SMOOSH! Charles Hazlewood on Paraorchestra’s Pied Piper-like Performance Piece

The Artistic Director of Paraorchestra will be familiar to a huge number of you through his Sky Arts documentary series Re-inventing the Orchestra. And he’ll be known to many more through his appearances at the Southbank Centre, whether that be leading musicians spread across the floors and spaces of our Royal Festival Hall for September 2022’s The Anatomy of the Orchestra, or clad in a frankly incredible jumpsuit to conduct The Love Unlimited Synth Orchestra at Grace Jones’ Meltdown.

Through all of those appearances and guises, you’ll have seen Hazlewood display a seemingly undiminishable enthusiasm for music and the power of music, and we can delight in assuring you that this is no act. Spend five minutes in his company and you’ll be convinced that you can change the world with a trumpet, even if you’ve never so much as picked up an instrument before. So it was a delight for us to have the opportunity to not only welcome him to the Southbank Centre again in the summer of 2023, but also throw some questions his way about just what his latest project, SMOOSH! entails.

‘The orchestra is a birthright for all, not a luxury for some,’ he told us as part of this discussion about how the project evolved on the streets of Paraorchestra’s Bristol-base. And while we go off to get that printed on a t-shirt, you can read on to discover what SMOOSH! is, how it developed, and how it reaches the parts that other orchestral works perhaps cannot.

Hi Charles, let’s start with the seemingly obvious question first, what exactly is SMOOSH!?

SMOOSH! is a big sonic bear hug. It’s a mobile mass-aoke. It’s like a human jukebox on wheels. It’s an act of love, a free, fun, kaleidoscopic mix of professional and local musicians and dancers parading through the streets performing special versions of pop bangers and inviting everyone to join in.

The name derives from a word in American English, which has two rather delicious and related meanings. The first is that let’s say you’ve taken a cauliflower and you’ve cooked it and cooked and cooked it so it’s like incredibly soft and then you want to sort of mash some grated cheese into it – now the process of mashing that cheese is known as smooshing. And then the other definition is, say, if you see a little fluffy kitten that is just sort of unbearably cute, you just find yourself wanting to smoosh it. So that’s the essence of the name and the essence of the show.

‘SMOOSH! can work in any kind of context… there’s nowhere it can’t go. It’s gloriously mobile and gloriously infectious fun.’

Can you tell us a little more about the genesis of SMOOSH! Where did the idea come from, and how did it originate?

Well, it was borne out of the Covid-19 lockdown, actually. We were scratching our heads and thinking, how could we make a piece of work that could be experienced in the open air, in a format which is less potentially infectious than being indoors? We also wanted to take Paraorchestra to a part of Bristol – our hometown – where we haven’t had any presence before, to an area called Knowle West. And so the show was born, really. I’ve always been fascinated by karaoke, about the idea of people just coming together and having a damn good old sing, because people do love to do that. So, yeah, SMOOSH! was born during the tail-end of lockdown and now it’s finding its feet in all sorts of different locations and contexts.

How easy is it to put together something like SMOOSH! Together, given that it’s so much more fluid in its delivery than a typical concert? And how do you create SMOOSH! in new spaces and new contexts?

The great thing about SMOOSH! is that it’s got a very strong kind of backbone. There’s an overarching narrative to it, the way that the particular songs we’ve chosen hang together. There’s a moment, if you like, of disharmony where the band splits into two sort of warring factions and they pit Adele and Kate Bush against each other, which is quite beautiful.

But beyond that the show can work in any kind of context, really, it’s fully choreographed – it’s all off-book, no-one’s reading sheet music because the thing is constantly on the move. It just completely opens itself to any thoroughfare, any bus shelter, any seaside pier, any motorway flyover – there’s nowhere that SMOOSH! can’t go. It’s gloriously mobile and gloriously infectious fun.

How do you determine what music to play within SMOOSH!?

So the wonderful composer we work with on this project, Emma-Jean Thackray and I got into the most delicious riffing where we were kind of trying to just distil down to the right number of tracks, but the absolute pitch-perfect tracks and the tracks that would sit most well together. I’d like to believe that we’ve chosen a good selection of tunes, both kind of like flagrantly popular and some slightly more niche, some with a real kind of essence of Bristol because after all that’s where Paraorchestra are from! It was a delirious and utterly delicious process with Emma fiddling away until we got the perfect number of tracks and the perfect combination of tracks.

‘People think of an orchestra as being a very fixed entity of violins and violas and wind sections and brass and percussion and so on. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t have to be just that’

Paraorchestra’s strapline, if an orchestra can have such a thing, is ‘re-inventing orchestra for the 21st century’. Where does SMOOSH! fit within this mantra?

So the first thing I’d say is that the word orchestra for me is far less limiting than perhaps it is for many other people. So much of what Paraorchestra does is around removing barriers. We exist to provide a platform for disabled talent that doesn’t exist anywhere else. To do this we need to take an incredibly flexible and gloriously creative approach to each of our projects to ensure that we are removing those barriers that otherwise prevent disabled musicians from playing.

The result is a magnificent reimagining of what an orchestra is – both in terms of its sound, but also of its format and who gets to play in it and where. SMOOSH! is almost the perfect embodiment of this, and we’re removing barriers not just for musicians who identify as disabled but for audiences as well, taking music out into the streets and meeting people where they are. People think of an orchestra as being a very fixed entity of violins and violas and wind sections and brass and percussion and so on. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t have to be just that. For me, the word orchestra simply means a collective of musicians. So SMOOSH! is as much an orchestral piece as Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, in my humble opinion.

The fact is that it’s very interesting when the orchestra comes out of its ivory tower, when it breaks free from the hallowed haunt of the concert hall, which is a place that is more comfortable for some than is for others by dint of background education, income bracket. Taking a show like SMOOSH! out into the streets, freeing the orchestra up, putting them actually in the middle of a great thoroughfare is an incredible way of taking art to people rather than expecting people to come to the art.

I suppose that’s the big shift in the paradigm with a show like SMOOSH! and with so much of the other work we do at Paraorchestra. We don’t just play pop music –we’re as comfortable playing Beethoven as we are Basement Jaxx – but it’s all just about renewing the form or just reigniting its splendour to people who perhaps haven’t come across it before. You know, the orchestra is a birthright for all, not a luxury for some.

What do you feel a performance like SMOOSH! offers an audience that other more traditional, auditorium orchestral shows, do not?

A-ha. Well, let’s face it, when you’re sitting in a concert hall, there are rules of engagement, right? I mean, it saddens me to say, but there still tends to be, you know, pages upon pages of the concert programme, which would tell you all the things you’re not allowed to do which to me is the wrong way round. You don’t want to invite people into a hallowed space and tell them what they’re not allowed to do – that’s the wrong way round. Couldn’t there be another way, which is much more along the lines of what you get if you go to Glastonbury or any other kind of big outdoor festival? 

It’s about people hunkering down, people being a bit silly, having a big old dance in the middle of the street, singing along to some glorious, great big universal tunes. It’s a completely different way of experiencing the orchestra where there’s an informality to it and the potential for kind of a spontaneous joy to erupt at any point.

‘The orchestra is a birthright for all, not a luxury for some’

And lastly, if a successful auditorium concert looks like musicians receiving a standing ovation, what will a successful SMOOSH! experience look like?

A success for SMOOSH! will mean that by the end [of the performance], we’ve gathered, Pied Piper-like, an inordinate army of delighted members of the public. There’s an audience that sort of grows exponentially as the show makes its way along. So I suppose we know we’ve done a good job and there’s a scrum of people roaring their lungs out to ‘Praise You’ by Fatboy Slim, which is the last track of SMOOSH!, and everyone’s giddy with the pleasure of it, with the kind of up close and personal access they’ve had to each and every instrument in the orchestra. 

You know, they can walk through the parade, they can dance alongside it. They can dance down through the middle of it. They’ve got open access to each and every instrument, each and every colour within the whole spectrum, which, again, you don’t have if you’re in a concert hall.

SMOOSH! by Paraorchestra took over the Southbank Centre’s Riverside Terrace on 24 June, 2023.

by Glen Wilson