A true artist: The legacy of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan
Few bands have created such a flawless and unique body of work as Broadcast, which was formed in 1995 by Trish Keenan and James Cargill. Between then and 2011, the band created music that occupied a complete world of its own, evoking a haunting and spectral atmosphere that completely engulfed the listener.
Keenan passed away in 2011 when she was 42. She had contracted swine flu while on tour, which led her to develop pneumonia. Her death put an end to Broadcast, although in the years since her passing, Cargill has released various recordings that the pair were working on, like the soundtrack for Berberian Sound Studio and Keenan’s four-track demos. Yet, while Broadcast’s name is familiar to many fans of alternative music with an interest in retro-sounding electronics and psychedelia, Keenan remains an obscure figure.
It’s a shame that her legacy remains relatively niche because her music career was so impressive. She was utterly enraptured by her creative process, weaving sonic worlds that feel like they could only exist in a dream or a film. On Mother Is The Milky Way, which Cargill released in 2022 after it was initially made by the pair in 2009, you can really hear the influence of 1960s and ‘70s folk horror movies. With its mixture of found sounds, audio samples, and dizzying electronics, it’s Keenan’s gentle voice that cements this collage together.
Whether they were doing more experimental projects like Microtronics, which played with an ambitious blend of jazz and electronica, or more conventionally structured tracks, Broadcast was always doing something innovative. On their studio albums – The Noise Made By People, Haha Sound, and Tender Buttons – pop-inspired structures were used to explore the kinds of sounds that other bands just weren’t, talking inspiration from library music, early electronica, obscure soundtracks, ‘60s psychedelia, and space rock. These experiments backed Keenan’s sumptuous vocals, which she allowed to warp and dissolve depending on what was required.
One of the band’s most well-known songs is ‘Tears In The Typing Pool’, a subdued effort that allows Keenan’s gentle vocals to take precedence. It’s intimate and striking, making you stop in your tracks when it plays on your headphones. Yet, every time it comes on, it’s worth stopping what you’re doing and soaking up every line, humming along to Keenan’s contemplative “Do do, do do-dos.” It is easily one of the greatest songs of the 2000s, and Keenan deserves her dues for delivering such an emotionally poignant performance.
The beauty of Keenan’s voice was that she could use it to fill a space when needed, too – she could be a lot more than haunting and ethereal. On ‘Papercuts’, her voice is more defiant and even slightly soulful, singing, “the writing for pleasure you wouldn’t let me read,” with particular potency. ‘Come On Let’s Go’, on the other hand, is more playful and reassuring, with Keenan singing resonant lyrics like “Stop looking for answers in everyone’s face/ Come on, let’s go/ What’s the point in wasting time on people that you’ll never know?”
Keenan was an underrated lyricist, too, and it often felt as though she was letting listeners into her inner world. On ‘Message From Home’, Keenan gets brutally honest with the subject, delivering unforgettable and relatable lines in the process, like “Why do I open my mouth/ Where I know silence should’ve been?” Meanwhile, other songs are much more abstract or poetic, like ‘Tender Buttons’, where Keenan lists strings of words beginning with C, or ‘Corporeal,’ in which she emphasises the fact that, despite everything, we are all just bodies: “Under the x-ray, I’m just a vertebrate.”
With the release of Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000-2006 at the end of September, just before the 13th anniversary of her death, the extensive artistic experiments made by Keenan throughout the years will be fully consumable. She deserves to be remembered for making such spectacular contributions to music, where nothing was compromised, and everything was beautifully executed.
