Penguin Cafe Orchestra – who described their music as “modern semi-acoustic chamber music” – caught the attention of Brian Eno as they explored the nature of randomness. Founder Simon Jeffes died in 1997 but the band and their ambitions live on through his son. In 2017 we took a look at their prog credentials.
In 1972, Simon Jeffes was on holiday in the South of France when he contracted food poisoning from fish. During a high fever he experienced a series of hallucinations, including a dystopian vision of the future. He recalled the incident in 1988.
“The next day, when I felt better, I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out, ‘I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe; I will tell you things at random,’ and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what’s most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe, your unconscious can just be.”
And so the idea for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra was born. This strangest of concepts defined a mental space which Jeffes could fill with musical ideas. With its shifting cast of over 30 musicians he produced some of the most singular music of the 70s and 80s, until his death in 1997, aged 49.
He’d started out in a classical guitar group, but by the late 70s found himself disenchanted with both that outfit’s repertoire and rock’n’roll. That was when Emily Young – one of the UK’s foremost sculptors, a distant friend of Syd Barrett and thought to be the inspiration for Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play – met Jeffes.
“It was the 60s when Simon started being who he was in terms of a musician and composer, and leaping out of the rather dismal past,” says Young. “And in that kind of optimism, it’s similar to what Syd Barrett was doing – it’s quite English.”
Much of Jeffes’ music is hard to pin down; mercurial in nature and full of contradictions. Young is right that with its strong melodies, whimsicality, wit and generally unassuming nature, it carries a distinct feeling of Englishness. But then it’s also pervaded by the rhythms and melodic figures of Africa and South America.
“He wanted to put all that together,” says Young. “He used guitar and percussion, ukulele and cuatro, with the classical strings playing together so beautifully and so tight. But then there was also the looseness, the way your body can go with the rhythm.”
Asked to categorise his music in 1988, Jeffes chose the descriptions “imaginary folklore” and “modern semi-acoustic chamber music.” Young recalls that, when the Orchestra were in their early stages, one of their gigs was listed in the “other” category in Time Out magazine.
In the mid-70s, Jeffes’ music caught the attention of Brian Eno as he was setting up his Obscure record label, which served as a haven for some of the avant-garde composers of the day. “It was a bit of a fluke,” Young explains. “Brian had these people he was working with in a leftfield zone. Then Simon turned up, and what he was doing was so unlike anything else that Brian – bless him – said, ‘We’ll do something; we’ll see what happens.’”
The Orchestra’s 1976 debut album, Music From The Penguin Cafe, features a core of four musicians, with vocals by Young on From The Colonies. It was the only time she sang on record, as Jeffes decided to pursue a purely instrumental tack thereafter; but she helped define the group’s aesthetic by painting surreal album covers which featured penguin-headed humans in strange tableaux.
Penguin Cafe Single sounds like an old parlour tune done ragtime style, with see-sawing string figures dropping down in a middle section of twinkling electric pianos. On first listening – like many of their pieces – it feels uncannily like something that one has heard before. And as Young says, stylistically it’s almost impossible to date.
Simon was really interested in the harmonics and how sound affects you
Emily Young
“He wanted it to be a universal pleasure so that anybody, anywhere in the world could listen to it and get as much pleasure out of it as he did,” she says. “It was intellectually interesting, but at the same time he wanted his emotional world to sing and feel free.”
In 1985 Penguin Cafe Orchestra appeared as the musical interlude on the BBC chat show Wogan, playing the jig-like Music For A Found Harmonium, which the host described as “like The Chieftains with Japanese undertones.”
Young remembers that Jeffes would sit for long periods at a piano, listening to the harmonics and overtones of single notes, then those of notes played together. His fascination with sound led to the couple enjoying rather some unusual nights out.
“We’d smoke a little dope and go down to Heathrow Airport and wander around late at night when there were very few people,” she recalls. “The sounds of the airport were fantastic – all these different hums and knocks, and noises coming from behind locked doors. It was the notion that the whole airport was one huge musical instrument.
“Simon was really interested in the harmonics and how sound affects you. Sometimes you’d get two different noises going at the same time and they were making a chord; sometimes major and sometimes minor. There was a click-click-click from an escalator, so you’ve got a rhythm going on at the same time as the air conditioning hum.”
Learning the pieces has been a bit like playing with him… there’s a complexity there that I hadn’t clocked first time around
Arthur Jeffes
The group’s most experimental piece, Telephone And Rubber Band (from 1981’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra), is based on recordings of a phone line’s engaged and ringing tones. It’s also their most widely heard, as it was used in mobile network One2One’s TV ads in the 90s.
Jeffes died on December 11, 1997 of an inoperable brain tumour. His colleagues continued to play his music as The Orchestra That Fell To Earth, and delivered a trio of memorial concerts at London’s Union Chapel in 2007, joined by Arthur Jeffes, son of Simon and Young – who remembers the pieces feeling “like old friends you thought you wouldn’t see again.”
Arthur went on to form Penguin Cafe, playing his father’s music in concert along with his own material. “I was a very inexperienced musician at that point and all the musicians had their own ideas about how the tunes should go – there was no central authority,” Arthur explains.
“I wouldn’t have been able to continue with them so we just left it there. It was beautiful but we’ve closed the chapter. I think there was a general agreement that it had to be that way.” (One ex-Orchestra player approached for this piece politely declined to be interviewed, feeling that their contributions were now effectively written out of history.)
In December 2017, Penguin Cafe played a concert to mark the 20th anniversary of Simon’s passing, which coincided with the label Erased Tapes reissuing the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s last album, 1993’s Union Cafe. The group played it in its entirety. “In a funny way, learning all the pieces from Union Cafe has been a bit like playing with him,” Arthur says. “It’s been emotionally turbulent and fun. It was really interesting because there’s a complexity there that I hadn’t clocked first time around.”
He cites the example of Lifeboat, on which he played piano live, with Neil Codling of Suede on cuatro. It took a while to perfect the timing of their respective patterns – in different time signatures – but when they did it yielded “a melodic result you wouldn’t otherwise have.”
There’s a drum sound that’s just like a Roland TR-909. But actually it was a floorboard in the kitchen
Arthur Jeffes
The composition that most clearly demonstrates the relationship between rhythm and melody in his father’s music – plus his impish sense of humour – is Discover America, on Union Cafe. The strings play Home On The Range and When The Saints Go Marching In at the same time, which works delightfully. This curious counterpoint produces an unexpected bonus. “There are three occasions where you get this enormous chord which is straight out of Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland,” says Arthur.
He also plays in Sundog, in a piano/violin duet with Oli Langford, but as Penguin Cafe he’s recorded albums that are certainly cut the cloth of the parent group. He describes his own music as “more filmic,” saying it feels more expansive – more opened out. So is it a homage to his father’s music, a continuation of a style, or is it all just in the genes?
“All three,” he replies. “I know when I’m happy with a particular piece going into a Penguin Cafe project; but some things are just not right for it. It’s quite instinctive.” He feels his musical activities are complementary. “That has to be the point,” he says. “Every year or so I think about just stopping. But then I find something and think, ‘Oh, that would be really good; that would work.’ So we’re being pulled forward rather than being pushed forward.”
Arthur’s music also demonstrates a familiar fascination with sonics. “On the Penguin Cafe album The Imperfect Sea, there’s a slightly house drum that sounds just like a Roland TR-909 [rhythm machine]. But actually it was a floorboard in the kitchen of my house that had this lovely resonance if you tapped it with your finger. We put a microphone on a dishcloth on the floorboard and played that.
“So what I’m looking for is to find ways to recreate electronic sound organically and played on real instruments. And that rather sounds like fun.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
