Men Not Jumping.

I’ve already praised the exhilarating minimalist Buzz buzz buzz went the honey bee of Orlando Gough‘s band The Lost Jockey (for more minimalism, see here). Now, via the appearance of his brother Piers on Private passions, I delight further in

• The perils of tourism, from the 1986 album World service by Lost Jockey’s successor Man Jumping—

a band formed to “take the Lost Jockey minimalism in the direction of pop, dance music and jazz, to get paid to play, and to concentrate on recording”.

Brian Eno described us as “the most important band in the world”—or did he? No-one was ever quite sure. The sales were disappointing. Managers were bought in, and mostly succeeded in irritating us. We probably would have benefited more from psychotherapists.

So here’s The perils of tourism—a concept almost, but not quite, before its time:

Their output also includes Lenin tempted by a job in advertising, a title of which Alexei Sayle would be proud. All this deserves to be far more popular—but it’s never too late. BTW, Orlando’s site has a wealth of drôle creative writing on his early travails on tour and the struggle between creativity and survival.

His later work continues to enchant. Continuing the theme of re-imagining world music, here’s a playlist of The world encompassed (2017), written for the enterprising viol consort Fretwork, about Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world—the title taken from a book by Drake’s nephew. As Orlando explains,

My approach is to imagine the viol players returning to England at the end of the voyage. Their friends say, so what was it like, this exotic music you heard? And they say, well, er, not so easy to give you an idea, but it was a bit like this……. And their version of the local music is as unreliable as the account of the voyage in The World Encompassed—biased, half-remembered, and severely compromised by the choice of instruments.