Watch Penguin Cafe Orchestra deliver a transcendent performance on ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’
Few musical groups capture the joy of spontaneous musical creation quite like Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Founded by English guitarist and orchestrator Simon Jeffes, the ensemble cultivated a transcendent blend of classical minimalism, jazz, rock, folk and countless other musical styles from all over the world. As you can see from this live footage of tracks taken from the band’s 1984 album Broadcasting from Home, this potent mix stands in stark contrast to anything recorded before or since, reminding us that true originality cannot be engineered.
The music of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra is far too nebulous to be defined with any precision. What can be pinpointed are the moods or impressions generated by said music. One of the recurring features of albums like Music from the Penguin Cafe, Broadcasting from Home, and the group’s 1981 self-titled LP is the cosmopolitan air so abundant in tracks such as ‘Air à Danser’, ‘Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter‘ and ‘Prelude and Yodel’.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the idea for The Penguin Cafe Orchestra came to Jeffes during a holiday in the south of France, where the bandleader experienced a hallucinatory dream induced by a serious bout of food poisoning. Just before the orchestra played their first concert in LA, Jeffes recalled the moment of creation: “I was laying in bed delirious, sort of hallucinating for about 24 hours. I had this one vision in my mind of a place that was like the ark of buildings, like a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of concrete. There was an electronic eye which scanned everything. In one room you had a couple that were making love, but lovelessly. It was cold sex with books and gadgets and what have you. In another room there was somebody just looking at himself in the mirror, just obsessed with himself. In another room there was a musician with a bank of synthesisers, wearing headphones, and there was no sound.”
He continued: “This was a very terrible, bleak place. Everybody was taken up with self-interested activity which kept them looped in on themselves. It wasn’t like they were prisoners, they were all active, but only within themselves. And that kept them from being a problem or a threat to the cold order represented by the eye.” Sound familiar? Bear in mind Jeffes is speaking before the proliferation of computer technology. God only knows what he’d make of today’s fully-digitised world.
A few days after the vision, when he had fully recovered, Jeffes decided to go to soak up some sun. “I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head,” he continued. “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. It’s acceptable there, and that’s how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves.”
In the footage below, the Orchestra’s cellist, Helen Liebmann, leads the charge on ‘Prelude and Yodel, weaving swooping, resonant melodies before Jeffes takes over for ‘Paul’s Dance.’ If you’ve been searching for music to lift your spirits, look no further than The Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
