An ode to Sputnik

By Hazel Sheffield

On the evening of October 11th, at the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Macclesfield in north-west England, a group of astronomers were giving the Lovell Space Telescope a break from its normal duties. The telescope, a giant white dish measuring more than 76 metres across and weighing over 3,000 tonnes, usually scans the skies. But tonight, the band Public Service Broadcasting were going to use it as the backdrop in the video for their song “Sputnik”, from their latest album “The Race for Space”.

Public Service Broadcasting don’t sing. Instead, the frontman, J. Willgoose Esq., mines the British Film Institute archives to find soundbites that tell stories, which they then edit together and set to music. With “Sputnik”, he wanted to celebrate the often overlooked Russian astronomers who launched the first satellite in 1957, and chose clips from Soviet propaganda films. “Will the bleep of the satellite bring people closer together in a common understanding?” one commentator asks on the track. “All of the earth shrinks, the universe stretches forth its beckoning hand in a gesture to all mankind.”