The Lost and Found Orchestra - LFO

The Lost and Found Orchestra is the sequel to the world renowned STOMP production. Designed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, Stomp's creators the production takes the attitude, if Stomp is the percussion section, then what would the rest of the orchestra look like.

View images & programme from the show- Download video mpeg 10mb - Visit the bingbangbong LFO page.

The Show travelled to Sydney Opera House in January 2007 where it Smashed Box Office Records - Sorry Mr Sinatra.

Paul Marshall, the founder of Junkdojo is the instrument design consultant on the production, a tremendous oppotunity to indulge his passion for invention, design and sound. Here' is a recent interview with Steve and Luke. 

Dancing a hosepipe
Traffic-cone tunes? Jeremy Austin on what happens when Stomp gets musical


Lost and Found Orchestra co-creator Luke Cresswell is trying to explain the best way of turning a length of hosepipe into an orchestral instrument.
“If you get a tube and a mouthpiece from a trumpet we knew that you could make a tone like a bugle by making it different lengths,” he says, looking enthusiastically at orchestra co-founder Steve McNicholas as they sit in the Brighton offices of their Yes/No Production company.

“That’s exactly what people did before they invented the trumpet,” he adds.

Well, not exactly. Not with hosepipe. But when you have created an entire orchestra out of, well, junk, hyperbole is allowed.

The Lost and Found Orchestra is about to make its second ever appearance. After being put together to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Brighton Festival in May last year, it has been invited to Sydney for a concert at the iconic Sydney Opera House.

A stage that has been graced by the world’s finest orchestras and soloists is going to host a bunch of actors, performers and musicians banging lumps of wood, blowing down hosepipes and playing road traffic cones. Surely it’s what arts festivals should be about.

Says Cresswell: “I think the sort of place that could cope with that is Sydney because they were brave enough to take it on. And it’s got the venue and it’s a really well-run festival that is world-renowned.”

It was certainly the right place for Cresswell and McNicholas when they launched their first theatrical collaboration, the global hit show Stomp.

Some 16 years ago the pair were disaffected musicians desperate to get out of a recording contract that was failing to allow them to record. Then they spotted a loophole in the record deal. They could make music as long as there was no melody by concentrating solely on the rhythm.

After a brief period of experimentation, the first incarnation of the percussion show Stomp made its tentative tappity-taps on to the stage at the Zap Club in Brighton. That was in 1990 and it lasted half an hour.

Two years later, after appearances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and in London, they took a fully rounded show to Sydney and it went down a storm.

“We went to the Sydney Festival in 1992 and that was our first paying gig,” recalls McNicholas. “We did a tour in Australia and that was when we realised the show was going to work. Up until then we thought it was something that all the performers liked but the punters hadn’t really clued into.”

This year Stomp celebrates five years in the West End. There is a show on Broadway and negotiations are underway for a new, longer version at the soon-to-open Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. It is a phenomenon, one that has dominated their creative lives. New casts for its various worldwide incarnations are continually being assembled and trained, sets and props being maintained, and new off-shoot projects created. This means that the pair have not been able to concentrate on a follow-up theatrical show.

The LFO is sort of that. But then again — true to its defiantly eccentric nature — it also isn’t.

“It’s still visual but it’s more like a concert that’s strayed into theatre. It’s a hybrid,” explains McNicholas. “There’s a lot of Stomp elements in it.”

But, Cresswell adds, the size of the orchestra and the complexity of the instruments means that it will never travel like Stomp.

“There’s too many people and the amount of stuff to ship to Sydney — but we didn’t design it for that. We designed it for the Brighton Festival. It’s great that it’s playing at Sydney and it would be great if it would play the Met in New York but it would be a one-off,” he explains.

McNicholas interjects: “It was fun watching all the Stomp producers coming over from America to see the set and all just glazing over because they realised it’s not another Stomp.”

And that, says Cresswell, added something that the commercial success of Stomp had overshadowed: the enjoyment of creating something just for fun.

“It was great fun to do,” he says. “It was back to the original idea of doing it for the craic of doing it. We get paid to do it, but you’re not doing it for the Mercedes car. It was what Stomp was about. Still is in my head.”

For the creation of LFO, Cresswell and McNicholas became mad scientists and beachcombers. If it could be blown, banged or sucked, it found a place in their unconventional orchestra.

As well as the hosepipe bugles, strings are replaced by bowed saws, brass becomes bellows and bottles and the timpani are fashioned from industrial kitchen cauldrons. These are all played by 45 performers, many of whom were found through one of Stomp’s global productions. McNicholas and Cresswell have written 12 pieces of music with influences ranging from jazz to Carl Orff.

“On one hand it is quite stupid; you think why don’t you just use violins if you want it to sound like that?” says Cresswell. “But when you hear saws played with a load of little bellows on little bottles, you actually hear a sound that no one’s ever heard before. You suddenly go ‘wow’. It is very emotional.”

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