It’s striking to reflect that Public Service Broadcasting, and their stirring archival narratives for cinematic rock, electronics and orchestra, have been with us since 2009. Led by instrumentalist-auteur J. Willgoose, Esq., these masters of conceptual pop historiography have depicted humankind scaling Everest and confronting Nazism on 2013’s Inform-Educate-Entertain, and launching into the cosmos on The Race For Space in 2015. 2017’s Every Valley then examined societal struggle via Britain’s coal industry, while 2021’s Bright Magic was a dizzying portrait of Euro-metropolis Berlin. 2023’s This New Noise, recorded live at the BBC Proms, was a love letter to the national broadcaster in its most elemental form. In each case, what was removed in time and specific in nature became vital and universal, as the human spirit was fathomed and saluted.

Now the band will consider a quite different, and more personal, type of heroism. The Last Flight concerns the final voyage of America’s pioneering female “aviatrix” Amelia Earhart. In 1922, aged just 25, she flew higher than any woman before her. In the years that followed she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, set multiple speed and distance records, and mixed with the highest and the best. In 1937 she found a new ceiling to shatter and announced that she would circumnavigate the globe. Taking off from Oakland in her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra aircraft on May 20, she crossed the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. On July 2, she and her navigator Fred Noonan left Papua New Guinea to fly to Howland Island in the Central Pacific. She never made it, and instead ascended to the level of myth reserved for the bravest adventurers.

J. Willgoose, Esq. admits that Amelia Earhart took over his imagination by a circuitous route. I wanted to do a woman-focused story, because most of the archive we have access to is overwhelmingly male, he says. I was initially drawn in by her final fight, rather than the successes that she had, but the more I read the more I became fascinated by her. Her bravery and her aeronautical achievements were extraordinary, but her philosophy and the dignity that she had… she was an outstanding person. The final flight is the spine of the journey: the story jumps off at different points, and examines different facets of her personality, her relationship with her husband, her attitude to flying, her attitude to existing, really. It sounds facile, but even her face contains multitudes.