Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra

MyGen Profile Generator MyGen Profile Generator MyGen Profile Generator'A cross between the music of Ian Dury, Brecht and Weill, an Irish pub band and a 1950's skiffle group. Songs of urban-alienation with plenty of fierce spontaneous playing.' (THE GUARDIAN.)Although NIGEL BURCH started performing at the age of 10 in his first band The Blackouts his serious(?) career began writing and performing in the seventies and eighties with a number of new-wave/punk outfits such as The Outpatients and Figures of Fun. During this period they shared the bill with bands such as The Damned, Sham 69, The Members and Crass. In the mid-eighties - solo and armed only with a ukulele and a scary pair of tonsils (billed as "The Troubadour Of Urban Angst") he stormed the stages of the pub/club/cabaret scene like some demented neo-George Formby. He appeared alongside the likes of John Cooper Clarke and Patrik Fitzgerald and released a stark and uncompromising solo vinyl album called "Fascists In The Snug Bar". (Faintly amusing - The Morning Star.) He continued to perform his set of strange and unsettling songs, now occasionally accompanied by string-players and percussionists. Later he assembled around him a collection of musicians from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. In 1997, with an expanded sound that included such instruments as the violin, double bass, cello and drums this eccentric ensemble now known as NIGEL BURCH AND THE FLEA-PIT ORCHESTRA played their first performance. The banjulele bashing bard and his musical misfits play twisted skiffle and bar-room ballads - Cockney-Weimar cabaret style. Gritty inner-city ditties you can drink and dance to - punkdiddley Brechtian hoedown, spit-and sawdust vaudeville: The Existential Knees-Up. Humorous and horrible, poignant and debauched. In London they have played The Hackney Empire, The Borderline, The 100 Club, The Spitz, King's Head Theatre Pub, The Klinker, The 12 Bar Club, The Hope & Anchor, The Buffalo Bar, The Arcola Theatre plus countless other pubs and clubs and anarchists's balls. They have also toured in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and Moscow - where they are very popular, seeming to appeal to the Russian alcoholic sensibility.
The band has appeared three times on BBC London radio once on the Peter Currin Show and twice on the Mel And Sue Show. Nigel has appeared solo on Viva Radio and resonance.fm. They have been featured on the Round the World play-list on Spirit FM and make a live appearance in the up-and-coming short film Percy Circus. They were interviewed for Moscow TV and an interview with Nigel Burch appeared in The St Petersburg Times in an article called Songs For When You Want To Weep And Waltz. Burch has also acted in both musical theatre (once as one of Santa's secret agents in The Legend Of Chocolate with The Sofa Trio) and in a number of short films - most recently making a very brief appearance as a harem guard in the dark erotic fantasy Prayer Cushions Of The Flesh. The CD BOTTLE SUCKER featuring Flea-Pit favourites such as 'Love Letters Down The Toilet',' Me And All The Other Vegetables' and 'I Used To Be Mad' is available from gigs and on request. The follow-up CD MR DOO-LALLY will be released shortly and includes 'The Pub With No Name', 'Bad To My Body' and of course 'Mr Doo-Lally'. Nigel Burch is also a published poet/illustrator and his work has appeared in a number of magazines including DOG, Iron, Ape, The Rialto, Liar Republic alongside Irvine Welsh and Billy Childish, amongst others. His first collection was called Sentimental Monster (Echo Room Press). Charles Bukowski described his writing as "the best cure for a hangover I ever lucked across." As a graphic artist he has shown his work in England, Germany, U.S.A, Switzerland and Austria. His last London exhibition was at The Stairwell Gallery and called "Old Hat." See: www.fleapitorchestra.co.uk for details of band and solo gigs.