A loose assembly of various musicians headed by classically-trained guitarist, composer and arranger Simon Jeffes. Only Jeffes and cellist co-founder Helen Liebmann were core members and other musicians were drafted for the requirements of particular pieces or performances. Their sound is not easy to categorise but is similar to the music of the French multi-instrumentalist Yann Tiersen, sharing with it elements of exuberant folk music and a minimalist aesthetic occasionally reminiscent of Philip Glass. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra recorded and performed for 24 years until Jeffes died of a brain tumour in 1997.

After becoming disillusioned with the rigid structures of classical music and the limitations of rock music, in which he also dabbled, Jeffes became interested in the relative freedom in ethnic music and decided to form an ensemble to explore the same sense of immediacy and spirit. The PCO formed in Jeffes' mind as a result of a dream-like vision he experienced during a severe bout of food poisoning in the South of France during the summer of 1972. Jeffes always conceived his Orchestra to be a fluctuating unit rather than a tightly cast group. Aside from one other founder member, the cellist Helen Liebmann, there were no regular performers and dozens of players passed though the Orchestra's ranks in the 24 years of its life.

It took 4 years to translate the original dream vision into the Penguins' first album. The first edition of what became the Orchestra began playing together as the Penguin Cafe Quartet in London in 1973. There were no public performances but a mysterious other name 'the 4 musicians in green clothes'. Helen Liebmann played cello, Gavyn Wright played violin, the producer and engineer Steve Nye played electric piano and Jeffes himself played electric guitar.

They recorded their first two pieces in 1974, Penguin Cafe Single and The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away and it Doesn't Matter.

In the following year, Nye introduced Jeffes to Brian Eno, who was just in the process of setting up his own Obscure Records label and who invited him to contribute to the series. Working to a tight budget and recording on a Revox machine in his back garden, Jeffes and the orchestra expanded. Jeffes' friend, a university English lecturer called Neil Rennie, brought along his ukelele and some words. Jeffes' partner at the time, the painter Emily Young (immortalised in Pink Floyd's See Emily Play) sang on a couple of pieces and donated a compellingly surreal painting of Penguin Cafe life that became the album artwork. Jeffes himself played a variety of unusual instruments, from the spinet to a ring modulator.

The centrepiece of what became their first album, Music From The Penguin Cafe, was a suite entitled Zopf of which one section, Giles Farnaby's Dream, combined an elegant Renaissance air (by Farnaby) with a Venezuelan folk shuffle to create a brilliant new folk-classical hybrid. While the Penguins touched on many styles, it was this timelessly effervescent and totally original piece of ethnically angled chamber-pop which connected most strongly with their audience.

As the punk movement opened doors of possibility to a new generation of musicians and listeners, so an emboldened colony of Penguins ventured out of the studio. They played their first gig in 1977 supporting Kraftwerk at the Roundhouse and in the following year visited the ICA and Acklam Hall with an expanded line up. Geoffrey Richardson, a former member of Caravan, now played viola (and most other things, at some point or another). He brought along an accordionist, Peter Veitch, with whom he shared a recording studio. An instrument maker with an aptitude for the oboe, Giles Leaman, helped out on woodwind, and the rhythmic elements in the music were emphasised by an itinerant character named Braco, who strolled in and out playing various drums, and Julio Segovia who added cymbals.

Now loosely heading a squad of 10, Jeffes took to referring to his group as the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Music From The Penguin Cafe was a collection of pieces recorded from 1974-1976 and was released in 1976 on the Obscure Records label.

In 1979, Jeffes bought an old garage in a quiet terrace in North Kensington and proceeded to convert it into a recording studio. It was here that in the following year the Penguins began recording an album which, for the first time, properly defined the breadth of Jeffes' musical ambitions. This album, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, was released in 1981 and includes what is probably Jeffes' best-known piece, Telephone And Rubber Band, which is based around a recording of a telephone ring tone intersected by the engaged signal. The album contains no vocals apart from one instance of 'la la-ing' - there are no words.

The album was well-received by a discerning few. Just after its release, Marcus Beale, the architect and composer of liturgical music, joined the band playing violin.

Word about the band began to spread and later that year they toured abroad for the first time, visiting Holland and Germany. In early 1982, they went to Japan, a country which held a particular fascination for Jeffes, not least because it was the home of Zen Buddhism, his religion of choice. After the tour ended, he stayed on in Tokyo working with the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and then went to the ancient city of Kyoto. Here he found a discarded harmonium which inspired one of his other best-known piece, Music For a Found Harmonium.

Another tour and a mini album (largely recorded live in Tokyo) earned the Orchestra cult status in Japan and set them up, back home, to finish recording their third set of original material. The cast for Broadcasting From Home was even bigger than the one which played on Penguin Café Orchestra. The jazz trombonist Annie Whitehead added an occasional brass element, as did trumpeter Dave Defries. A certain amount of coming and going in the rhythm section saw three new drummers helping out - Fami, Trevor Morais and Mike Giles, formerly with King Crimson. Although somewhat more restrained than its predecessor, the album was well-received.

From their somewhat reclusive beginnings, the Orchestra were, 10 years later, becoming a live attraction with real international appeal. For the next decade, they spent weeks or months every year on the road in Europe and North America. Ironically for an outfit which stubbornly resisted marketing categories, the PCO were welcomed just about everywhere on the live circuit. They turned up at jazz festivals, WOMAD, art events, classical avant garde gatherings, alternative rock venues, as well as many of their own evenings at London's South Bank and elsewhere. They got used to TV cameras, appearing first on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984 and 3 years later having an entire South Bank show to themselves.

This new emphasis wasn't particularly noticeable at first on Signs Of Life. The opening track was a high-spirited piece of ersatz zydeco, called Beanfields, allegedly based on an apocryphal story about Pythagoras getting chased by assassins. But from then on, starting with the stately strings leading off on Southern Jukebox Music - the most beautiful melody Jeffes ever composed - a gentler more elegaic tone was established. Three tracks feature Jeffes on his own, without orchestra and the extraordinary closing track, Wildlife, is neither wild nor lively but is an 11 minute piece, sparingly played on triangle, guitar and cello with scattered tape effects. Listening to it is like hearing church bells from an imaginary church lost in some extra-terrestrial landscape. Achieving a profound meditative effect without resort to ambient noodling it clearly shows Jeffes re-connecting with some of the avant garde ideas he had discarded after music college and also reflected his continuing interest in Zen Buddhism.

The overall impression is of Jeffes reining in the orchestra rather than letting them go. Though Signs Of Life is full of rhythmic subtlety, the group's new percussionist Danny Cummings had very little to do throughout. The presence of a new third violinist, Bob Loveday, did not presage waves of sawing violins and although dancing was as always encouraged, tracks like Oscar Tango proceeded to a more lugubrious beat than before.

Life after Signs Of Life became pretty hectic for the Penguins. The critical response to the new album was universally strong. The PCO was much in demand for live performances and such was their confidence now as concert performers that plans were laid to make a live album, which was duly recorded at the Festival Hall in London in July 1987. Released in the following year under the teasingly inaccurate title When In Rome..., the 16 tracks effectively summarised the PCO's career so far. With Ian Maidman now looking after the rhythm section with the returning Segovia, Paul Street bringing in more guitars and Loveday adding to the strings, this was a more muscular set than Signs Of Life.

By the time the album came out, Jeffes was deeply immersed in another, allied project. David Bintley, choreographer with the Royal Ballet and a major fan of the Penguins, had proposed a dance piece based on eight of the PCO's tunes. Intrigued by the idea, but daunted by the task of scoring his pieces for a full orchestra, Jeffes was involved for months in arrangement. Despite his anxiety, Still Life At The Penguin Café was a popular hit with the ballet-going public and went on to be performed all over Britain, in Melbourne and Munich.

The Penguins' touring schedule for the next 3 years took them out of the UK a lot, particularly in Southern Europe. The highlight of this phase was Jeffes' appointment as artistic director at an arts festival in Bologna in the summer of 1992. For this he programmed three shows by a Penguin Café Quintet (a formation he used regularly around this time) which along with a series of concerts featuring friends, Orchestra colleagues and their side projects. This was the closest he ever came to creating a real Penguin Café and for it he was awarded the freedom of the city of Bologna.

The next PCO album turned out to be the last collection of new material they recorded. Its overall style was more robust than Signs Of Life, reflecting the Orchestra's growing prowess as a working band rather than Jeffes' acknowledged mastery of the studio. The line up had slimmed down and settled down. Annie Whitehead and Ian Maidman, now a couple, were both in. Julio Segovia was back again. Jeffes' old friends and allies Geoffrey Richardson and Neil Rennie were still there. And so of course was Helen Liebmann, the cellist and rock on which every incarnation of the orchestra had relied for her instrumental poise and grace.

The most strikingly different piece on Union Café was a composition Jeffes put together while taking part in one of the so-called 'recording weeks' at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios near Bath in August 1992. While he was down there, surrounded by musicians from all over the world, jamming and demo-ing ideas together, Jeffes heard of the death of the great American modernist John Cage. He swiftly conceived a piece which brilliantly enshrined the random principle which Cage pioneered and which the Penguins, in their own way, elaborated. He quickly wrote a piece which simply spelled his name in canon over 4 octaves, three durations and two transpositions a fourth up and a fourth down. Alongside this riffing on the CAGE theme, was a piano part playing the notes DEAD in free time.

The rest of Union Café was a vigorous re-statement of traditional Penguin musical values. The African inheritance was again rearranged in Kora Kora, a Venezuelan cuatro was used on Lifeboat and the sound of the deep South of America was subtly hinted at in Nothing Really Blue. The musical conservatory got a name check at least in Scherzo And Trio, as did Jeffes' other, stranger historical preoccupation, in Pythagoras On The Line.

Released in 1993 on Jeffes' own Zopf label (named after the suite on his first album), Union Café ushered in another busy round of touring at home and abroad in 1994. An unexpected highlight of this flurry of onstage activity turned out to be the Orchestra's barnstorming performance at Glastonbury, an event which disclosed the existence of a new and younger generation of PCO fans. Having originally conceived the Penguin Café as "an imaginary and rather introverted place which didn't exist in the real world", Jeffes was now happy and proud to admit that "we really take off in concert".

Another live album seemed the obvious way to celebrate this happy state of affairs and so it was that on 23rd July 1994, at Wool Hall in Somerset, Concert Program was recorded.

Although the Penguins carried on playing together for another two years, Jeffes gradually began to hanker for a quieter life, or more accurately perhaps, a quieter way of making music. In 1996 he moved from London to Somerset and began to concentrate on solo piano work. Shortly afterwards, he fell ill with an inoperable brain tumour and in December 1997 he died.