In 1975, a time-traveling being from a distant but familiar realm left an indelible imprint on Trish Keenan's mind. The character title from Heaven, one of those weird British sci-fi shows supposedly made for kids in the 60s and 70s, he speaks with a cold, eerie feeling, his voice slightly distorted by the tight reverberation. When exercising his telepathic powers, Skye stares down the barrel of the camera, his eyes and palm imbued with a raw glow of color-keys. James Cargill, who founded Broadcast with Keenan in 1995, spoke about Of the Heaven profound influence on the band during a 2009 interview XLR8R. He cited the show's cocoon of white noise and paranoid, spectral atmosphere as key building blocks for Broadcast's retro-futuristic psychedelia. In promotional photos, Keenan often mimicked Sky, bathed in oversaturated colors and reaching out to the viewer. She always seemed outrageous, as if her icy contraltos and surreal lyrics radiated from some distant corner of time and space. When Keenan died of pneumonia in 2011, it was tragic not just because of the sudden loss of a brilliant, exploratory musician, but because a portal to another dimension had been permanently closed.
On Keenan's 43rd birthday, just eight months after her death, Cargill posted “The Song Before the Song Comes Out” to his SoundCloud page. The 40-second recording features a breathless Keenan singing a fast-paced tune, seemingly struck by inspiration mid-ride. In the background, under a soft static hum, you can hear her footsteps keeping time. The melody unfolds gracefully, as if it's a lullaby it's known all its life, the occasional flared note a product of the native's overthinking. Despite its brevity, the demo recording captures what made Broadcast so special: the hypnagogic interplay of children's tunes and the noise that surrounds them.
In November 2011, Cargill said The guardian that he was building a new Broadcast record from Keenan's vast treasury of home recordings. It would be a monument to her earlier talent, a fitting cap to the show's all-too-brief arc. That album never came, but for several years, Cargill kept up the tradition of sharing one or two of Keenan's demos on her birthday. It was a gift to the perpetually disheartened fans trawling Soulseek and YouTube for any unheard bits of the band's special magic. Over time, the links died and Cargill's blog posts gradually slowed down, but dedicated heads doubled as archivers, preserving the songs on YouTube and Reddit. In 2022, Warp continued their fan service and deepened the band's legacy by releasing Maida Vale Sessionsa selection of the band's BBC studio recordings, along with reissues of two previously tour-only LPs; Mictotronics and The Mother is the Milky Way. Now, me Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009, we finally get to hear what an album of new Broadcast material could sound like. It assembles 36 demos (including “The Song Before the Song Comes Out,” “Petal Alphabet” and “Tunnel View,” which Cargill previously released) into a warm and sprawling 65-minute tribute to Trish Keenan, providing an intimate look her otherworldly genius.
