"To say the neighbours were intrigued is . . . um . . . an understatement.” Seventeen years after co-founding the percussive theatrical phenomenon that was Stomp, Luke Cresswell is talking about the genesis of Stomp’s long-awaited successor.

The neighbours were not old ladies peering from behind net curtains, but the remaining occupants of a South Downs industrial estate, quietly boggling at the quantities of shopping trolleys, radiator pipes, vast soup canisters, bed bases and water cooler bottles being freighted into unit ten. Inevitably, once the noise began in earnest, someone complained.

“We might have been road-testing the squonkaphone,” says Steve McNicholas, Cresswell’s bearded sidekick of some 25 years. “But the noise wasn’t so loud that day. So I think curiosity might have been a factor. You know that Tom Waits song, What’s He Building? — where someone becomes obsessed about the noise coming from their neighbour’s shed and the person making it? It was a bit like that.”

So what are they building in there? An orchestra, no less. But, of course, having created a multimedia international empire from the unpromising premise of banging on bins (since it was launched in 1991 the show has been seen by more than 12 million people in 42 countries, it notches up it’s 43rd next month when it has its Cairo premiere) any conventional concept of an orchestra scarcely begins to cover the task that the Stomp duo have set themselves with their new show. More for reasons of curiosity than ecological conscience, the Lost and Found Orchestra takes the recycling ethos to a surreal, sublime conclusion.

Anyone who has seen Stomp, of course, will expect nothing less. Bravura rhythmic displays tapped out on matchboxes and choreographed sequences using water-filled kitchen sinks that hang off the necks of those “playing” them are previous high points.

So, wandering the Stomp premises, it isn’t that surprising to be confronted by a bed frame, strung so that it can be played like a double bass. It’s a similar story with the plumpets — traffic cones attached to long lengths of plumber’s pipe, supported by trolleys that move around the stage. The oddest thing about it all is that, actually, none of it sounds that odd.

Close your eyes and, at times, the Lost and Found Orchestra come close to sounding like a real orchestra, albeit with a heavier emphasis on tribal rhythms and low, lugubrious melodies that smother the senses like a sweet whale song. Open them again, and the scale of the enterprise is overwhelming, not least when a phalanx of plumpeters swarm the stage beneath the huge rope-ladder marimba and unleash their mighty plumpet din.

Cresswell and McNicholas say it was a relief to create something with “notes and chords” after the runaway success of Stomp. Before Stomp, both eked out a living, initially as street entertainers, then in a London collective called Pookiesnackenburger, best remembered for a series they were given back in the days when Channel 4 routinely gave London street entertainers their own series. “We were a good band,” says McNicholas, who alternated between guitar, violin and vocals, “But it didn’t translate to television.”

The realisation provided them with the impetus to assemble another band, Yes/No People, signed by the future superstar DJ Pete Tong, then an A&R man for London Records. If pop aficionados of the late 1980s struggle to remember Yes/No People, there’s a good reason for that. It all went a bit . . . well . . . Pete Tong: “The album was completed, but it sat on the shelf for over a year. They wanted us to be more commercial, but that was never what we were about,” Cresswell recalls.

Locked in dispute with their record company, Cresswell and McNicholas found themselves contractually forbidden from recording or staging music without permission from the label that refused to drop them or put out material by them. “It was a matter of sitting down,” McNicholas says, “and saying, ‘Well, what can we do? Well, we can still do something as long as it doesn’t feature melody.”

“They couldn’t stop us from doing a rhythmic piece,” picks up Cresswell, at 45 eight years McNicholas’s junior. “So we had that germ of an idea kicking around. And that was really how Stomp began. I remember in 1994 the head of London Records, Tracey Bennett, coming to see Stomp. That was funny. He has a lot to answer for.”

McNicholas recalls the “eureka moment” in 2001 that led to the Lost and Found Orchestra, seven years ago. The two were in Romania working on the soundtrack for their debut IMAX project Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey, the award-winning IMAX documentary that married footage of Stomp troupes around the world, intercut with the natural habitats of their respective countries. “We were creating sounds out of hooters and vacuum cleaners,” McNicholas recalls. “And Luke and I looked at each other and realised that this might, in some way, be the basis of the next project.”

Within two days, however, future ambitions were dramatically shelved. The day after leaving Romania, the Stomp Odyssey crew flew to South Africa in search of footage of a giraffe. Hours after dining on a springbok stew all six of them were taken to hospital with severe food poisoning. In time all recovered, with the exception of McNicholas, who returned to hospital for a further examination with a view to catching up with the others at the next location. Misdiagnosing what turned out to be a viral infection of the brain for epilepsy, doctors gave him the wrong drugs, which compounded his seizures.

“It did kind of feel like the end in a way,” McNicholas says. “You’re lying in a bed thousands of miles away from your wife and kids. It took me six months to get even halfway better. When I came home, I was in a wheelchair.”

It is with unsentimental briskness accentuated by his Yorkshire accent that McNicholas looks back upon this period. Since then, he has been forced to take a back seat, though he continued to work with Cresswell as he channeled his passion for scuba diving into another IMAX project.

Three years in the making, and receiving its premiere in the UK next year, Wild Ocean follows a shoal of billions of sardines as they embark on their annual migration from South Africa. Above them all in a microlight aircraft was Cresswell, perpetually poised to swoop among all the seabirds following the sardines, who in turn were being followed by thousands of dolphins. “Like anything we’ve ever done, you do it because you want to see it — but no one has made it. So you’re left with no option but to do it yourself.”

Given that restrictions were what led McNicholas and Cresswell to find their creative feet with Stomp, it is hardly surprising that they have continued to try to find ways of placing their own restrictions on themselves. With the strictures of that record contract long since gone, the Lost and Found Orchestra is McNicholas and Cresswell’s way of creating something from a self-imposed set of limitations. There have been teething troubles along the way. Halfway through the Lost and Found Orchestra’s debut performance at the Sydney Opera House, a glass tank in which several instruments were part-submerged split open. “We emptied out gallons of water on to the stage and they gently went ballistic about it.”

It hasn’t just been equipment that they have had to tweak and repair along the way. The job of auditioning people for an orchestra numbering more than 50 has taught Cresswell and McNicholas a few home truths about the character types who are drawn to certain instruments. “There are definite sorts that you quickly identify,” Cresswell says. “You get people who work in classical orchestras and know this is different and fun to do, or you get people who don’t fit into the classical world and need somewhere different to feel they belong.”

The only problematic posts, apparently, tend to be the saw players. “Nightmare,” he says. “We’ve slowly come to realise that they’re all barking mad — and that’s the reason they all work alone. So you put them all in a room together and you’ve effectively got a nuthouse. You try and get them to do something and it’s like, ‘I’ve been sawing for 20 years and I would never do it like that.’ And you’re like: ‘Come on mate — it’s only a saw!’ ”

Can he imagine, in 100 years’ time, any of these instruments having edged their way into a proper orchestra? Just as the flute eventually evolved from a carved, hollowed-out animal bone, is there any chance that the squonkaphone or the plumpets may, in time, finally gain mass acceptance?

Cresswell ambles over to one particularly striking construction — the bottle bellows. “This took over a year to get right, so if I had to choose one . . .” As the name suggests, what we’re talking about here is a two-tiered iron frame of bellows attached to layers of wine bottles and, for the higher notes, distinctive round Kikkoman soy sauce bottles. All are filled with differing quantities of water. “This entailed some sacrifices,” Cresswell says. “We ended up with more soy sauce than we knew what to do with. I still gag at the thought of another salmon stir-fry.”

And the neighbours? Do they still complain? “Sure,” McNicholas shrugs, “but we apologise and give them free tickets for the shows. Which seems to improve their headaches immeasurably.”

Lost and Found Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall (www.southbankcentre.co.uk; 0871 6632500), Dec 19-Jan 11 2008