The PCO was the brainchild of the English composer and multi-instrumentalist Simon Jeffes (1949-1997). Because his father's work entailed many foreign postings, his early life was spent on the move around Canada and Europe, an experience which left him, he said, with "this culture of slightly dispossessed people who live in the modern West but haven't got one rooted home." While at English boarding school, aged 12, Jeffes heard a guitar being played by a new boy. "It was like meeting your destiny" he reported later, "This guitar was actually glowing... there were sort of angels coming out of it. It was absolutely riveting." He played in an r'n'b band at school and when he left, he studied classical guitar and music theory at music college. Swiftly disillusioned with the factory-like conditions in which he was being taught, Jeffes dropped out and joined a 10 piece avant garde guitar ensemble, Gilberto Biberian's Omega Players, only to find that also rather stifling - "it was a bit too cerebral for me." So he turned to rock, working with the producer Rupert Hine on music for films, as well as Hine's first two solo albums, 1970's Pick Up A Bone and Unfinished Picture (1971). There are some demo tapes extant from this period which indicate that Jeffes was also then exploring the possibility of becoming a pop reggae vocalist. In 1972 got on the Trans Siberian Railway and spent four months at the other end in Japan. This was where he first became interested in ethnic music, particularly African, which he discovered on a cassette tape made up by a friend. "This tape just blew my mind, man!" he later told the journalist Andy Gill. "I didn't want to go to Africa, or learn African instruments or sound African. What I heard was straight from the source, why it is we play music, that gut level sound of humans being human. There was a joy to it, an ease and integrity straight from the stomach and the heart. It wasn't mediated by the mind at all."

And so began his plan to emulate the deep humanity of exotic folk music and merge it with his other more westernised enthusiasms within a previously unenvisaged ensemble. It was a mistake, he believed, simply to be a consumer of ethnic music, a goggle eyed tourist at the world's great musical bazaar. "It's good to hear these things, but it shouldn't be the end. The end should be us making our own ethnic music." A decade passed before this aspiration became a practical, economic reality. For the rest of the 1970's, alongside his Penguin activities Jeffes carried on working as a freelance producer and arranger, working with a rich mix of artists from Caravan and Rod Argent to Yvonne Elliman and the 101-ers. His best remembered work from this period is probably the string arrangement he contributed to Sid Vicious's version of My Way. "Through Malcolm McLaren I became a sort of musical consultant to the New Wave. He later asked me to explain the principles of Burundi drumming to Adam Ant." Simon Jeffes' musical taste was omniverous but his special favourites were, in no particular order: Beethoven, Bach, Erik Satie, John Cage, Abba, Wilson Pickett, Zimbabwean mbira, Cajun fiddle, Irish bagpipe, Venezuelan cuatro, West African choral, the Rolling Stones, Stravinsky.

The PCO formed in the mind of Simon Jeffes 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. Simon retold the story often. This was how he remembered it in 1988, just before the orchestra played their first gig in LA.

"I was laying in bed delirious, sort of hallucinating for about 24 hours. I had this one vision in my mind of a place that was like the ark of buildings, like a modern hotel, with all these rooms made of concrete. There was an electronic eye which scanned everything. In one room you had a couple that were making love, but lovelessly. It was cold sex with books and gadgets and what have you. In another room there was somebody just looking at himself in the mirror, just obsessed with himself. In another room there was a musician with a bank of synthesisers, wearing headphones, and there was no sound.

This was a very terrible, bleak place. Everybody was taken up with self-interested activity which kept them looped in on themselves. It wasn't like they were prisoners, they were all active, but only within themselves. And that kept them from being a problem or a threat to the cold order represented by the eye.

A couple of days later I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out 'I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random' and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It's acceptable there, and that's how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves."

The music of the Penguin Cafe, Simon broadly regarded as " a very big yes to the survival of the heart in a time when the heart is under attack from the forces of coldness, darkness and repression." When forced to describe it more precisely, he called his music "imaginary folklore" and "modern semi-acoustic chamber music." He very much liked the comment of a Japanese girl who attended a Penguin concert in Japan and who said afterwards that the music sounded strange, because it was as if she'd heard it a long time ago. Dissolving the otherwise insuperable barriers of time and space was, and still is, an important function of the magic contained in his music. Simon 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. Dozens of players passed though the Orchestra's ranks in the 24 years of its young life. "It is my context as a composer," he said. "I write for people rather than instruments."

It took four years to translate the original dystopian 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 Simon 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, Steve 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 - a total of £870 was spent - and recording on a Revox machine in his back garden, Jeffes and the orchestra stepped up a few gears. Extra personnel drifted, or got drafted, in. 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 - she who was 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 now essayed several unusual instruments, from the spinet to a ring modulator. "Because I'm a composer, I get to do whatever I like, " he commented. "It's almost as if in some past life I must have played instruments because when I pick them up, most of them, I can make a nice sound almost instantly, oboe excepted." The centrepiece of Music From The Penguin Cafe was a suite titled Zopf whose most vivid moment, Giles Farnaby's Dream mated 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 a friendly 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.

Brian Eno: " Given his individuality, his non-allegiance to any particular musical category, and the unfailing eclecticism of his vision, Simon Jeffes could easily be marginalised as an English eccentric - and thus sort of overlooked.

The truth is he discovered a huge musical territory - stretching along the border regions of the whole United Nations of music - and he wandered through it fascinated and, apparently always smiling. These pieces are reports back from those borderlands.

Like any good explorer, Simon was both alert and humble. He had no trace of musical snobbery, but delighted in the length and breadth of music, happy to experiment with all combinations."