North Sea Radio Orchestra / Meeting House, Brighton

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Reviews

North Sea Radio Orchestra marooned in the wrong era

Words Ben Graham

Well, it’s a mighty long way from rock’n’roll. To have come through the punk, post punk and indie wars to find ourselves in the solemn and alcohol-free surrounds of a Quaker meeting house, watching what amounts to a chamber music recital, and not finding it at all odd, because actually it’s typical of where the lo-fi, DIY music scene finds itself in 2008.

It’s not even post rock, because a collective like North Sea Radio Orchestra bypass rock entirely. Combining folk themes and melodies with classical arrangements and instrumentation, a smattering of jazz and highbrow avant-garde, it’s frequently a fine and lovely thing. But in some ways it can’t help feeling like a retreat.

Opening proceedings on the grand piano, the man known as Crayola Lectern evokes the fragile, forlorn spirit of Robert Wyatt, with a nod too to the deadpan surrealism of Ivor Cutler. Alistair Strachan, moonlighting from Hamilton Yarns on trumpet, brings a hint of Chet Baker, while former Cardiacs guitarist John Poole plays the Brian Eno role with his box of odd electronic noises and unsettling ambience: excellent, heart-stopping stuff.

There’s a definite Cardiacs connection tonight, with mainman Tim Smith watching in the front row and another ex-member, William D Drake, among the North Sea Radio Orchestra choir. They perform a couple of songs from his excellent albums of last year, along with musical settings of poems by his near-namesake William Blake (and Yeats and Tennyson too).

The NSRO are a genuine 20-piece orchestra, and their wistful, windswept sound is filtered through vague memories of sixties children’s television soundtracks and the kind of cult British movie scores that Trunk Records have made their own. At times, though, they’re a little too polite and twee, especially when vocalist Sharron Fortnam veers into ‘Moonlight Shadow’ territory. Certainly there are moments of beauty, but ultimately it’s like stepping back into an alternate, pre-war England where rock’n’roll - not to mention mass industrialisation and immigration - never happened. Which is fine for a night, but I wouldn’t want to stay.