Review: Bristol Fantasy Orchestra, Kuumba

With the BBC’s blessing, the city was celebrating itself with a weekend of music in all kinds of glitzy places and here we were in a community hall on a rainy Saturday afternoon, plastic chairs set out in rows in front of a ramshackle display of musical equipment like a school concert.

Yet somehow it felt like we were closer to the living heart of Bristol’s musical culture than the fortunate few with tickets for the Knowle West Boy and such.

The Bristol Fantasy Orchestra is a unique project combining fancy dress, playful music and serious intentions inspired by longtime musical subversive Jesse ‘Morningstar’ Vernon. Making delightful orchestral mountains out of quirky musical molehills is one of their specialities and this 6 Music Fringe event – Bristol I Beseech You – was a celebration of great Bristol-based leftfield musical talents.

Things opened, however, with something new: ex-Zun Zun Egui keyboard player and vocalist Yoshino Shigihara’s Yama Warashi at times hits a kind of Japanese equivalent of the wonky funkiness of The Ethiopiques, at others the sparse elegance of Jah Wobble’s oriental excursions.

Suitably fancily dressed for the occasion, the four-piece band wove their music carefully around Yoshino’s songs (mostly in Japanese) about power stations, the moon and madness. It was compelling stuff, not least for the graceful balance of electronic and acoustic sounds.

The intimacy of the opening set was quickly displaced by the sprawling chaos of the Fantasy Orchestra, filling half the Kuumba hall and squishing their eager audience together to make more room.

Among the jumble of disguises you could see a badger on cello, a clown on trumpet, a bee on guitar and a clutch of singing cowpersons as well as Jesse’s flamboyantly becaped figure – all suitably incongruous as Adam Coombs conducted them in a specially composed opening overture whose funereal chords gradually swelled into an epic soundscape.

It was to be the most ‘orchestral’ moment of the programme, almost classical in its construction, and typically deflated by the brilliant singalong joviality of Jamie Harrison’s The Bear which followed. 

After that yin-yang kick-off it was a choice chocolate box of miscellaneousness, some songs presented by their composers, others not. It was interesting to see the responses of those who were there as their creations, usually presented in quiet acoustic contexts, were aggrandised by the BFO’s full-scale sound.

Andy Skellam looked genuinely bemused as his Green Moat unfolded, while Rozi Plain and Kate Stables (above) had the impish air of sheepish schoolgirls in front of an assembly.

The serene Rachel Dadd, undeterred by her two small children, floated her vocalisations easily across the rich backdrop of poking brass and swelling strings and Boris Ming found a naturally louche home in a loungecore version of The Precious Ming’s The Wind Has No Heart. 

It was a shame that Paul Bradley wasn’t there to hear One of my Favourite Weathers, the superb interaction of the arrangement using the full resources of strings, brass and choir to point up the enormous musicality of his song: he would, I’m sure, have been proud of the results.

But it was the afternoon’s rockiest contributor that actually stole the show. Rita Lynch, simply clad in plain black and strumming a semi-acoustic guitar, had two numbers to perform and it was the second – Beautiful Eyes – that captivated as the orchestra picked up the pure rock pulse of the tune and she rose into the arrangement with her distinctive power vocals.

It was a moving and powerful highpoint that brought into focus the city’s hard-rocking heritage and, like the Orchestra itself, surely deserved to have been blasted across the nation’s airwaves as much as anything else?