Music From The Penguin Cafe
April 24th, 2009 by sparky
Arthur Jeffes, Simon’s son, will perform some of the Penguin Cafe music at The Big Chill 2009.
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Arthur Jeffes has brought together a group of young musicians to create Music from the Penguin Café, playing the music of his father, Simon Jeffes and the Penguin Café Orchestra and combining it with some of his own compositions. The ensemble that Arthur has drawn together are about the same age as the original members of the PCO when they first started playing together in the 1970s.
“The Penguin Cafe’s quintessentially English music was informed by a celtic, bluegrass and South American music. Giles Farnaby’s Dream, a superb finale at the concerts, was a 16th century tune given a hoedown treatment. Probably their best-known numbers were the oddly addictive Telephone and Rubber Band, a tune which inevitably ended up on an ad for mobile phones, and the wonderful Music for a Found Harmonium.” (The Guardian)
Genesis and History of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra: An interview with Simon Jeffes, founder of the PCO.
Simon Jeffes was born in Sussex. After spending some of his early childhood in Canada, he returned to England. He started to play the guitar at the age of thirteen and subsequently studied classical guitar, piano and music theory and attended the music department of Chiswick Polytechnic with the intention of going on to music college. However finding that academic studying did not suit him, he embarked on a series of experiments. He did not find any of these areas particularly satisfying and eventually formed the Penguin Cafe Orchestra in order to develop his work as a composer. He describes its genesis thus:
“In 1972 I was in the south of France. I had eaten some bad fish and was in consequence rather ill. As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision, there, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied. In one room a person was looking into a mirror and in another a couple were making love but lovelessly, in a third a composer was listening to music through earphones. Around him there were banks of electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place he had been neutralized, made gray and anonymous. The scene was for me one of ordered desolation. It was as if I were looking into a place which had no heart. Next day when I felt better, I went to the beach. As I sat there a poem came to me. It began ‘I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random.’
Perhaps I should observe that I don’t write poems. These words which came to me were somehow accidental, unconscious. The proprietor went on to explain his cafe. He said that the random, chance element in life is terribly vital. If through fear we allow the repression of spontaneous and unpredictable actions and events in order to make life “safer”, the creativity that arises naturally from the hurly-burly of human life could be destroyed and lost. He kept saying” Come to the Penguin Cafe where things just aren’t like that”. A short time later I went to Japan. Perhaps it was a culture shock of finding myself in a new world that prompted me to think again about the Penguin Cafe. I started writing about it describing the things that went on there. It was very surreal. Tape recorders had the same validity as human beings. Beethoven was there, as well as ordinary people.
I started writing the kind of music played in the cafe. What sort of music is it? Ideally I suppose it’s the sort of music you want to hear, music that will lift your spirit. It’s the sort of music played by imagined wild, free, mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dreamlike quality. It is cafe music, but café in the sense of a place where people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played that often touches the heart of the listener.
Originally I created the Penguin Cafe Orchestra to make such music. I wrote for violin, cello, guitar and piano but I use whatever instruments I have…”
Arthur Jeffes, Simon’s son, will perform some of the Penguin Cafe music at The Big Chill 2009.
A-Z line-up | Buy tickets
