Another comeback: the Penguin Cafe Orchestra

As my Led Zep tickets must have got lost in the post, the reunion of the month for me was the Penguin Café Orchestra at the Union Chapel. Strangely enough, it proved a hot ticket: three nights last week were a complete sell-out with stirring standing ovations at the end. We even had a Jason Bonham moment - in that PCO composer Simon Jeffes' son Arthur was on stage playing percussion and other instruments. The last time the group played was 10 years ago, at Simon's memorial service, and it seemed as if that was the end of his music, a small footnote in English musical culture.

The band were signed to Brian Eno's Obscure label, before finding a home on Editions EG, home to lots of interesting arty music in the Eighties, and from obscurity the music seemed destined to lapse back into obscurity.

Critics were divided about the band - the chief dart against them being that they were a bit twee; the New York Times once memorably said it was 'low-key salon music that plinks along for a few minutes, then stops, having gone nowhere affably'. It's true that the PCO are not radical or groovy or sexy - some combination of which critics tend to like. Simon's music has an understated English charm, a Brief Encounter passion rather than a soul diva or Wagnerian passion, more like Howard Hodgkin's small paintings inspired by Mughal miniatures. I remember Simon once told me that he admired people who spent years making cathedrals out of matches. He also hero-worshipped the Erik Satie of 'Gymnopédies' , perhaps the most perfectly conceived elegant short piano pieces in the canon, and Jeffes in some ways was the nearest we've had to an English Satie.

The PCO's quintessentially English music was informed by a post-colonial raiding of celtic, bluegrass and South American music, as well as by a slightly fuzzy Zen philosophy. 'Giles Farnaby's Dream', a superb finale at the concerts, was a 16th century tune given a hoe-down treatment. Probably their two best known numbers were the oddly addictive 'Telephone and Rubber Band', which used as a backing track a jammed phone signal to great effect, a tune which inevitably ended up on an ad for mobile phones, and the wonderful 'Music For a Found Harmonium', which was written as the title suggests, on a harmonium Simon found in a street in Kyoto.

Jeffes was Malcolm Mclaren's world music adviser for a time - he played Mclaren the Burundi drum rhythms that ended up behind Adam and The Ants and Bow Wow Wow. He also arranged the sickly strings on Sid Vicious' 'My Way'. Jeffes was that rare thing, an English upper middle-class musical original (Nick Drake was another) whose music reflected his own character; warm, an intellectual with a joy in mathematical conundrums, and definitely more than a bit dotty. Jeffes was something of a mentor to me when I arrived in London as an intense 21 year old, and I used to go to his converted garage in Holland Park and discuss music, eastern philosophy and the importance of randomness, so I'm very grateful to him for that, too.

Jeffes had a prophetic dream in 1972. Suffering from food poisoning, he had a vision of a nightmare future where people would sit in front of screens and not talk to each other. The Penguin Café was supposed to be an antidote.

The reformed PCO included most of the old players, but thankfully they didn't slavishly adhere to the old PCO sound to the letter. During some of the more mathematical numbers in the first half they seemed momentarily lost - easily done, I imagine. Like Led Zep, apparently there is a debate within the band on whether to play more concerts or to make this a one-off. From the audience response to last week's concerts, and the fact that Simon's prophetic dream has come true - they should carry on, at least occasionally, perhaps in a random kind of way.

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