Songs for When You Want to Weep & Waltz

Nigel Burch and The Flea Pit Orchestra bring their hard-edged skiffle and bar-room ballads to Moscow this week for a four-date series of performances that begins and ends at popular bar, restaurant and gallery Project O.G.I.

Burch, the band's frontman and songwriter, has earned The Flea Pit Orchestra a devoted fan base with his fiercely honest hymns to lost love and lost time -- songs populated by drunks, lunatics and losers who while away the hours longing for lost lovers, or in pubs "rooted to our bar stools, just like cabbages in a row" (from "Me and All the Other Vegetables").

In an e-mail interview from his London home this week, Burch called the music of The Flea Pit Orchestra "punk-diddley chamber-pot music-hall Cockney-Weimer cabaret-style urban ditties and dirges you can dance to." And, once you've heard the band, you're likely to agree that Burch's description is as precise as they come.

In the run-up to this week's Moscow tour and Thursday's local re-release of the band's two-year-old debut album "Bottle Sucker," The Flea Pit Orchestra has been advertised here as "a slice of The Pogues with a bit of The Tiger Lillies." But, despite some similarities to Irish folk punk band The Pogues, Burch's band is a far cry from The Tiger Lillies, a London trio known best for its falsetto-voiced chants and kindergarten humor. The Tiger Lillies, who are hugely popular in Russia and tour here often, made their reputation with joke songs like "Sex With Flies" and love ballads dedicated to a sheep, but have little in common with The Flea Pit Orchestra, whose work is more down to earth and less a desperate bid for laughs than a sincere, if sometimes unorthodox, expression of emotion:

"I throw your love letters down the toilet / But they just won't flush away," Burch sings in a ballad called "Love Letters Down the Toilet," the first track on "Bottle Sucker."

Although Burch admits to knowing The Tiger Lillies and playing several gigs with them at London venues, he objected to the comparison with his own band:

"We are often compared to The Tiger Lillies, but I really don't know why. ... The only similarity I see is that the two bands both play acoustic instruments. ... I suppose our songs share the same subject matter -- lowlife stuff really -- but they [The Tiger Lillies] seem a bit shallow to me and tend to go for more shock value than we do. They're also more 'theatrical.'"

The influence of The Pogues, however, is obvious in the music of The Flea Pit Orchestra, whose five members include percussionist Andrew Ranken, who played with The Pogues for the duration of the band's 15-year lifetime

"By contrast [to The Tiger Lillies], the early Pogues stuff I love, and I find it inspiring that Andrew Ranken is playing with us," Burch wrote.

In addition to Burch and Ranken, The Flea Pit Orchestra -- which Burch calls "a compelling concoction, a heady cocktail ... of misfits and musicians" -- includes violinist Dylan Bates, a composer who has written music for several theatrical productions and leads his own jazz band, Waiting on Dwarfs; and Seattle-born, classically-trained cellist Mary Morrison, who also performs frequently on London's jazz club circuit.

The band's bass player John Edwards will not make the trip to Russia and will be replaced on the Moscow tour by Italian-born, London-based double bass player Roberto Bellatalla, a prominent member of the European improvisational music community.

In addition to singing and writing songs, Burch also plays a tiny, four-stringed instrument called a banjulele -- a cross between a banjo and a ukulele invented by Alvin Keech in 1918.

"After playing guitar in various rock bands and on solo gigs, I decided I needed something to sound a bit different from all the other six-string strummers, pluckers and pickers, and I started to play the ukulele," Birch wrote. "It was interested to see how my songs sounded stripped down to the bare bones. Not all songs survive such close scrutiny, but I think a lot of mine did. I liked that empty, naked sound, but it was hard to sustain in a long concert."

The ukulele also played a role in the naming of the band:

"The word 'ukulele' comes from Hawaii and means dancing flea because your fingers move around the fretboard like little fleas -- hence the Flea Pit Orchestra, because orchestras also play in orchestra pits and lots of our songs are set in flea pits: dirty hovels, smelly bed sits and crumbling pubs."

Burch also makes forays into other art forms. In addition to composing songs, he draws and writes poetry and prose.

"I only draw, write and sing about the things that I see, although this can sometimes be a problem because you can end up only seeing what you draw and write and sing about," he wrote.

"It excites me to write and read, to sing and listen, to try to move people with my music, but also to be moved by them -- although fewer and fewer people do it for me these days."

Burch's interest in literature is apparent in his music, in which lyrics are of utmost importance.

"I like songs to be concise and clear, to say complicated things in a simple way," he wrote. "[American country & western star] Hank Williams was a master of this and I've always liked the raw emotion of a lot of the country and blues singers: Leadbelly, Jimmie Rodgers, Big Bill Broonzy."

But some of the artists Burch cites as influences hailed from Russia, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the alcohol-soaked samizdat epic written by the late Venedikt Yerofeyev in 1970 and first published in Israel in 1973.

The latter is appropriate since several of Burch's songs are about alcohol and the abuse of it, a fact that certainly plays a role in the band's popularity here.

In "Bottle Sucker," for example, Burch sings "Keep up your pecker / Keep up your chin / There's always whiskey / And beer and wine and gin."

And in "Wee-Wee Into Wine," he sings "The alcohol is going / To my bladder and my brain / I'm waiting for a miracle / I think I wait in vain / Things would work out for me / All would be just fine / If I could turn my / Wee-wee into wine."

"Alcohol's a huge subject," Burch wrote, "but it's a long time since I went a day without a drink. As Humphrey Bogart said when someone asked him if he had ever been on the wagon he said, 'Yes, and it was the most depressing afternoon of my life.'"

But the music of The Flea Pit Orchestra is just as often poignant as it is cynical -- although upbeat rhythms are practically a constant, even in the band's songs about lost love, of which there are more than one in its 13-song repertoire.

"Wounded people do stupid things," Burch sings in "Wounded People. "They close their eyelids and make a wish / They cry like babies and they drink like fish / They trap pretty butterflies and pick off their wings / Wounded people do stupid things."

Despite the depressed tone of its lyrics, however, the song is not intended to inspire grieving. Just the opposite, in fact:

"Art helps people through, especially songs and music," Burch wrote. "I say that we play dirges you can dance to and I think that's true. Gloomy words with jolly and jovial tunes: The Existential Knees Up."

Nigel Burch and The Flea Pit Orchestra perform at 10 p.m on Wednesday at Project O.G.I. (8/12 Potapovsky Pereulok, Bldg. 2. Metro Chistiye Prudy. Tel. 927-5776), at 9 p.m. on Thursday at Svalka (27/1 Profsoyuznaya Ulitsa. Metro Profsoyuznaya. Tel. 128-7823), at 11 p.m. on Oct. 18 at Kitaisky Lyotchik Dzhao Da (25 Lubyansky Proyezd. Metro Kitai-Gorod. Tel. 924-5611), and at 10 p.m. on Oct. 19 at Project O.G.I.