SIMON JEFFES was resting on a beach in the south of France in 1972, recovering from food poisoning, when he had a strange hallucination of a world devoid of joy or colour, except for a noisy, happy, place called The Penguin Café which had its own house band.
Jeffes, a composer and classically trained musician, was inspired to form a group that would be the house band to his imaginary café and thus the strange, wonderful, world of The Penguin Café Orchestra was born. From 1976 until Jeffes’ passing in 1997, the band released eight albums of beautifully eccentric music which mixed English classical, pop, prog, world, and avant garde.
Today the Penguin Café Orchestra lives again through Simon’s son Arthur Jeffes and his Music From The Penguin Café project. Arthur and friends will perform Penguin Café Orchestra songs as well as Arthur’s own compositions in the Radisson SAS Hotel on Friday July 17 at 8pm as part of the Galway Arts Festival.
The ensemble Arthur has drawn together for Music From The Penguin Café are about the same age as the original members of the PCO when they first started playing together in the 1970s. Why this approach?
“It’s been 12 years since my father died and for a long time to go back to his music was a sensitive and emotionally difficult thing to do,” Arthur tells me during out Thursday morning interview. “In 2007 to mark the 10th anniversary since he died I got together with the old members of the Penguin Café Orchestra did three one off concerts.
“It was really lovely but there was a question in our minds whether it was apt to go on with it. These were musicians I grew up with and was in awe of. For them it was a professional thing. It didn’t make sense to do it with them.
“Over the next year I found myself asked to do concerts, as I am a producer and composer in my own right, and I found myself playing more and more of my dad’s music and it seemed like the right thing to do - a new enterprise based on the old.”
The Jeffes household in Shepherd’s Bush was always a hive of musical activity - either the family would get together to play or musicians would call around seeking Simon’s help. One musician Simon worked with was Sid Vicious.
“Dad never talked about doing the string arrangement for Sid Vicious on ‘My Way’,” says Arthur. “It was one of a million jobs he did in London at the time but I think secretly he was proud of it. It’s a classic. He was also asked to be the African drumming consultant for Adam Ant! He’d have all kinds of people coming through the house. I remember at 14/15 being very excited that The Orb and Andrew Weatherall were coming around for dinner. That’s when I realised how cool all this stuff was my dad did.”
The Penguin Café Orchestra was Simon’s personal project of musical adventure. What was that strange vision he had in France which led him to form the band?
“He was in the south of France and had eaten some bad shellfish,” says Arthur. “He had a horrible fever and a waking dream of a nightmare vision of the future where everyone lived in these soulless blocks of apartments where you could look into different rooms. There was a couple making love lovelessly, a man playing music with headphones on so you couldn’t hear, and another man just watching television. None were engaging with life.
“Further down the street there was a place with light spilling out and noise and chaotic music and tables with sawdust on the floor. There was always something going on here and a band that played ‘imaginary folk music’. The idea was that the music seemed familiar and it seemed like it’s for you and it was something you could find if you looked for it. That was my dad’s idea for the Penguin Café Orchestra and he spent his life searching for the music for that band.”
Simon gathered together a team of friends and fellow musicians, including Steve Nye, producer for Bryan Ferry, XTC, and Clannad, and in 1976, they released their debut Music From The Penguin Café. Now rightly regarded as a classic, back then its classical meets pop flourishes seemed very odd with The Clash, the Damned, and Sex Pistols banging down the musical doors.
However doing something different was always the Simon Jeffes way and Arthur fondly recalls the lengths his father would go to create new approaches to creating music.
“The song ‘Telephone And A Rubber Band’ [from the band’s eponymously titled second album from 1981] dad found when he phoned someone and because of a crossed wire he got an engaged tone and a dialling tone,” recalls Arthur. “Instead of hanging up he unswitched the telephone and put it into a tape machine and recorded it, then put it into a tape loop and played the violin over it. The rubber band came from a rubber band he had around a chair and he’d pluck it. He found that when he held it at a certain position it would sound like a New Orleans washtub bass.
“Dad was an English eccentric composer. To combine Venezuelan music with English Renaissance music is an interesting idea but it has to be played with warmth and made attractive. For dad it had to be combined with the human heart and have a human element in the music.”
This approach has been of huge significance to Arthur and has profoundly influenced his own compositions.
“My musical landscape is populated by things that spring from Penguin Café reference points,” he says. “When I get to the point of having found something elegant and new to my ears I get it from my dad’s school of composing. Then you need to bring it back to the ear of the person who will be listening and have an emotional response. The balance has to be right and you have to take it to the listener rather then waiting for them to find it. That’s a very Penguin Café Orchestra idea.”
For tickets contact the Festival Box Office, Merchants Road, 091 - 566577. Tickets are also available through www.galwayartsfestival.com
