Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Famous Pieces

Famous Pieces

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's most famous piece may be "Telephone and Rubber Band", which is based around a tape loop of a UK telephone ringing tone intersected with an engaged (busy) tone, accompanied by the twanging of a rubber band. The piece is featured on the soundtracks of Nadia Tass's film comedy Malcolm (1986) and Oliver Stone's film Talk Radio (1988), and in a long-running advertising campaign for the telecoms company One2One (now T-Mobile). The 1996 single "In The Meantime" by English rockers residing in New York City, Spacehog, featured a tweaked and fine-tuned sample of "Telephone and Rubber Band". It was also the trademark song of the Argentinean show dedicated to artistic animation "Caloi en su tinta". The tape loop was recorded when Jeffes was making a phone call, and discovered that he was hearing a combination of a ring tone and an engaged signal at the same time, due to a fault in the system. He recorded it on an answering machine.

Another famous tune featured in Malcolm (among other films) is "Music for a Found Harmonium", which Jeffes wrote on a harmonium that he had found dumped in a back street in Kyoto, where he was staying in the summer of 1982 after the ensemble's first tour of Japan. He wrote that after installing the found harmonium "in a friend's house in one of the most beautiful parts at the edge of the city," he "frequently visited this instrument during the next few months, and I remember the time fondly as one during which I was under a form of enchantment with the place and the time." Preludes Airs and Yodels (A Penguin Cafe primer) Virgin Records Ltd 1996 "Music for a Found Harmonium" was used over the end-credits of the 1988 John Hughes movie "She's Having a Baby" where many film actors and celebrities of the time invent their favourite name for an imagined child, although it was not placed on the soundtrack accompanying the movie. The piece gained exposure when it was released on the first Café del Mar volume in 1994. Its rhythm, tempo and simple structure made it very suitable for adaptation into a reel, and it was subsequently recorded by many Irish traditional musicians, including Patrick Street, De Dannan, Kevin Burke and Sharon Shannon. An Irish traditional version was used on the soundtrack of the film Hear My Song, made in Ireland in the early 1990s. In 2004, Patrick Street's cover of "Music For A Found Harmonium" was featured in the film Napoleon Dynamite and the following year in the film It's All Gone Pete Tong. The Scottish folk rock band Rock Salt and Nails, from Shetland, also recorded a version for their debut album Waves in 1993.

Simon Jeffes composed most of the music for the ballet Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, largely based on earlier compositions for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Geoffrey Richardson also composed music for the ballet, which was first performed by the Royal Ballet in 1988 and released as an album under Jeffes' name.