Spaghetti Western Orchestra, Grand Opera House, York, February 15 (From York Press)

Spaghetti Western Orchestra, Grand Opera House, York, February 15

10:10am Friday 10th February 2012 in Music news and reviews By Charles Hutchinson

THE Spaghetti Western Orchestra have left behind the heat of Australia for the icy blast of our winter on their debut British tour.

“I’m from Melbourne, where it’s 35 degrees at the moment, but not being one to experience the snow usually, I’m really enjoying it,” says Graeme Leak, one fifth of a five-piece that not only plays the themes from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, For A Few Dollars More and Once Upon A Time In The West, but also ingeniously recreates the saloons, spittoons and shotgun-slinging ambience of Sergio Leone’s iconic film collaborations with Ennio Morricone.

Cast aside the winter chill in York; inside the Grand Opera House on Wednesday, the musician-performers of the Spaghetti Western Orchestra will be dressed in period attire against a dramatic scorched sun backdrop, as they play more than 100 ‘instruments’ that range from the conventional to everyday objects such as playing cards, coat hangers and a packet of cornflakes.

Their inventive arrangements will combine orchestral skills with foley (sound effect) artistry to recreate the punch-ups, gun shots and jangling spurs that evoke the movies that made Clint Eastwood, above, a star.

The route to this tour stretches back to in 2000 in Melbourne when Graeme met Patrick.

“I’d seen him perform a lot of cabaret and comedy: he was in some very interesting groups, including The Men Who Knew Too Much, who made very strange theatre that was hilarious,” he says. “In fact the first time I saw him, he had a suit made of Astroturf and a metronome on his head.”

Graeme, a classically trained musician, had played regularly at the Sydney Opera House and in the contemporary music group Flederman, while working as a freelance orchestral percussionist in Sydney before moving to Melbourne.

“I became interested in making my own work, hanging around with actors, musicians, magicians and clowns, and I’ve always been fascinated by experimenting with making new instruments,” he says.

“I love the beauty and simplicity of something as ordinary as a piece of string and a can: simple but so full of possibility.”

We are digressing here, but the point is that Graeme likes creating sounds from unlikely sources, be it his innovation of the four-string quartet, featuring cans of four different sizes, ranging from a chip oil can to a tuna fish can, or a large Perspex bowl of water.

Anyway, back to Graeme and Patrick.

“We met up and I said, ‘What are you thinking of doing next?’ and he said he was considering putting together an orchestra to play the music of Ennio Morricone,” says Graeme.

The orchestra was born.

“We soon realised the theatrical possibilities of doing this film music, and we became very interested in learning about the way Morricone composed, beyond just the music. There were the sound effects, too.”

Graeme, Patrick and co originally performed as The Ennio Morricone Experience, but once they met Denis Blais at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, The Spaghetti Western Orchestra was born.

“He’s a French Canadian full of ideas for bringing more visual ideas to our performance, and what we’re touring now is what we started in 2007 at the Montreal Jazz Festival,” says Graeme.

The orchestra has performed previously at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s South Bank Centre and at the Royal Albert Hall during last year’s Proms season, but this year is the first chance to see them around the country.

Part of the joy will be watching them feverishly at work on the sound effects. “If you want to make the sound of a cowboy walking on gravel, stick a microphone in gravel,” says Graeme.

Rather than scenes from the films, the orchestra uses an evocative backdrop. “We feel it would ruin it if we used images from the Eastwood films,” says Graeme. “Everyone has the movies in their head already, and the music and sounds sets off those images.”

• Spaghetti Western Orchestra, Grand Opera House, York, Wednesday, 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024