On 9 July 1987 the Penguin Cafe Orchestra performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London, a concert captured for the album When in Rome, released by E.G. Records the following year. Among the performers that night were several names familiar to followers of David Sylvian’s music. Simon Jeffes, co-founder of the group, had by this time been invited by Sylvian to contribute to sessions for the ‘Bamboo Houses’/‘Bamboo Music’ single with Ryuichi Sakamoto, and to provide an orchestral arrangement for ‘Wave’ during its development for Gone to Earth, although ultimately Jeffes’ contributions didn’t make the final mixes for either project. Steve Nye, producer of Japan’s Tin Drum and Sylvian’s solo work throughout the ’80s, was also on stage. Nye had been one of the founder members of Penguin Cafe Orchestra back in 1973, when the line-up was a quartet, his principal contribution being piano and harmonium at the Royal Festival Hall. And finally there was Jennifer Maidman who mainly shared percussion duties with Julio Segovia that night, although she took up bass guitar for the exuberant opener, ‘Air à Danser’. Maidman’s bass propels a trio of tracks on Gone to Earth, none more so than the opening track and lead single ‘Taking the Veil’ (see here for an earlier conversation with Jennifer about that song).
Exuberance was a hallmark of the Penguins’ music. Jeffes would often recount the story of the band’s inception. In 1988, ahead of a concert in LA, he described being way-laid with a bout of food poisoning in the South of France in 1972: ‘I was laying in bed delirious, sort of hallucinating for about 24 hours. I had this one vision in my mind of a place that was like the ark of buildings, like a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of concrete. There was an electronic eye which scanned everything. In one room you had a couple that were making love, but lovelessly…In another room there was somebody just looking at himself in the mirror, just obsessed with himself. In another room there was a musician with a bank of synthesisers, wearing headphones, and there was no sound.
‘This was a very terrible, bleak place. Everybody was taken up with self-interested activity which kept them looped in on themselves. It wasn’t like they were prisoners, they were all active, but only within themselves. And that kept them from being a problem or a threat to the cold order represented by the eye.
‘A couple of days later I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out, “I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random,” and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what’s most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It’s acceptable there, and that’s how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves.’
The tunes composed for the Penguin Cafe were in many cases rooted in a fascination for the traditions of other cultures, influences melded together to create what Jeffes would describe as ‘imaginary folklore.’ He regarded the music as ‘a very big yes to the survival of the heart in a time when the heart is under attack from the forces of coldness, darkness and repression.’ His words seem every bit as relevant decades later…
As David Sylvian’s third solo album, Secrets of a Beehive, was released in October 1987, thoughts turned to plans for his debut tour as a solo artist. Jennifer Maidman was asked to join the band and she is certain about the catalyst for the invitation. Whilst Steve Nye would not be directly involved in the live shows, he was undoubtedly, Jennifer told me recently, ‘the common element. I know that David was looking for someone who in a way could cover more than one role, and, of course, in the Penguin Cafe Orchestra I originally joined as a percussionist. So Steve knew that side of me, and I ended up playing some bass as well in that band. I suppose David knew I could wear both those hats. We never really talked about it, but I think it was there from the word go. I was playing a lot of percussion. I imagine that was probably what swung it.’
Rehearsals took place at John Henrys studios in Islington, North London. ‘As I remember it,’ Jennifer says, ‘I was there pretty much from the beginning. Steve Jansen might have been there the day before setting up some drums or something. I think the plan of action was to get the rhythm section and the basic structure in place before Mark Isham and David Torn arrived. I’m not exactly sure how long afterwards that was. It could have been as much as a week.
‘Obviously we were getting the bass and the drums happening and where I was playing percussion figuring out how to divide that, because the percussion parts were more structured than the sort of thing I was doing with the Penguins, which tended to be quite free. It was more like Steve Jansen saying, “well I’m going to play this, and maybe you can play this?” and then you get that nice cross-over effect, like on ‘Nostalgia’ where I played percussion, it’s like a definite pattern.’
So how solid was the set-list at this point? ‘I think David had a pretty good idea of what the tunes would be. I won’t say a set-list, I think it was a case of let’s see how things pan out. There were other things that perhaps didn’t end up in the show.’ ‘When Poets Dreamed of Angels’ made an appearance for an early show in Canada but was never to be repeated. ‘I thought it sounded pretty good,’ remembers Jennifer. ‘But David had a good idea of what he wanted to hear, so…
‘We were adhering more or less to the arrangements on the records, I think. But having said that, there was quite a lot of room for improvisation in some areas. So in a way, a lot of the rehearsal process becomes deciding where those areas are. Mapping out, ok here it can get a little bit freer, but this bit, it can’t… because it just can’t – obviously with all the triggering and things that were going on.’
Many of the samples familiar from the tracks we knew so well were present in the live arrangements, not because there was a backing tape playing, as had been the case for the late Japan shows, this time each excerpt was triggered live by one of the performers, usually through a key-strike on a synth. ‘I think we had it pretty well covered by the end of the rehearsals,’ remembers Jennifer. ‘The technology was less advanced in those days, although arguably that might have been a blessing because we were using things like Emulators. If somebody was doing it now they’d be having a lot of Protools, a lot of computers, which are great until they go wrong and then the whole thing collapses! I am old fashioned in that respect, I’d rather have an Emulator or something where you just hit a key on a keyboard and it delivers the noise!’
I wondered whether the fact that there was more structure to the arrangements than had been the case with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra meant that there was less pleasure to be taken from the performance? Not that I had that impression watching from the stalls. ‘I really enjoyed it. Some people don’t like that sort of thing, but I like having a part and just making it feel good. Because I think a key ingredient with David’s music – always has been actually – is that it needs to feel good, even though the mood can be quite muted or dark or whatever. To me the magic combination is that plus the sort of groove aspect that Steve Jansen always brought to it. Very groovy drummer, I would say. That’s what I loved about Japan, it was this kind of “ice-cold” thing but actually it really wasn’t, it seemed to me to have a lot in common with Tamla Motown and soul music and Stax. One of the most unusual rhythm sections ever, I’d say. Mick was almost like a lead player. It was a lead voice.’
There was a satisfaction in revisiting the tracks to which Jennifer had contributed on record. ‘‘Taking the Veil’ is the obvious one, even that I think developed a bit. But it had to be recognisable because it was almost like a hook, that bass line. It would have been weird for the audience not to hear that line.’ Part of the assignment, though, was to take on songs for which Danny Thompson had played in the studio with his signature ‘woody’ double bass sound. Songs like ‘The Ink in the Well’ and Secrets of the Beehive gems ‘Orpheus’ and ‘The Boy with the Gun’.
‘I think I did have a conversation with David about the upright bass aspect,’ says Maidman. ‘There was some – I’m not going to say pressure, it wasn’t pressure – but I gathered that the logistics side were not keen on an upright bass. Travelling with an upright bass is a nightmare. Nowadays you can pick up stuff locally more easily. But actually you don’t really want to do that with an instrument because, you know, a rented upright bass is not going to be a good thing – and I speak from experience! It can be a real pig of an instrument. So, that’s how I ended up playing that little Guild “rubber band” bass basically, which sounds a lot like an upright. On some of the good bootlegs you can hear it sounds pretty “uprighty”.’
So how do you tread the line between respecting the original parts and yet making them your own? ‘I love Danny Thompson’s playing, I’ve always loved it, you know, everything that he does. And we’ve met a few times. The key to his playing for me is that it’s almost like he’s looking for a melody that can happen in that low frequency area, and he’s really good at that. And so I took that as my jumping off point. But then there were things that ended up being on the electric bass rather than the little rubber bass. It didn’t all translate precisely. I think ‘Orpheus’ started out on the Guild with that sort of upright sound, but it ended up being on the electric. For ‘The Boy with the Gun’ [mimics Danny’s prominent line which accompanies the opening rhythm guitar] you’ve got to play that, you can’t not play that! It’s like The Beatles or something to me – if you do a Beatles song there are certain things you are going to have to play!’ The sound of the Guild was perfect for that track.
David Sylvian’s desire for the tour to incorporate a strong improvised dimension is well documented. Is it too much of a generalisation to say that this aspect was principally delivered through David Torn’s guitar and Mark Isham’s battery of brass instruments? ‘I think that’s broadly true. Certainly in terms of playing solos. I’ve worked with David Torn subsequently and, I mean, he’s an improviser. That’s what he does. I’m sure that David S knew that and he wanted that to be there. But having said that, for the bass end of the things, there was some room for manoeuvre. I wouldn’t think I played precisely the same thing twice. And it did develop as the tour went on, particularly the stuff that Danny had played upright bass on, because in a way we were taking that into a whole new area by playing it live in big gigs. Of course, you could do that with an upright bass, but in a way we were enlarging it. It was like putting up a larger version. Even in terms of what David Torn was playing… He’s on Secrets of the Beehive and it’s quite intimate, that record. I think we were really trying to go quite “wide-screen” with it.’
By the time I saw the show in London the band were well into their groove. There was a sequence towards the end of the set that was a highlight for me and brought into focus Jennifer’s dual contributions. First, to close the main set, came ‘Let the Happiness In’. The brass orchestration of the Secrets… version was replaced with a synthesiser alternating between the dual notes of the introduction. The overall arrangement, however, was familiar and the percussion showed all the qualities honed firstly through rehearsal and then successive stage performance.
Jennifer: ‘A lot of his material, like ‘Let the Happiness In’, it’s so pictorial. You could see it, you could just see it. I mean the lyrics, but it’s the whole tone of it and the space of it, and you just think, “oh God, he really is there isn’t he? He really is just waiting in that place.”
‘I love that song. I played percussion on that. There’s nothing for a while, and then it always felt like a really uplifting moment when the rhythm appears. It’s just this tiny hint of hope.’
Whereas on the LP the track fades as Sylvian seems to abandon himself in the moment, singing without words, here we dwell in what seems to me a near-ecstatic invocation of the longed-for joy.
When the band returned to the stage it was for a version of ‘Gone to Earth’ quite unlike the album cut which had featured only Sylvian himself and Robert Fripp’s guitar assault. Freed completely from any sort of predetermined arrangement, it’s a rare opportunity in the set for the tour band to truly create something new. Sylvian had previously said that he’d intended to record a version of the song with Bill Nelson to complement the rendition with Fripp (read more here) and I’ve often wondered whether the live version might be an extension of that idea. Grainy video from the start of the tour shows Jennifer and Steve Jansen both in the percussion area to the right of the stage, beating out tom-tom rhythms. However, by the time they reached London the vibe had developed with Jennifer taking bass duties, her part initially responding to Sylvian’s acoustic guitar, together with Jansen establishing the ‘groove’ of which she spoke. As the track goes on, both Mark Isham and David Torn improvise above with the latter’s guitar building up layers of sound.
‘He’s an incredible player,’ says Jennifer. ‘I saw him play solo a couple of months ago, in a small place, about a hundred people, in Saugerties which is in upstate New York. I think there were a few people who hadn’t seen him before. You could just see this astonishment on people’s faces at times, of like, “I don’t know what I’m hearing anymore but it’s clearly all coming from him because he’s the only person on stage!” Always messing around with electronics. I mean it’s years since we did that Sylvian tour but I think he was always interested in that side of things. On that tour he was using the Steinberger transposing tremolo and needless to say he’d found a way of using it that was not necessarily the way that it had been conceived. So he was doing some really interesting things, swoopy things with it, you know.’
The experience of taking this music across the continents differed from her previous outings. ‘It wasn’t the longest tour I’d done, but it was one of the most intense,’ is how Jennifer describes it. ‘I’ve done a lot of touring with other people, in fact through the ’80s if I wasn’t in the studio I was probably on the road, it was just that time. With the Penguins, even though I know it was seen as a sort of arty left-field band, actually on the road it was all very light-hearted and it had this slight – deliberately so I think – element of amateurism, in the best sense of the word. Amateur in the sense of someone who is doing something just for the love of it. That was more important than precision with the Penguins. And you can hear that in the music, especially the live stuff.
‘The Sylvian band was almost like the polar opposite of that. It was, “We’re going to get this right”, you know. Which didn’t mean you couldn’t have a laugh with people – of course, we were just people – but when it came to actually playing, we need to be quite focussed about this, otherwise it’s just going to fall to bits – because the potential for that to happen is there with something that’s precise. I think we managed to avoid that.’
Did the intensity stem from Sylvian himself? ‘The thing I’d say about David is that he’s pretty serious about life, and the music is an upshot of that. I think I share that actually, although that might not be so obvious. You can see that in his other work, like when he did that thing not long ago when he took photographs across the US, ERR. He’s engaged with life in a very particular way and that’s the commonality, I think, with someone like Simon Jeffes. Very different characters, but Simon was very serious about life. He had a very different approach to music, and I think those are the people I get along best with. It’s important you know. And David’s got that, he’s absolutely got that.
‘You just really get that sense of it being authentic, in the true sense. Sometimes people say something’s authentic because it’s splurging emotions all over the place, but I think his music is authentic in a deeper way than that. It’s somebody who’s being very true to their experience of life and themselves and what it means to be a human being, having hopes and dreams and ups and downs and all the rest of it. And to me he’s writing about that in a very naked kind of way.
‘I’ve worked with lots of writers and it’s an interesting dilemma: if you’re going to put your inner life out there to that extent, how do you manage that? The more revelatory it is, the more there is a need to keep some kind of sanctuary. I’ve worked with Joan Armatrading and people say, “oh, she’s so private.” And she is, but then you look at the content of the songs… absolutely the heart is there. David is that just in a different way. A very sensitive man. And I think a lovely man actually, if I may be so bold. Perhaps not an easy person to know well, but there’s a real tenderness there.’
Such a tour in the late ’80s must have been a vastly different experience to today’s equivalent. So much of existence in the modern world seems to revolve around a virtual universe we create for ourselves online – an environment we carry with us just about everywhere we go. It must have been much more isolating back in ’88, and the experience of sharing the adventure with a relatively small number of others must have been all the more heightened.
‘There are real contradictions. Because you’re in this environment where people are throwing heavy equipment in and out of trucks, people that drive trucks for a living, and there’s the crew – some of whom are sensitive and some of whom are, you know, “hey come on, what’s the effing matter with you!” It’s an environment where different ways of being in the world come together and sometimes really mesh in a positive way, and sometimes there’s an element of culture clash.’
I’d anticipated that personal time would have been limited, but that wasn’t Jennifer’s experience. ‘Everything’s done for you, to an extent. You get up in the morning, you have breakfast in the hotel, somebody says, “get in the bus” or “get in the taxi and go to the airport”, so you don’t have to think about the logistics of it. The only time you’ve got to be really “on it” is at the gig. Even the soundcheck – often I think you don’t want the soundcheck to be too good, you don’t want to give it all away. And then the gig happens and its intensity for however long it is – two hours, two and a half hours. The rest of the time it’s like you’re just sort of floating. And it’s slightly like a child you know: there’s a tour manager whose job it is to take care of you.
‘There’s a loosening that happens. Maybe that’s less discussed, I don’t know, but I think it’s one of the things I like about touring… You do enter this slightly altered state of consciousness, and the longer the tour the more that that happens – and it was a longish tour.
‘I did find myself journalling a lot and hanging out quite a bit with David Torn, I think. We were kindred spirits to some degree. I think that tour, it was the first time I really started writing lyrics myself…’
The tour being named In Praise of Shamans resonated. ‘I was interested in that whole area of magic and other cultures, and I think a lot of people were, but we didn’t have the internet, so it was books and trying to find stuff out. Simon from the Penguins was very interested in music from other cultures. And that was tricky, you had to go to obscure record shops. And I really got into the number thirteen, I decided it was a magic number. That played into the whole shamans thing – thirteen being the number of moons in the year. So I was writing these little thirteen-syllable haikus – although I know that’s not traditional haiku.
‘Also it was my first time in Japan. I’d never been to Japan before and again no internet, no “I’m going to hold up my phone and it will translate it for me!” We had, I think, three days off at one point and I took off and went out of town on one of those bullet trains and went up into the hills. I suppose it’s like when children spin in circles to make themselves dizzy – I was looking for that experience and it kind of peaked a bit in Japan. I remember I just got off somewhere and I was walking up this main street out in the sticks, it was near some mountains, people cooking food out in the street, nobody spoke English, and I felt like an alien you know.
‘Arguably that was a bit of a theme of the tour: otherness and alienness. That music, it creates a sense of another world. You want to inhabit that world or at least know what it is.
‘Funnily enough, Japan was a big influence on Simon Jeffes as well, in a different way. Simon was a Zen Buddhist really, and the Penguins, certainly within the band, was very explicitly, “this is about creating a sense of another place,” which was the Penguin Cafe, and this is the music that happens in the Penguin Cafe, that was the concept.
‘It was less explicit with David, but I think it’s about another possible world. This is the music that might happen in that world. It’s evoking a space. Robert Fripp talks about the place that music comes from. I’m sure there are other ways, but I’ve always found music to be the best bridge into those other worlds. You can build a bridge, you can’t force anyone to go across the bridge, and sometimes you can’t even get across yourself, but I always felt like that’s what David’s trying to do and I think he’s succeeded more than most actually in doing that.’
In 2017 Jennifer Maidman released a solo album, Dreamland. Included there was a track called ‘No Man’s Land’ whose genesis could be traced right back to the tour with David Sylvian, and not just for the appearance of David Torn. ‘Composed largely of pieces of a dream I had in 1988,’ read the accompanying notes, ‘a dream which in many ways led me down the road which would eventually result in this record. It seems that, via dreams, feelings and images from another time or place are able to filter into waking consciousness to light the path.’ The lyric speaks of a place where ‘a voice that never speaks/soars across a skyline of wise and ancient peaks,’ and where ‘music casts a spell/synchronising heartbeats to the ever-flowing well.‘
‘I think that’s what the tour was, we were trying to evoke a kind of no man’s land. My grandad was in the First World War and he used to talk about no man’s land as literally the space between the trenches. But I think as a metaphor it’s also like this idea of a place which is not clearly demarcated, nobody really owns it, and that’s where all the interesting stuff happens. Whether it’s musically, or politically, or spiritually, or whatever, I’m drawn to that. I’ve always been drawn to that.
‘I’d say the tour was transformative for me. Up to that point it was one of the best bands I’d played with, there’s no doubt about that. But it wasn’t just that. It was because of all these things that we’ve discussed. It was because I am a person who’d always been interested in art, partly because I had serious identity issues as a child, confused about my gender and all that stuff. So that had drawn me at an early age to the library and reading Carl Jung and all this kind of stuff. Up to that point, that had seemed like quite a separate thing. There was my music career and then there was that. That’s why it was transformative for me.
‘It was like ah, now I’m involved in something that is great music but it’s also connected into that world as well, because obviously David was very interested in that whole aspect. It was on that tour that I began to get really interested in things like synchronicity and dreams, and that’s never gone away.
‘I think that was a turning point for me. I think I went, ‘Well, I am strange, sort of!’ I’m not saying I’m special or different or exotic or anything but I believe everyone’s strange, everyone has weird dreams, everyone has those days when life just seems really “off”. And it was like ok, this tour, this band, this writer, this singer is actually putting that centre stage. And that really excited me.’
‘Let the Happiness In – Gone to Earth – live’
Robbie Aceto – guitar, keyboards; Richard Barbieri – keyboards; Mark Isham – trumpet, flugelhorn, soprano saxophone, keyboards; Steve Jansen – drums, percussion; Ian (now Jennifer) Maidman – bass, percussion; David Sylvian – guitar, keyboards, vocal; David Torn – lead guitar
‘Let the Happiness In’ – Music and lyrics by David Sylvian.
‘Gone to Earth’ – Music by David Sylvian & Robert Fripp. Lyrics by David Sylvian.
Lyrics © samadhisound publishing
Played live on the In Praise of Shamans tour, 1988
The featured image is a publicity photograph distributed by Virgin Records. Named Map of the Heavens, it was taken by Yuka Fujii and used on promotional materials for the In Praise of Shamans tour in some territories.
Full sources and acknowledgments for this article can be found here.
‘The music really evolved through rehearsals and the tour. It’s nice when that happens. It’s probably the thing I’m most drawn to. I’m not sure I’d last very long in a band where things couldn’t breathe and move and evolve, but it definitely did do that. I know opinions have varied, certainly even from David, but I think it was pretty good.’ Jennifer Maidman, 2024
More about the In Praise of Shamans tour:
Vista 