday grief of being impotent to stop it. It’s one of many songs on Tender Buttons written in between Keenan’s visits to hospice care, while she was also navigating frequent arguments with Cargill. And while that friction never surfaces explicitly on the record, the contrast between her voice and everything around it is just as jarring and unstable.
With the absence of Perkins’ drumming, his parts were almost entirely replaced by harsh beat-machine patterns – save for the album’s brilliant opener, "I Found The F". The warm synths of before were now shredded into shrieking layers of distortion. At times, the carefully manufactured wall of noise coming out of the speakers seems more akin to the buzzing of an 8-bit video game than to the nostalgic haze of the band that, only a few years prior, was deliberately immersed in retro coding. On the title track, Keenan’s whispery and almost mournful delivery barely rises above the abrasive production. That same clashing effect returns later on during the riveting climax of "Subject to the Ladder" and the cryptically satirical "America’s Boy", which pokes fun at the “self-celebratory nature of Americans towards their own country” and their patriotic interventions on foreign land. Even when that hostility isn’t overtly present across Tender Buttons’ endless highlights, this is Broadcast at their most hallucinatory and muted, with traces of Keenan’s fascination with the occult threaded through her everyday streams of consciousness. The vague musings on "Black Cat", allegedly sparked by something as trivial as a shy pet animal belonging to a friend of Keenan’s (even making an appearance in the track’s DIY music video), are made just as intriguing as her cosmic contemplations on discovering “a future so vast” during "Arc of A Journey". Elsewhere, on "Corporeal", Keenan even confronts the complex tension between the body and the soul that inhabits it, in an attempt to reduce the human experience to its physical form.
In retrospect, it feels somewhat fitting that an album, a band and especially a lead vocalist so committed to finding freedom by stepping outside of the self, desperately trying to shift into new characters and identities through her soundwaves, gained such a ghostly presence in the years that followed. There’s certainly no denying how an album like Tender Buttons, in all its greatness, gains a spectral, existential aura when heard against the haunting context of what came after. As Keenan herself reflected in a 2009 interview with The Wire: “[Tender Buttons] completely changed the sound, dynamics, everything really. (…) It wasn't actually meant to end up sounding the way it did. Those were sort of example versions to be arranged and played in a group. But the group never materialized.” And yet the final result has been more than enough to hold up on its own, continually resurfacing to be (re)discovered and resonate with new listeners alongside the rest of the group’s catalog, more so now than during their active years. In The Quietus’ eulogy to the late singer, music journalist David Stubbs rightly points out there’s some injustice in that outcome which even the growing reputation can’t fully erase: “Broadcast were denizens of a 21st century underworld, increasingly disregarded by the mainstream in a way that previous generations of rock and pop mavericks were not”. The fact that someone’s contribution in life may not leave a lasting trace after death is the type of distressing truth only a song like "You And Me In Time", the penultimate track on Tender Buttons, can fully capture. To know it was only played live once, given as an impromptu encore in Melbourne at Broadcast’s second-to-last show, is even more beautifully prophetic, Keenan walking back to the stage on her own and performing it acapella with only a microphone and a loop pedal.
After that same tour in Singapore and Australia in late 2010, Keenan contracted the swine flu, her health rapidly deteriorating after she returned home. Two weeks into the new year came the announcement she was on life support. Just a day later, on January 11th, 2011, Trish Keenan passed away, leaving behind an incalculable legacy that’s still hard to fathom. Two years later, James Cargill completed what is widely regarded as the group’s fourth and last full-length: Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, made in collaboration with Julian House, the multidisciplinary artist who also helped put together Tender Buttons’ artwork. The definitive bookend to their posthumous releases came with last year’s Spell Blanket and Distant Call compilations, turning Keenan’s vault of demos, home recordings and voice memos into both a long-overdue celebration of her brilliance and one last gut-wrenching farewell to what might’ve been, if not for her unexpected, but inevitable death. But for a band that so often mastered the art of remembrance and escape, whether through the sound of the past or the ghosts we carry around, there’s comfort in seeing the lasting echoes of Broadcast and their spellbinding masterpiece sustained and reinforced by memory, like a sort of guardian angel in this eroded world, fleeting through time and space, without ever having truly been bound to it.