Terry Grimley meets a songwriter who is adding his talents to Birmingham big band’s eclectic mix.

After a long solo career, Paul Murphy has brought his song-writing talents to the eclectic mix of eccentric Birmingham big band The Destroyers.

It’s been a long time coming, but the debut album by the Birmingham’s Balkan jazz-funk big band is finally scheduled for release on August 29.

Meanwhile, the band’s first single, Out of Babel, will be launched with a party at The Rainbow Warehouse, in Digbeth, next Friday. It’s a riotous celebration of multicultural Birmingham and, of all the songs released this year, possibly the one least likely to be adopted as an anthem by the BNP.

It was written by Paul Murphy, Belfast-born singer-songwriter and cultural activist who has lived in Birmingham since 1966 and was well known in the 1990s for running the Songwriters’ Cafe. His performing career has taken on a new lease of life in the last few years as the fez-topped vocalist of The Destroyers’ eccentric stage shows.

“Basically it took three years to finish the album – longer than it should have done,” he explains. “That’s in part the sheer logistics of the 15 of us. New material was emerging into our live set as we were doing the album, and it seemed kind of sensible having worked that stuff on the live circuit to record it.”

However, Out of Babel pre-dates The Destroyers, Paul having written it during New Year, 1996/97.

He explains: “It was in the days of Songwriters’ Cafe and it was a song I had been wanting to write for a while. It’s about the experience of living in this city, and a vision of a city of unity in diversity and a kind of cultural melting pot. At that time I was very conscious of the range of musical influences that existed in Birmingham.

“So in the lyrics you have ‘tabla, bodhrán and conga call...Gurdip Singh hoists his granddaughter high/and she’s laughing like a dove as we go by...’. I was thinking of a particular Gurdip Singh who was then in his late teens and a friend of my son Mark, and imagining him 50 years down the line.”

This was around the time that Paul was first meeting the group of musicians who would eventually become The Destroyers.

“A lot of the band, like Louis Robinson, came to the city in about 1996 and also my nephew Joel was a student at the Conservatoire at the same time as them. They were living in Speedwell Road and they came along to the Songwriters’ Cafe, and I employed them on youth music projects I was organising.

“Joel, Louis, Max Gittings, the flute player, and Dan O’Connell, the drummer, worked with me on an album of songs about bereavement, dealing with the loss of my wife, which I never did release in the end. It’s still waiting for a definitive mix.

“Then The Destroyers were forming at Speedwell Road. I knew them and had often been at sessions there, and they invited me to come on a number of gigs with them, and then I just became part of the band.

“I brought the songwriting element, collaborating with members of the band who are instrumental composers. There are songs on the album which are collaborations between me and Leighton, the other violinist, for example. The other song being released with Out of Babel, which is called Where Did the Money Go?, was inspired by the Bernard Madoff scandal. It’s about Thierry de la Villehuchet, who lost 1.4 billion dollars in the scam and killed himself in his Manhattan office. There are also two songs on the album in Italian, written by me for our trumpeter Leo Altarelli, who has a fantastic voice.”

Apart from the economic challenge of running such a large band, The Destroyers are artistically dependent on maintaining a creative equilibrium between a wide range of musical styles and skills.

“Obviously it’s when we get on stage that it becomes manifest, and fortunately we’ve got lots and lots of gigs. The line-up has settled down so it means the arrangements are really tight, and it gives so much scope.

“We’re playing Glastonbury for the third time this summer and this time we’re playing the Avalon Stage, which is a nice move up. We recently played in Glasgow and Edinburgh and there was a strange phenomenon in Edinburgh. We do a song called I’m Alive! which we start with the band lying down playing their instruments, and the audience lay down too – about 200-300 people lying on the floor!”

The full title of this song is actually The Glass Coffin Burial of Professor Zurinak, and it is probably the oldest original piece in The Destroyers’ repertoire, having been written by Paul as long ago as 1967. Mysteriously, it has just turned up on a compilation CD, Waltzes, Glitches & Brass: The New Sounds of Vaudeville released by California-based Eventide Music Productions (www.empcds.com).

As well as building up its repertoire of original material the band likes to keep things fresh with collaborations like the one at this spring’s Flatpack Festival event at the Town Hall, where it provided live music for Mitchell & Kenyon’s pioneering documentary films. And then there’s the “urban folk opera” Tweedeleededeedee, Sir Ru Barb and The Green Wolf, performed in its current narrated version at the Bath Music Festival last month, which seems to have taken on a life of its own.

“I’ve spent the last couple of years working on that on and off,” says Paul. “Frank, our bass player, scored it for 15 instruments, and we’re talking to people in London called Music Theatre Matters about developing it into a fully-staged musical.”

* The Destroyers launch their debut single with a party at the Rainbow, Digbeth, on Friday, June 19 (9pm-4am; tickets £10). They play Ludlow Assembly Rooms on July 4. For details see www.thedestroyers.co.uk and www.myspace.com/the destroyers