Plat Du Jour -

PROGRAMS
- Program Grid
- Streaming
- Podcasts
- Feature CD
- Shows
WHAT'S ON
SUPPORT US
ABOUT US
- Policies
- Studios
- The SER Story
- Vision
CONTACT US

“Ever since being fortunate enough to travel the world with my music, my palate has changed. The familiar English rituals, textures and tastes have been undermined at every turn. The inevitable consequence has been a growing obsession with the international language of food.” Matthew Herbert

This obsession with food has led Matthew Herbert to make it the focus of his next musical endeavour, ‘Plat Du Jour’. Whilst Jamie Oliver has been busy revolutionising the way that British schoolchildren are fed and the government have been worrying about the state of the nation’s waistline, Matthew has been travelling the UK, hard-disk recorder slung over his shoulder, collecting the sounds which form this most singular and creatively ambitious of albums. These recordings have taken him to Scottish salmon farms, Cornish military museums, Heston Blumenthal’s famous kitchen/lab at his restaurant, The Fat Duck in Berkshire, to large-scale broiler farms, a chicken abattoir, the sewers beneath London's Fleet Street and a household refuse dump in Battersea.

Food is an unusual topic for a record. Most people make records about falling in love (or out of it) about sunny days, about cars and even dogs have turned up, but food hasn’t really meaningfully featured in the modern musical canon. This is surprising when you consider that eating is something that we all do more than anything else, certainly more than sex or driving or reading and writing.

Because the lucky ones amongst us eat three times a day, what we eat, where it comes from, how it got on our plate, who grew it, packed it, cooked it, all have enormous consequences on the world we live in. Every item of food or drink is loaded with stories, making the consumption of food a political act. With ‘Plat Du Jour’, Matthew Herbert attempts to tell some of these stories through music.

One of Matthew's earliest field recording sessions involved visits to different chicken farms and a commercial hatchery. So the album begins (you have to start an album with a chicken and egg track) and crunches, cheeps and squawks its way into your ears. In “The Truncated Life Of The Modern Industrialised Chicken” you are hearing the sound of 30,000 broiler chickens in a Wiltshire barn, 24,000 one minute old chicks in a hatchery, 40 free-range hens, a chicken being killed for a farmers’ market and organic free-range eggs broken and rolled around in bowls before being beaten with a whisk.

For the final track of the album, “Nigella, George, Tony And Me” Matthew recreated the meal that Nigella Lawson cooked for George Bush when he came to thank Tony Blair for his support in the war. This delectable feast was then laid out, picnic-style, in a Cornish field and Matthew drove over it in a Chieftain tank.

The attention to detail is staggering. To explain the ingredients of each track and the significance of each would entail writing a press release the size of the New Testament. Luckily it has all been listed at www.platdujour.co.uk

Also staggering is the amount of people who have been involved in the making of this record, from the research done by Polly Russell from the University of Sheffield (who also works for the oral history archive at the British Library) to the man who lent his field for “Nigella…” to the 3,255 people eating apples on “An Apple A Day”. Of particular note, are two pieces in collaboration with Heston Blumenthal whose Fat Duck emporium has just been voted the best restaurant in the world. “The Final Meal Of Stacey Lawton" and "Hidden Sugars" a track made from just one crystal of beet sugar and a can of coke.

The music of ‘Plat Du Jour’ is at once ominous and playful. According to The Guardian, with this project, "Matthew Herbert has managed to explode the dry conservatism of the avant-garde by, radically, having fun". He is not a documentary-maker. If he was, the sounds would be heard here in their raw form.

‘Plat Du Jour’ is an emotional response to the sounds and history that are contained within our food. It’s a polemic protesting the loss of diversity and quality in our food thanks to big business, supermarkets and government policy. Not since Public Enemy have noise and political protest been so convincingly entwined.

That Matthew has found the time to create ‘Plat Du Jour’ is remarkable in itself. He has played over 50 shows with his big band following the release of their album ‘Goodbye Swingtime’ in 2002, produced the debut album by Roisin Murphy (of Moloko fame) and scored a film by acclaimed French director Etienne Chatilliez.

As always, Herbert creates a masterpiece from smorgasbord of sounds – here the music is made from 30,000 broiler chickens, 3,255 people eating apples, the sound of a Chieftain tank running over a recreation of the meal prepared by Nigella Lawson for Tony Blair and George Bush, plus the sound of the sewers beneath Fleet Street.

Moving back to his more electronic style, the music of ‘Plat Du Jour’ is at once playful and ominous. With a staggering attention to detail ‘Plat Du Jour’ promises to be a genre defining moment in modern electronic music.