This is an occasional musical collective, originally started to inject some surreality into the
Dalí Festival
Liverpool City Council was the first public authority in the UK to admit that it had a surreal sub-committee of elected members and council officers. There was a major exhibition of Salvador Dalí's work at Tate Liverpool, which included the only UK exhibition of the works in the collections in St Petersburg, Florida, and items from the Sigmund Freud collection. To complement this, Liverpool City Council created a Dalí Working Party and invited Dave to direct the Festival with a programme of performances, lectures, poetry, music, dance and other education and arts activities.
The exhibition seemed unduely reverend to Dalí - someone described by festival performers as a charlattan, an exploitative artist, a cruel human being, a bad Catalan, and a bogus surrealist.
With the help of Adrian Henry, George Melly, Ian MacMillan, John Hegley, Kimbara Brothers and Primera Nota, the Festival was a landmark for the missing "ludic*" and cultural elements. Surreal Orchestra was part of this, and launched the event with the music for an escaped balloon (in the form of a helium-filled giant soft watch which crawled upwards over the Liverpool skyline to an unknown destiny.)
The Surreal Orchestra now performs very rarely, and consists of talented multi-instrumentalists and word-artists.
* a difficult-to-capture term, incorporating playfulness, absurdity, humanity, humour & piss-taking.