There are plenty of good Father’s Day gifts out there, and many of them require minimal effort.
Most dads are so easy to please that you can literally (speaking for myself here, but I bet I’m not alone) buy them a couple dozen pairs of socks and they will be genuinely happy.
If you can afford a bit more, the perfect gift is usually not hard to identify. Dad is a sports fan? Tickets to a game. More of a theatre buff? Take him to a show. Got a foodie father? Head to the restaurant he loves but is too cheap to pay for himself.
But what gift do you go for if your dad was an avant-garde musician who created a musical project inspired by a hallucination he had as a result of food poisoning but who died before age fifty?
Well, if you’re Arthur Jeffes, you create a new band committed to playing – and extending – his musical repertoire. I mean, there’s no Hall of Fame dedicated to Father’s Day gifts, but that’s gotta be right up there.
The dad in question is Simon Jeffes, and the hallucination was of a dystopian city in which humanity lived disconnected from each other. Arthur described his dad’s vision like this:
“…there were these blocks of flats where everyone lived and it was a very bleak and grey place. You could look into these different rooms and see all these different examples of a dehumanized existence. So in one room there was a couple making love, soundlessly and lovelessly. In another room there was a musician with an array of musical equipment but he had headphones on and there was no music in the room. And in another room there was just someone looking at a screen, immobile and inactive. In the top corner of all these rooms there was a big malevolent camera, fundamentally a big eye spying on all of them.”
Down the road from this bleak setting was a café that was full of life and music; a beacon of hope that must have seemed to the hallucinating Jeffes like the only logical choice for a meaningful life. It was called the Penguin Café, and he named his band The Penguin Café Orchestra, writing music that he imagined this band would play.
Following the elder Jeffes’ premature death, his son Arthur played a series of concerts featuring his dad’s music. The only difference was that Arthur dropped the “Orchestra” from the band’s original name, going instead by simply, “Penguin Café”.
The Penguin Café grew beyond a tribute or cover band into a project of his own, but the new music he composed remained true to his father’s vision: music of hope and life.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The way it fades in already in full stride, like an idea that was there before you even knew it.
2. The way it oscillates between the first and augmented second degree of the scale. There’s something mystical about an augmented second.
3. The steady tempo and looping eighth notes in the background lend a comforting feeling of infinity.
Recommended listening activity:
Doing something special with your dad. Or even better, something completely normal.