Music From the Penguin Cafe

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Music From the Penguin Cafe

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1976

12” vinyl record, 29:30

Edition size unknown

The seventh record on the Obscure label is the debut album for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. In a 1975 interview with Time Out Magazine titled “I Want to be a Magnet for Tapes”, Brian Eno teases out the forthcoming album album, calling it "a secret project.” I suspect many people with a Penguin Cafe Orchestra LP consider it a secret treasure, despite the band’s reach extending into popular film soundtracks and television commercials.1 

Like Discreet Music (Obscure #3), the Penguin Cafe was born of illness. The somewhat goofy origin story  involves Simon Jeffes lying on a beach in the south of France, in 1972. He had an hallucination from the food poisoning he got from eating bad fish. A penguin approached him and announced "I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe. I will tell you things at random.” As the story goes, Jeffes’ resolved to compose the type of music one might hear at this cafe. 

"I want to make music for people capable of enjoying Wilson Pickett, Beethoven, the Rolling Stones, choral music from West Africa, Bach, Stravinsky, Irish bagpipe music and even Abba on the odd occasion," he said.

Unlike the other albums in the series, Eno did not serve as producer for this LP, instead providing Jeffes with the small sum of 900 British Pounds to handle recording costs. Much of this was done in Jeffes’ back garden, between 1974 and 1976. 

“It was a bit of a fluke,” explains Emily Young, now a renowned sculptor2. “Brian had these other people he was working with in a left-field zone. And then Simon turns 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.’”

Young sings on the record - something which might be jarring to listeners familiar only with the group’s later, all-instrumental works - and would illustrate all of their future album covers, including any subsequent reissues of this debut. Young and Jeffes have a son together, named Arthur, who later formed a group called the Penguin Cafe, to continue performing his father’s music.  

Music From the Penguin Cafe can sometimes feel like a demo the band’s later masterpiece, the 1981 self-titled disk, but it remains the most accessible of the Obscure series. At almost a half-century old, it hasn’t aged poorly at all. But audiences will likely consider it a minor work in the group’s discography, as did Jeffes presumably, as only two tracks from this disc make it onto their 1996 “primer” Preludes, Airs & Yodels. Broadcasting From Home, Signs Of Life and Penguin Cafe Orchestra are each represented by four cuts on the compilation. 

It strikes me, revisiting these works in the new box set, that so many of the Obscure recordings involve found sounds and chance operations. Music From the Penguin Cafe involves none. However, the track they are most known for features both.3 "Telephone and Rubber Band” originated when Jeffes was making a phone call and discovered the sound of a ring tone and an engaged signal appearing simultaneously. He recorded this strange bit of audio serendipity onto his answering machine and used the loop as the bed track for the song.4 

The band gave its first major concert performance in October of 1976, opening for Kraftwerk at The Roundhouse. Shortly afterwards, Jeffes found himself supervising recordings for Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band, the 101ers, which brought him to the attention of the Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren. McLaren hired him to write the string arrangement for Sid Vicious’ version of “My Way” and later to teach Adam Ant percussion.5 

Jeffes died of an inoperable brain tumour on the 11th of December 1997.

1. Films using PCO songs on their soundtracks include Malcolm (1986, Nadia Tass), Talk Radio (1988, Oliver Stone), Napoleon Dynamite (2004, Jared Hess), and The Founder (2016,  John Lee Hancock). A trailer for John Hughes' She's Having a Baby and an episode of the The Handmaid's Tale also made use of their music. 

2. Young is also the Emily from "See Emily Play”, a 1967 single by Pink Floyd, written by original frontman Syd Barrett. 

3. Their next-best well-known song does not feature found sounds, but rather a found instrument. During the ensemble’s first tour of Japan, Jeffes found an abandoned harmonium in a back alley in Kyoto. He used it to write "Music for A found Harmonium”.  

4.  The 1996 single "In the Meantime” by Spacehog featured a tweaked and detuned sample of "Telephone and Rubber Band". 

5. Before recording his second album as Adam and the Ants, Adam Ant invited McLaren to manage his band. McLaren absconded with the Ants, replacing Adam with thirteen year old Annabella Lwin and changing the band’s name to Bow Wow Wow. 

“Given his individuality, his non-allegiance to any particular musical category, and the unfailing eclecticism of his vision, Simon Jeffes could easily be marginalized as an English eccentric – and thus sort of overlooked.

The truth is he discovered a huge musical territory – stretching along the border regions of the whole United Nations of music – and he wandered through it fascinated and, apparently always smiling. These pieces are reports back from those borderlands.

Like any good explorer, Simon was both alert and humble. He had no trace of musical snobbery, but delighted in the length and breadth of music, happy to experiment with all combinations.”

- Brian Eno

"The first Penguin Cafe Orchestra album was I think number seven on the Obscure label. He produced various people on it as well. Music For Airports was always something that Dad really, really loved. And then also the idea of music being... not a fifth wall exactly... but something to go in a space rather than just a narrative form. That lack of directness in his music was something that informed their music. Someone once described Penguin Cafe as electronica done with real instruments and I think there’s a bit of that in it.”

- Arthur Jeffes, son of Simon Jeffes and Emily Young

"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 grey 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 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. 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.”

- Simon Jeffes