"To say the neighbours were intrigued is . . . um . . . an understatement.”
Seventeen years after co-founding the percussive theatrical phenomenon that
was Stomp, Luke Cresswell is talking about the genesis of Stomp’s
long-awaited successor.
The neighbours were not old ladies peering from behind net curtains, but the
remaining occupants of a South Downs industrial estate, quietly boggling at
the quantities of shopping trolleys, radiator pipes, vast soup canisters,
bed bases and water cooler bottles being freighted into unit ten.
Inevitably, once the noise began in earnest, someone complained.
“We might have been road-testing the squonkaphone,” says Steve McNicholas,
Cresswell’s bearded sidekick of some 25 years. “But the noise wasn’t so loud
that day. So I think curiosity might have been a factor. You know that Tom
Waits song, What’s He Building? — where someone becomes
obsessed about the noise coming from their neighbour’s shed and the person
making it? It was a bit like that.”
So what are they building in there? An orchestra, no less. But, of course,
having created a multimedia international empire from the unpromising
premise of banging on bins (since it was launched in 1991 the show has been
seen by more than 12 million people in 42 countries, it notches up it’s 43rd
next month when it has its Cairo premiere) any conventional concept of an
orchestra scarcely begins to cover the task that the Stomp duo have
set themselves with their new show. More for reasons of curiosity than
ecological conscience, the Lost and Found Orchestra takes the recycling
ethos to a surreal, sublime conclusion.
Anyone who has seen Stomp, of course, will expect nothing less. Bravura
rhythmic displays tapped out on matchboxes and choreographed sequences using
water-filled kitchen sinks that hang off the necks of those “playing” them
are previous high points.
So, wandering the Stomp premises, it isn’t that surprising to be
confronted by a bed frame, strung so that it can be played like a double
bass. It’s a similar story with the plumpets — traffic cones attached to
long lengths of plumber’s pipe, supported by trolleys that move around the
stage. The oddest thing about it all is that, actually, none of it sounds
that odd.
Close your eyes and, at times, the Lost and Found Orchestra come close to
sounding like a real orchestra, albeit with a heavier emphasis on tribal
rhythms and low, lugubrious melodies that smother the senses like a sweet
whale song. Open them again, and the scale of the enterprise is
overwhelming, not least when a phalanx of plumpeters swarm the stage beneath
the huge rope-ladder marimba and unleash their mighty plumpet din.
Cresswell and McNicholas say it was a relief to create something with “notes
and chords” after the runaway success of Stomp. Before Stomp,
both eked out a living, initially as street entertainers, then in a London
collective called Pookiesnackenburger, best remembered for a series they
were given back in the days when Channel 4 routinely gave London street
entertainers their own series. “We were a good band,” says McNicholas, who
alternated between guitar, violin and vocals, “But it didn’t translate to
television.”
The realisation provided them with the impetus to assemble another band,
Yes/No People, signed by the future superstar DJ Pete Tong, then an A&R man
for London Records. If pop aficionados of the late 1980s struggle to
remember Yes/No People, there’s a good reason for that. It all went a bit .
. . well . . . Pete Tong: “The album was completed, but it sat on the shelf
for over a year. They wanted us to be more commercial, but that was never
what we were about,” Cresswell recalls.
Locked in dispute with their record company, Cresswell and McNicholas found
themselves contractually forbidden from recording or staging music without
permission from the label that refused to drop them or put out material by
them. “It was a matter of sitting down,” McNicholas says, “and saying,
‘Well, what can we do? Well, we can still do something as long as it doesn’t
feature melody.”
“They couldn’t stop us from doing a rhythmic piece,” picks up Cresswell, at 45
eight years McNicholas’s junior. “So we had that germ of an idea kicking
around. And that was really how Stomp began. I remember in 1994 the head of
London Records, Tracey Bennett, coming to see Stomp. That was funny. He has
a lot to answer for.”
McNicholas recalls the “eureka moment” in 2001 that led to the Lost and Found
Orchestra, seven years ago. The two were in Romania working on the
soundtrack for their debut IMAX project Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey, the
award-winning IMAX documentary that married footage of Stomp troupes
around the world, intercut with the natural habitats of their respective
countries. “We were creating sounds out of hooters and vacuum cleaners,”
McNicholas recalls. “And Luke and I looked at each other and realised that
this might, in some way, be the basis of the next project.”
Within two days, however, future ambitions were dramatically shelved. The day
after leaving Romania, the Stomp Odyssey crew flew to South Africa in search
of footage of a giraffe. Hours after dining on a springbok stew all six of
them were taken to hospital with severe food poisoning. In time all
recovered, with the exception of McNicholas, who returned to hospital for a
further examination with a view to catching up with the others at the next
location. Misdiagnosing what turned out to be a viral infection of the brain
for epilepsy, doctors gave him the wrong drugs, which compounded his
seizures.
“It did kind of feel like the end in a way,” McNicholas says. “You’re lying in
a bed thousands of miles away from your wife and kids. It took me six months
to get even halfway better. When I came home, I was in a wheelchair.”
It is with unsentimental briskness accentuated by his Yorkshire accent that
McNicholas looks back upon this period. Since then, he has been forced to
take a back seat, though he continued to work with Cresswell as he channeled
his passion for scuba diving into another IMAX project.
Three years in the making, and receiving its premiere in the UK next year, Wild
Ocean follows a shoal of billions of sardines as they embark on their
annual migration from South Africa. Above them all in a microlight aircraft
was Cresswell, perpetually poised to swoop among all the seabirds following
the sardines, who in turn were being followed by thousands of dolphins.
“Like anything we’ve ever done, you do it because you want to see it — but
no one has made it. So you’re left with no option but to do it yourself.”
Given that restrictions were what led McNicholas and Cresswell to find their
creative feet with Stomp, it is hardly surprising that they have
continued to try to find ways of placing their own restrictions on
themselves. With the strictures of that record contract long since gone, the
Lost and Found Orchestra is McNicholas and Cresswell’s way of creating
something from a self-imposed set of limitations. There have been teething
troubles along the way. Halfway through the Lost and Found Orchestra’s debut
performance at the Sydney Opera House, a glass tank in which several
instruments were part-submerged split open. “We emptied out gallons of water
on to the stage and they gently went ballistic about it.”
It hasn’t just been equipment that they have had to tweak and repair along the
way. The job of auditioning people for an orchestra numbering more than 50
has taught Cresswell and McNicholas a few home truths about the character
types who are drawn to certain instruments. “There are definite sorts that
you quickly identify,” Cresswell says. “You get people who work in classical
orchestras and know this is different and fun to do, or you get people who
don’t fit into the classical world and need somewhere different to feel they
belong.”
The only problematic posts, apparently, tend to be the saw players.
“Nightmare,” he says. “We’ve slowly come to realise that they’re all barking
mad — and that’s the reason they all work alone. So you put them all in a
room together and you’ve effectively got a nuthouse. You try and get them to
do something and it’s like, ‘I’ve been sawing for 20 years and I would never
do it like that.’ And you’re like: ‘Come on mate — it’s only a saw!’ ”
Can he imagine, in 100 years’ time, any of these instruments having edged
their way into a proper orchestra? Just as the flute eventually evolved from
a carved, hollowed-out animal bone, is there any chance that the
squonkaphone or the plumpets may, in time, finally gain mass acceptance?
Cresswell ambles over to one particularly striking construction — the bottle
bellows. “This took over a year to get right, so if I had to choose one . .
.” As the name suggests, what we’re talking about here is a two-tiered iron
frame of bellows attached to layers of wine bottles and, for the higher
notes, distinctive round Kikkoman soy sauce bottles. All are filled with
differing quantities of water. “This entailed some sacrifices,” Cresswell
says. “We ended up with more soy sauce than we knew what to do with. I still
gag at the thought of another salmon stir-fry.”
And the neighbours? Do they still complain? “Sure,” McNicholas shrugs, “but we
apologise and give them free tickets for the shows. Which seems to improve
their headaches immeasurably.”
Lost and Found Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall (www.southbankcentre.co.uk;
0871 6632500), Dec 19-Jan 11 2008
