What are the chances? You wait ages for a record about the American aviator Amelia Earhart and two come along at once.

At the end of the summer Laurie Anderson released her latest album Amelia, a retelling of the final flight of the pilot whose plane went missing over the Pacific in 1937 on a round-the-world flight.

And now, just a couple of months later we have the archive-haunting, bow tie-wearing, art rock Londoners Public Service Broadcasting with their new album The Last Flight which is, yes, you’ve guessed it, based on Amelia Earhart’s final journey.

Which tells us? “I’m not as original or as interesting as I think I am,” Professor John Willgoose, PSB’s frontman tells me with a wry smile and a hint of chagrin.

“It was a bit gutting. I just couldn’t believe that somebody else had not only written a record about Amelia, but that it focused on the final flight. And they’re coming out within two months of each other.

“There’s no obvious anniversary, there’s no real stimulus for that to happen other than chance I suppose. Yeah, one of those things.”

Art rock band Public Service BroadcastingArt rock band Public Service Broadcasting (Image: free) That said, he points out, “they’re very different records living in different worlds. I think there’s room for both.”

There’s certainly always room for a new Public Service Broadcasting album. Since Willgoose (NB, not his real name, but you may have already guessed that) released EP One in 2010, his band Public Service Broadcasting has carved out a distinctive niche blending guitars, electronics and sampling old public information films to make records based around the Second World War (The War Room), mankind’s attempt to land on the moon (The Race for Space), the rise and fall of the Welsh mining industry (Every Valley) and the 100th anniversary of the BBC (This New Noise, commissioned for the BBC Proms).

As a result, they’ve played venues as diverse as the Royal Albert Hall, the RAF Museum, on board the USS Intrepid and even 300 metres underground in a Polish mine. “That was a weird gig,” Willgoose concedes.

Playing Barrowland later this month should seem almost normal in comparison. “This will be the third time actually for us, which is amazing. It’s pretty much the greatest. We did it once with the Manics as support. That was quite memorable because it wasn't a very friendly crowd. I think we won a few people over.”

The Last Flight sounds on the surface a very PSB record - a mixture of vintage broadcast samples and high-intensity music with more ambient, atmospheric breakouts (as on the track The South Atlantic which comes with vocals from This Is the Kit’s Kate Stables).

But there have been tweaks to the formula this time. The “vintage broadcast samples” are in fact newly created for the record.

“There are no recordings of Amelia’s journey,” Willgoose explains. “You want to be in the cockpit with her for some of it. And there’s not a great deal of her contemporaneously that doesn’t seem a bit stiff and wooden in retrospect and not really a good reflection of her character.” So the band created them from scratch.

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The origin story of the new album started with a notion to make “something less male-heavy,” Willgoose admits. “Ideally something female-led or centred around a female story.

“So much of the archive we’ve used in the past, and so many of the stories we’ve chosen based on the availability of the archives, have been overwhelmingly male. So I wanted to try to redress the balance of that a bit.

“Amelia’s name popped up and I did the most cursory research into her - Wikipedia. But as soon as I read even the merest fraction about her life I realised this is a really fascinating person. It was a privilege getting to know her character a bit better.

“This last journey has attracted a lot of attention because of the way it ended. But I wanted to try and refocus the whole thing through her personality and the sense of adventure she brought to it.

“Her bravery and her philosophical nature all grabbed hold of me.”

How do the story and the music then come together? It’s hard to explain, he says, “because it’s all woven together in my head and it’s a strange place in there. It’s quite hard to untangle after the fact sometimes.”

He mentions the opening track Towards the Dawn. Because it’s about the start of her flight, he suggests, “You just think, ‘Right, high-energy, uptempo, loads of percussive instruments. You’ve got piano, harpsichord, acoustic guitar, 12-stringed guitar, hammered dulcimer, string mikes for the guitars. The drums are driving everything forward. Everything’s about energy and drive.

“And then on Monsoons you’re trying to imagine this wall of rain, this almost unimaginably powerful force reckoned against you, and trying to build that through this almost aggressive guitar sound.

“There are other ones that you take a bit of a left turn with. Like the Fun Of It. I was trying to capture that sense of stubborn pleasure she got in telling people why she did what she did, trying to find room for the lightness and joy she felt.

“There is not one hard and fast set rule for how it comes together. It’s a bit of a mix and match really.”

Mystery surrounds Amelia Earhart's final flightMystery surrounds Amelia Earhart's final flight (Image: free) Willgoose’s background is indie in excelsis. He played in a number of bands that never got anywhere and had, in fact, gone and got himself a real job before starting to make music as Public Service Broadcasting.

“I’d given up on music. I started doing this purely for fun.”

He wasn’t keen on singing himself hence the idea of using samples from public information films. It also connected with his own family history. His great uncle George died at Dunkirk in 1940 at the age of 26.

“I was given his banjolele around a similar age. When it came time to think about writing something with a bit more heft and seriousness to it, to show people there was more to this project than kitsch fun - nothing wrong with that but I wanted to try and challenge it and see how far it could go - World War Two was an obvious suggestion. And part of that was to write a song for him basically and play it on his instrument.”

The result was the song Waltz for George. “When we finally played a headline show in Sunderland in 2022 we managed to play that song live in his hometown for the first time ever, which was very emotional for me and for my family who were there. It was a lovely moment.”

In the past Public Service Broadcasting’s mission statement has been to “teach the lessons of the past through the music of the present." I tell Willgoose I have them down as 20th-century futurists still chasing an idea of utopia.

He is not totally convinced. “I think there is an element of our work focusing on hope and technological innovation and the human spirit. I think the human spirit is at the heart of everything we’ve done and that could be described as utopian,” Willgoose concedes.

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“But I think there is a lot of irony in there as well, some of it really quite dark, especially with Every Valley; using job adverts from the coal industry telling people they would have a job for 400 years.

“Which is why I’ve always fought against the label of nostalgia when it comes to us because we’re not trying to put people in that time. We’re trying to build these lines between then and now and bring our knowledge of what’s actually happened to these revisitations of past events. And in that you do unlock these layers of quite savage irony sometimes.”

Perhaps. But there’s a lot of hope in there too.

“It’s nice to remind people that we do tend to focus as a species on the threats and negativity,” Willgoose admits. “So much of human society is based on cooperation and teamwork, and striving forwards together as a species. And it’s nice to remind people of when we’ve done that successfully in the past.”

Somewhere in the world the sun is always rising.

The Last Flight is out now. Public Service Broadcasting will perform an album launch show at Oran Mor, Glasgow on Wednesday and at The Liquid Room, Edinburgh, on Thursday, via Assai Records. The band then plays Barrowland, Glasgow on October 16 and Music Hall, Aberdeen on October 17