Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Music from the Penguin Cafe

I never buy albums completely on spec any any more, as it's so easy to research them. I used to make mistakes by buying on spect, but this album was perhaps my biggest success.

It goes back to the days when you might still discover music just by flicking through the racks at your local record store. I think it was HMV in Guildford where I came across the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. I thought it was an intriguing name for a band, if that's what they were, and the track titles — Pythagoras's Trousers, The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away and It Doesn't Matter — were beguilingly eccentric. Then there were the Emily Young paintings on the covers of the two albums. I can't remember if I noticed that the records were on the EG record label, or how much that might have meant to me if I did, though I already had albums by Robert Fripp on EG by that time. It took me several months to decide to take a gamble (the records stayed in the racks; no one else was snapping them up), and then, in a toss-up between Music from the Penguin Cafe and Penguin Cafe Orchestra (the second, eponymous album), I chose the former, probably on the basis that I liked the cover and the track titles better.

I don't think it was love at first listen, because this is Orchestra's least accessible album. But I persevered and probably enjoyed the fact that the Penguin Cafe Orchestra were never played on the radio, and never featured in the music press either.

I like the way the album clearly divides into two sides, and the three moderately even and restrained pieces on Side 2 seem to stand apart from the rest of the Orchestra's work. The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away and It Doesn't Matter is a particular favourite.

A few weeks ago, my friend Guy asked, "You know who's just about to become very fashionable, don't you?" Of course I didn't. "The Penguin Cafe Orchestra," he said, on the grounds of their blend of folk/world/chill elements. I think the world is still several years from catching up with Simon Jeffes, the much-missed leader of the Orchestra. It needs some contemporary musical celebrity, a Devendra Banhart type, to help more people catch on. For now, we devotees remain a disparate band of slightly smug cognoscenti.

MusicBrainz entry for this album