Here at NCB Radio, there’s very little we love more than sharing the music we love and telling you all about it. It’s kinda why we do what we do – simply, its for the love of music.

While it would be easy for us to give in to Doreen McInnerny’s demands for a weekly “Doreen’s Diary” column where she tells you about the night Eddie dared to cook her peas for dinner, we thought that actually, we’d share some of our favourite music with you.

So, welcome to “Now that’s what I call NCB Radio” – volume one – with our founder and weekend presenter Aaron James sharing one of his musical loves this week. Mostly because it was his idea in the first place. Here is an album Aaron thinks you should listen to.

Inform-Educate-Entertain by Public Service Broadcasting: I must confess, I’m a massive, massive fan of Public Service Broadcasting and that’s why every so often I do a full album playback on my show just because I can. Indeed, as I’m writing this, I’m listening to their 2019 album ‘Bright Magic’.

PSB state their mission is to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, much like the original founding mantra of the BBC and the way they do this is by creating music featuring old archival clips they acquired after working with the British Film Institute to tell a story. For example, their debut EP, the War Room tells the tale of World War II through five tracks, all using samples from different British World War II propaganda films. Likewise, the White Star Liner does the same for the Titanic, using old film clips. You get the idea.

Inform-Educate-Entertain was PSB’s debut album from 2013 and features samples from the 1942 film The First of the Few (the excellent track ‘Spitfire’), Marie Slocombe talking about the BBC Sound Archive, the 1959 road safety film Signal 30, the 1936 documentary Night Mail and even Thomas Woodroffe’s drunken radio broadcast from HMS Nelson at the Spithead review among the samples used across this album’s eleven tracks. There’s even one about Peak 15- better known to you and I as Mount Everest.

On this album, J. Willgoose Esq masterfully crafts the samples into the songs, not only to tell the tales he wishes to convey but also to create memorable, listenable songs where the sampled clips effectively take the place of vocals. After a few listens of Spitfire, you will probably find yourself speaking along as the voice of Leslie Howard as R J Mitchell states “It’s tiring always stretching out for something that’s out of reach. But I’ll get it. After all, what I want isn’t as easy as all that”.

It’s hard to say what genre Inform-Educate-Entertain is; maybe it’s too difficult to put into a single genre but for the sake of clarity – think of it as an indie history lesson. One where instead of books about Hitler, the teacher gets out a guitar, sampler and drums. Give it a listen.