by LORRAINE CARPENTER

On stage, Birmingham, England's Broadcast are bathed in film, largely found footage bridging the sterile '50s and psychedelic '60s. On record, they draw from the early avant-garde rock and electronic experiments of the Velvet Underground and the United States of America (the band), but Broadcast have proved themselves a band of the present, if not the future. They're well known as the only pop band on Warp Records, the ace techno label co-founded by the late Rob Mitchell. Along with their friend's death, disturbing world events and problems with drummers and studios tainted the making of their sophomore LP, Ha Ha Sound, but Broadcast have emerged with an excellent record and an itch for travel. In anticipation of their second Montreal show this year, the Mirror spoke to Tim Felton about the golden age, cinema as sound and maternal music.

Mirror: What attracted you to that late-'60s aesthetic?

Tim Felton: I suppose it's a golden age for rock music, isn't it? There's a point after the British invasion and before all the 15-minute blues solos that was quite fresh and exciting. There was great experimentation, and it was the first time the working classes had access to equipment that had been out of reach before, so there was a flaring of ideas and technology at the same time.

M: How did you lock into that period as a band?

TF: We were friends for a long time before we formed the band, and we were all interested in that era already. We met in a club in Birmingham in the late '80s called the Sensateria, where DJs played psychedelia and leftfield indie rock, with projections of parachutes and stuff. That was where we first heard the United States of America.

M: How about film? How does it inspire your music?

TF: All art is influential, but film is an especially interesting medium because you have images and sound in one very accessible format. A film may be shot or cut in a particular way that makes you want to take that feeling and try to project it into a piece of music. The song "Valerie" is directly influenced by a Czech film called Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It's a great film, it's quite surreal and pleasantly odd. Trish [Keenan] wrote the song about the feeling it gave her and, also, the film's soundtrack is very emotive-it's simplistic, but it had a nice feel that fitted into the jigsaw of what we were trying to do.

M: I read that the album title is somewhat sarcastic, in light of the fact that, as you said in a recent interview, "It's been quite a dark new millennium so far."

TF: Yeah, but that's only one part of it. "Haha" also means "mother" in Japanese and a haha is a kind of Japanese cinema about mothers. One could say that parts of the LP have a lullaby or nursery-rhyme quality. But it applied to so many different things that we were talking about. Making the LP had been very difficult because of certain problems and bad events, so we wanted to make a positive album to make light of things, you know, say, "Ha ha." So it's not totally cynical, or it's not intended to be. I think it's quite an innocent, optimistic record, really.

With Fly Pan Am at Lion d'Or on Friday, Oct. 17, 9pm, $12

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