18 January 2011
Articles | Certificates and Obituaries
Obituary: Trish Keenan
Shock as news of Trish Keenan’s death is Broadcast
Words Ben Cardew
Broadcast could be a scary, sometimes foreboding beast musically. But if there was always warmth and light at their heart it was largely due to the voice of Trish Keenan, who died On January 14, aged 42.
The band were formed in Birmingham in 1995 by Keenan and partner James Cargill. The earliest Broadcast songs were full of space-age sixties pop cool and Stereolab were an obvious point of comparison. Even back then, though, Keenan’s voice — a thing of incredible clarity and expression — was enough to set Broadcast apart.
The band signed to Warp and released their debut album, The Noise Made By People, in 2000. It contained what was probably their signature track, ‘Come On Let’s Go’, a melancholy swoon of a song up there with the very best of the decade.
If they had stuck in this vein, sales may well have followed. But ever keen to mutate, 2003’s Haha Sound, saw the band throw everything from jazz to Velvet Underground-style filth into the mix.
“Haha Sound was like a jewellery box, full of sparkling things,” Trish told The Stool Pigeon in 2005. But for their next album, 2005’s Tender Buttons, they “turned off the jewellery”. “We needed to do something that was more us, other than in the shadow of all the sixties bands,” Trish added.
The band’s last record — a genuinely unsettling collaboration with The Focus Group grandly entitled Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age — was released in 2009.
It was during a tour of Australia that Trish got sick. Rumours started to surface at the start of the year that she was hospitalised, gravely ill with pneumonia. Warp announced that she had tragically died on January 14.
The reaction was extraordinary: Graham Coxon, Flying Lotus and Zooey Deschanel all paid tribute, while everyone from The Daily Mail to The New York Times ran with the news.
“I don’t know where we stand. We get good reviews but nobody buys it,” Trish also told us in 2005. “There is the promo world that exists and there is life in this house. It’s weird that there are these posh photos, but I look around my bedroom and it’s a mess.”
Trish Keenan, Broadcast singer, b. 28.09.1968, d, 14.01.2011
