Clangs and crashes echo from an anonymous warehouse on an industrial estate near Brighton. Outside, workmen load a lorry with dented buckets, crumpled street signs and bashed-up oil drums. Inside, another gang in heavy boots thumps out complex rhythms with wooden poles, rubber tubing and dustbin lids. But this factory produces neither ironmongery nor woodwork, but new cast members and stage sets for Stomp, the pigeonhole-unfriendly percussion-dance-comedy stage show that started as a busking band on Brighton’s streets 16 years ago. I’m here to have a go, to see what it takes to be part of this international phenomenon, whose triumphs include a five-year run in the West End, 13 years in New York and, since last month, a Las Vegas version in a purpose-built 1,500-seat theatre.

Teaching the recruits is one of the show’s original cast members, Fraser Morrison, 44, a wiry, smiling Scot with tattooed arms and a pierced ear. On paper, he and the show’s creators, Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, should have gone and got proper jobs years ago. The show has few of the features normally considered necessary for popular success: no celebrity appearances, no hummable tunes, no titillating costumes, no dialogue, just eight performers in building-site garb, shaking, banging and tapping rhythms from a skipful of rubbish, using everything from match-boxes to water-cooler bottles to, yes, the kitchen sink.

But see the show, and the reason Morrison still has a job is clear. The music the cast coax from their unlikely instruments is riveting. Starting from a simple beat – a Zippo lighter flicked open, sparked then closed; a broom swished across the floor and tapped on its side – the group add layer upon layer of sound until the rhythms are so precariously interwoven that one false move could plunge the whole thing into chaos, as it regularly does during the rehearsal I attend. Just the intricacy and inventiveness might be enough to win the show novelty value or popularity with aficionados of avant-garde music. But on top of that, the cast dance and clown, projecting exaggerated versions of their personalities, playing out friendships and petty rivalries and raising audience giggles by questioning the size of each other’s instruments, giving the show entertainment value as well and allowing it, more than 10,000 performances in, to carry on drawing in crowds. Morrison says: “Back at the beginning, Luke called me up and said, ‘Fancy doing this for three weeks?’ Three weeks turned into 16 years – the longest three weeks of my life.”

The original cast, who all knew each other from previous performing projects in Brighton, first took the show to the Edinburgh Festival. When it was a hit there, they travelled on to “any festival we could gatecrash”, as Morrison puts it. “There’s no dialogue, so we could go anywhere. And we were playing arts festivals, music festivals, comedy festivals – it snowballed pretty quickly.” In the early days, the cast would visit the local dump to gather the scrap metal for the set – partly for a local feel, but mostly from necessity, lacking the cash to transport much gear. “At least now we get our oil drums professionally cleaned,” says Morrison. “Back at the start, we were doing a show in Ireland and all came off feeling a bit light-headed and high. Then we saw all this crap, which had come out of the bottom of the drums we were using, all over the stage – we’d been poisoning ourselves. But it was part of the job.”

Morrison occasionally still performs but spends most of his time auditioning and training new blood. The current batch of 11 twentysomethings were chosen from thousands at open auditions. They have in common only an easygoing cheerfulness and a willingness to cover their hands in calluses as they put in long, exhausting days of practice. Of varied class and race, some have been to drama school, some are dancers, some musicians. One was an estate agent. Most fell in love with the show when they saw it as kids.

Morrison prefers to place his audition notices (which demand only that prospective cast members should have “a sense of rhythm and a sense of humour”) on the Stomp website and in the local press, rather than in industry publications, to preserve the show’s everyman feel. “Sometimes the people we choose actually don’t move that comfortably,” he says. “A dance teacher might be horrified.. But if there’s music and character there, that’s enough for us. We’re trying to keep the punk ethic theshow had back at the beginning – like they could still just be buskers – so it’s accessible to all, and people leave thinking, ‘I could do that. If I really applied myself, I could do that.’ ”

But when I try to join in, I find I can’t do it at all. Morrison hands me a broom and lines me up with the rest of the trainees. He demonstrates a simple rhythm – a hefty thump of the broom handle on the floor, a right-foot stamp, a left-foot stamp. Thump-stamp-stamp, thump-stamp-stamp. Then switch it round – stamp-thump-stamp, stamp-thump-stamp. Then switch it again. Then string it all together. I follow the others and keep my own thumps and stamps inaudibly puny. But then we have to take it in turns. Morrison taps out an eight-bar string of thumps and stamps. The first recruit copies him perfectly. The next in line picks up the rhythm and it travels down the line, with only a few minor errors, until it arrives with me. And then my brain, feet and hands refuse to cooperate. I can’t even work out whether I should be stamping or thumping first, and I almost fall over.

At least I get a friendly rather than mocking laugh before the rhythm starts again – and when, after a couple more passes down the line, I almost get it right, thumping my broom in time, even if my feet (mercifully clad in soft, quiet shoes rather than racket-making boots) still refuse to obey, I’m greeted with whoops from the others. I sit back down to watch the recruits take the riff I failed to master and play it twice as fast, add some flourishes, then divide it into rhythms and counter-rhythms. Everyone is too kind to say it, but it’s clear I’m not going to be invited to run away and join this scrapyard circus.

Stomp is at the New Ambassadors, WC2

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