LP Swing Orchestra celebrate movie music at Congress Theatre, Eastbourne

At the Congress Theatre, Eastbourne on August 25, they will be celebrating the golden age of movies though the works of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin plus the soundtracks of James Bond, Disney and MGM. You can expect swinging renditions from the libraries of Sinatra, Ella and Basie courtesy of the 17-piece orchestra, which bills itself as the UK's busiest big band, under band leader Joe Pettitt.

In 2010 the Len Phillips Big Band came under Joe’s leadership, bringing a more vibrant and dynamic feel to their direction. They became LP Swing Orchestra, touring Britain’s concert halls and jazz clubs.

“My background is that I was a jazz player,” Joe explains, “and I used to do a lot of West End and touring shows. The artistic director at Eastbourne is Chris Jordan and I was the bass player in a show called By Jeeves which Chris produced in Eastbourne. That must have been going back to around 2008 and I got to know Chris fairly well and then a couple years later I started running what was then called the Len Phillips Big Band but I didn't know anyone in the business so Chris was the first person I thought of that had a venue under his control. And actually Eastbourne really suits this music well.

“Eastbourne is a brilliant, brilliant venue. It's a great place and after the refurbishment of a few years ago it is in really tip top shape. And it is a good size, plus at this time of the year if you're not playing the venues that are also holiday destinations then you're going to be looking for trouble. If you're not playing the holiday destinations, you're going to be wondering where all the people are.”

The early name changes were tricky, Joe admits: “We stopped being the Len Phillips Big Band because big band was something that people of a certain age knew about but younger people didn't really know. The word swing seemed to better suit us but then it was just really too many words. The Len Phillips Swing Orchestra is a lot of words to fit on logos and posters. It was tricky and a bit sad to drop the Len Phillips name but we are always very keen to hark back to Len Phillips and what he meant.”

As for the show this year: “Really it harks back to my days as a bass player in the West End. I got to play on a lot of the big MGM musicals. I did a show called High Society that toured and went into the West End and that was my first big job out of college and we're going to be doing some songs from that.

“And also we're going to be doing a Rat Pack segment. We love all those films and we've also got a Disney segment and we're also doing a Bond segment. We've got three singers in the show this time, and they are all big fans this type of music.

"We've got a big email train that’s very, very long with us chucking out ideas as to what songs we could do but actually having three is very unusual for us.

"We usually only have two singers. We usually have a boy and a girl but this time it makes it really interesting to have two chaps (as a permutation) in this instance.”