Penguin Café – the London-based, avant-garde, neo-classical chamber ensemble ­– wooed the crowd who flocked (no pun intended) to see them at Hackney Empire in early July as part of the Blaze festival.

Throughout the evening, the 11-piece orchestra – under the leadership of head penguin Arthur Jeffes – performed tracks from their album A Matter of Life, many of which where originally composed by Jeffes’ late father, Simon, the founder of the band’s original format – The Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

Combining acoustic power with a beguiling, feisty charm, the band frequently swapped instruments (piano, ukulele, harmonium, cuatro and melodica) as they performed their most famous pieces, including ‘Music for a Found Harmonium,’ (composed on an abandoned harmonium that Simon found on the streets of Kyoto in 1982); ‘Telephone and Rubber Band,’ (based around a tape loop of an engaged UK dialling tone) as well as the moving piano piece ‘Harry Piers’, which was written and played by Arthur at his father’s memorial in 1998.

A few minor hiccups through the evening – including confusion over the set-list, Jeffes tripping over his ukulele and his elbow slipping off the top of the piano and onto the keys – only served to make the performance more enjoyable and personable.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Penguins, here’s an extract from our Globe Rocker interview with Jeffes:

“I am the proprietor of the Penguin Café, I will tell you things at random.’ These are the poetic words that came to Simon Jeffes  – founder of the Penguin Café Orchestra – as he awoke from a dystopian nightmare in the early 70s. And from these words was born the inspiration to create the music that Simon and his orchestra – anywhere from four to 30 of them – would play for the next 24 years, until his untimely death in 1997.

But the music of the PCO – and what it stood for – did not die with him. Its latest incarnation, or ‘reboot’, is Penguin Cafe – a band fronted by Simon’s son, Arthur. When we meet, Arthur explains where the idea for the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra came from. “My father was suffering from a particularly bad bout of food poisoning in the south of France when he started to hallucinate.”

“He had this vision of people who were living in these huge grey tower blocks, and it was as if he could see straight into their windows,” he tells me. “In one window he saw a couple making love silently and passionlessly while in another room, a musician was making music in a silent room, wearing headphones.”

“But down the road from this tower block was this ramshackle bar bursting with light and energy. My dad said it was like an okonomiyaki restaurant [Japanese grill-it-yourself joint] with long benches and sawdust on the floor – and in the back of the bar, there was always a band playing. This place was the Penguin Cafe.”

The Penguin’s music continues to infiltrate daily life from films like Napoleon Dynamite to several theme tunes and performances have included Glastonbury, Bestival, The Big Chill, the BBC Proms, Cambridge Folk Festival, and WOMAD.

Catch them at Standon Calling this summer. Their album A Matter of Life… is out now.

Tags: arthur jeffes, hackney empire, Penguin Cafe