Chris Muirhead: From The House to Tarrion and The Pit Orchestra

Few figures are as deeply woven into Plymouth’s alternative music scene as Chris Muirhead. From curating unforgettable nights at The House, to co-founding The Pit Orchestra, to now fronting his ambitious new band Tarrion, Chris is constantly pushing creative boundaries. Our community reporter Joshua Edwards sat down with him to find out more.

Chris Muirhead is a very busy man. Without the use of hyperbole, it has taken us three months to find a time we could both make an interview work.

So much effort has gone into the when of the interview that I had failed to consider the where. So, when Chris suggests conducting the interview over a pint, and states a preference for independent public houses, there seems to be only one logical choice for such a sprawling and long form discussion about artistic endeavors; The Nowhere Inn.

I have met Chris only a couple of times before, both times in passing at gigs Chris was working on, so after a hand shake and a trip to the bar, I suggest breaking the ice by putting some songs on the jukebox to soundtrack our discussion. Despite the famed Nowhere jukebox diversity, it is testament to Chris’ finger on the pulse of what’s interesting in the music world that he cannot find most of his first or second choices as we go through. Eventually, we find five songs, which I figure will soundtrack the majority of our time, earmarked for an hour or so.

The interview goes two and a half hours. This should give you an idea of not only how much Chris has going on, but also how engaging an interviewee he is.

I record the interview to refer back to as I write up to avoid having to constantly be scribbling throughout. A two and a half hour recording to write up? Sure, why not? Let’s dive in.

Chris Muirhead Live - Photo Credit Tim Langsford

The House

I first became aware of Chris Muirhead as curator of music at the House. I’ve reviewed a gig there before for Plymouth Culture and had also been there for the incredible Peach and Sans Froid show in 2024. It is a unique venue based on the Plymouth university campus that has already built a reputation for incredible shows. Chris is the man behind that.

On his position at the House, Chris says his time working at beloved Bretonside venue, the White Rabbit, instilled in him a “he who dares” attitude when it comes to booking: “If you want to book a band, just book them. Don’t think they won’t be interested or they’re too big or whatever. Just book them.”

When he was approached by the university to “give the students something interesting” Chris took that experience with him. “There was an appetite for something (that would attract the students) in the university. So, I thought I’d just go for broke, because why not? I’ll go for the weirder side of things and if that turns out to be a terrible idea and they don’t end up wanting to work with me again, I’ll know where I stand,”

For his debut gig at the House, Chris booked London’s Neo-Jazz experimenters, Sly and the Family Drone in February of 2023. “It was hilarious actually, because they walked around and said ‘bloody hell, this is a bit posh.’ I told them about all the things we could offer, told them about the big four metre by four metre screen behind the bands and they said ‘cool, cool, cool… We wanna play where the people stand. There’s no difference in the floor level between stage and audience so they wanted to play with people around them.”

What followed was a wild show, complete with topless singer atop stacks of hastily rearranged speakers, playing to a packed house. It was a success, and Chris has been booking there, during term time, ever since. A host of exciting acts have played the House in the following years, including the aforementioned Sly & the Family Drone, Peach and Sans Froid, Mt. Onsra, Goldenmother, Sugar Horse, Eyesore, Creep Cave, Heavy Heavy Hands, Ubiquitous Meh! and Chris’ own band, Aches.

All the line-ups for shows are put together with great care by Muirhead: “I’m interested in the spectacle of it. I’m not interested in who the rising star is or who are my friends’ bands necessarily, I’m interested in the spectacle. I find that really interesting. Take booking Sans Froid to go on before Peach; you watch them and go ‘what the f@ck was that? Like Tori Amos fronting Battles. Then you follow that with Peach, same physicality onstage, there’s boys and girls in both bands, and it looks the same in terms of the female at the front, so maybe you will get the same genre but it’s a completely different beast. Peach are…”

Fronted by the world’s smallest titan?

“Yeah. Incredible. And that spectacle is interesting to me.”

Photo thanks to Chris - from his personal collection

Visually, what sets the House apart most prominently as a venue, is the huge four metre by four metre screen behind the stage. The visuals displayed on it are stunning, but Chris surprises me when he says that, for the most part, bands will allow him free reign to put whatever he wants to put up there. Those visuals provide a means for Chris to interact with the band’s music more practically, as he and his partner, artist Katy Richardson, will put together short films based on listening to the music of each band. Chris Muirhead’s fingerprints are all over the shows at the House and he must be considered a huge reason it’s built up such a favourable reputation.

It is not certain at this time if regular shows will continue at the venue, but I sincerely hope they do, not least because as a student of the university I get free entry to them and, as a musician myself, I am very keen to play there.

Photo Credit: Greenbeanz Photography.

The Pit Orchestra

The next scheduled event at the House at time of writing is on the 6 th of December. It will be a screening of the classic Russian silent film, Battleship Potemkin, which celebrates its 100th birthday this year. The film will be shown with a live score, performed by The Pit Orchestra (formerly The Imperfect Orchestra), a group of musicians for hire featuring a revolving roster of artists.

The Pit Orchestra was founded by Tom Richardson, Chris Bailey and, our subject, Chris Muirhead, all of whom still perform as part of it.

Formed in 2013 when they were approached by Allister Gall of the Imperfect Cinema group to score their short film, Home, the group were presented with a blank canvas to work upon for their first project: “We asked what sort of thing do you want and (Allister) said you're free to do whatever you want. We didn’t see the film, he gave us pointers whilst they made the film. The Imperfect Cinema are very much improvise and develop the idea ‘in situ’ kind of guys; punk rock. All about the process, not necessarily the outcome. So, we get these themes, he gives us these themes and ‘this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end’ and we get little bits of footage to respond too. We eventually decide to do this Godspeed You Black Emperor! Type-thing, create soundscapes and go from there. It ended up a bit folkier than that.”

The venture led to a diverse array of commission work being offered to the musicians: More projects with the Imperfect Cinema, as well as bizarre ventures like scoring an academic conference (“It was all about how artistic academia consumes itself, so we created a lounge band and played a few Easy Listening standards. We would just chug wine, repeat the songs and spiral into a drunken muzak to baffle everyone there”), a wild swimming event at Tinside in which they responded to what the swimmers were doing musically, and a last-minute semi-improvised scoring of the

1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for an Imperfect Cinema event, as part of Nudge’s “Awakening” event at The Millennium Nightclub.

 To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they revisited that first film, re-scoring it for an event they dubbed Decade. It was then that they decided to change their name from the Imperfect Orchestra to the Pit Orchestra in order to not be confused with the Imperfect Cinema group. To be clear, this is with no animosity between the groups; when I ask Chris if he’d work with them again, he says “absolutely” emphatically and without hesitation.

They take their new name from the players in the theatre pit to reflect their ever-changing line-up. “It isn’t necessarily a band, like Dave’s the singer, Gary’s the guitarist. It’s more transient than that, with people coming and going.”

There have been around fifty different musicians who have performed with the Pit Orchestra since its inception. The doors are open to beginners and virtuosos alike, with their latest project having earned Arts Council funding to allow for each member to be paid for their work.

“We’re revisiting Battleship Potemkin (a film they originally scored in 2017) for the centenary and we have attracted some professionals; there’s a professional singer and a professional violinist in the orchestra this time. But the amateurishness of a person is still of interest. (…) For this performance, I’m playing cello. I’ve been playing cello for just under a year, I couldn’t sit here and play something on the cello now, but I can pretty much read sheet music. I’m using a tuner on my music stand that shows me if I’m in tune when I play. So, it’s a mix, which is what we want. (…) It’s been brilliant. People (in the orchestra) are really enjoying it.”

With all the founders having come from playing in punk bands, it’s unsurprising that there would be this level of inclusivity in the project, but Chris is surprised at how successful it’s become. “It’s honestly one of those things we didn’t realise we were building. The years go by and we were doing more stuff and then, before you know it, this is like a legitimate thing in the local culture. This is a thing people will come to, people will buy a ticket to. And we get people from all walks as well. I’ve been in bands my whole life, and you see the same hundred people at different gigs (…) but with The Pit Orchestra we’ve got people in their seventies, people’s kids there enjoying it more than they expected to, you know? It’s a proper mix which is fab.”

Having taken no notes from the original score, Chris says that they’ve re-written their original take for the end of the film to better reflect the current climate and think about it in a contemporary context. There are also plans to have the Ukranian singers of Plymouth open the evening.

Photo - thanks to Chris from his personal collection

Tarrion

Chris’ new band Tarrion is born from the natural ending of his previous band, Aches. As a creature of habit, Chris was reluctant to give up his weekly rehearsal space, working on new songs with the aid of his electric cello.

The artistic direction of the group stems from a writing project Chris started some years ago as a form of self-therapy. Chris had no idea what the writing was going to turn into, but eventually he wrote a novel around his obsession with the multiverse and the many worlds theories in quantum physics. The understanding of liminal spaces and the way humans perceive the world around them in a limited fashion. He developed the idea of a race called the Tarrion who exists on our planet but “we can’t see them or understand them because they don’t exist in a similar way to us” and they can see us but “like we can see a termite hill.”

“The creatures were born out of the world created in my novel Phantom (yet to be published) and their interest in humanity. (… And that led to a) two A4 page manifesto for a band. I wrote a paragraph for each song name so with each song I had a clear idea about what it was going to be.”

With a brief on what each song sounds and even looks like, the project was met with hesitation at first by the band: “A couple of weeks went by and we didn’t know what to do with it. This is like a literary project. (But all of a sudden) ‘I think I’ve got an idea about this now and I’ve brought a couple of bass lines’ and before you know it this is moving in a sort of cinematic way. We’re scoring these ideas.”

All of this has taken some time to birth, as you would well imagine, the band having started writing in November. “The songs are long. Eight minutes, sort of thing. (…) They’re epics, but not necessarily meandering; they are full of sections you could separate into individual songs.”

Far from prog-rock Chris describes Tarrion as “genre homeless (…) it doesn’t know what it wants to be and that’s embraced.”

The nature of the project allowed all the members to contribute music, not necessarily using their usual instruments of choice:

“I’ve written two songs. Danny the guitarist has written two songs, Stan the bassist has written three songs. Jack, the drummer, said ‘I want to write some guitar songs. I’ve never written, never really played guitar.’ (…) That song comes in wildly different to the other songs. It’s like (Black Sabbath’s) Planet Caravan or Something dark and spacious, with a big ending.”

There’s more Tarrion in the pipeline with mention of a fifteen minute “completely f*cking out there” composition coming and specifically made instruments for purpose. For now, they are preparing for their debut this weekend.

Honestly, the lofty concept of this project could be written about for much longer, but that’s true of every subject we touched upon in our interview; It is clear, coming out of it, that Chris Muirhead is an experimenter and an artist capable of producing wildly different works that he has poured a lot of effort and care into. I’ve pushed how many words the fine people at Plymouth Culture will accept as it is, so I won’t go anymore into it all.

After we part, I buy myself something cheap and dirty for my dinner and attempt to consider how one converts this conversation to print in my head. But before that, I eagerly note down the dates for the Tarrion show and the Pit Orchestra performance in my calendar.

You can see Tarrion playing alongside Goldenmother and the Buzzards at Leadworks on September the 27th.

The Pit Orchestra will be performing their score of Battleship Potemkin at the House on the 6th of December.