Let there be light | 13 July 2017

If you’ve never heard the John Wilson Orchestra, it’s time to experience pure happiness. Buy their 2016 live album Gershwin in Hollywood — seriously, just do it. Play the first track: a medley arranged by Ray Heindorf for Warner Brothers’ 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. One by one the great melodies glide past and you’ll already know them, of course: ‘Swanee’, ‘Embraceable You’, ‘I Got Rhythm’. There’s something different, though, about the way they sound here. The brass swaggers; the strings melt and swoon. It’s a sound that most of us have only ever heard through the crackle of a vintage-movie soundtrack, or on a Capitol-era Sinatra LP. But this is fresh — in fact, it gleams. And then, with the audience still cheering, John Wilson slams his full 66-piece orchestra into the opening salvo of ‘Treat Me Rough’. If, in that instant, you don’t feel that this is the greatest show on earth, there’s probably not much point in reading on.

‘It packs quite a punch, doesn’t it?’ says Wilson. ‘We worked bloody hard to get it like that, and what you hear is what happened on the night.’ Talking to the conductor at the centre of the whole phenomenon is disarming. Audiences sometimes giggle when the dapper figure (his tailcoat was made for him by Fred Astaire’s former tailor) with the stick in his hand turns around, wipes his glasses and addresses them in a soft Geordie accent. And the point that he’s determined to make on this occasion is just how much effort it takes for music to sound this much fun. ‘It takes infinite care,’ he says. ‘You start by getting what you think are the right people together, which is what I did 22 years ago at college, and then keep finding players who really want to do it.’