“WE are all old gents with families,” says Pip Branson from Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, purveyors of gypsy, cabaret, world, ballads and black humour.

We’ll see them all soon – Mikelangelo (the Balkan Elvis), T.G. Muldavio, Guido Libido, Little Ivan and Rufino (that’s Pip – “entirely a figment of my imagination,” he says) when they launch their fourth album, “After The Flood”, at the Polish White Eagle Club in a night of Cooma-inspired music set against the backdrop of a vintage ‘60s-era nightclub.

The Black Sea Gentlemen have been together for 15 years and, although these days he lives in Newtown with his partner and two kids, in Canberra Pip is better known as one of our top musos.

Younger brother to the late, lamented theatre personality David Branson, he’s been fiddling from very early days as part of the Peg Mantle Strings, ensemble of the James McCusker Orchestra and the Canberra Youth Orchestra.

Educated at Campbell High and Dickson College he lived on the fringe of the notorious Splinters Theatre, of which his brother was co-founder. David, one of the original “Gentlemen”, died in a car accident on Anzac Parade 15 years ago on the very day that Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen were to premiere at The Street Theatre.

Pip was asked by ensemble leader Mikel Simic – Mikelangelo – to play a couple of numbers at David’s wake and he’s been with them ever since, clocking up frequent-flyer points from Auckland to Arnhem Land and Budapest to Britain, where they won a “Time Out” London Critics’ Choice Award.

Last year, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen provided the music to Big hART Theatre’s production “Ghosts In The Scheme”, a play woven around the real-life stories of people who worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme in the ‘50s and 60s, when Cooma was transformed from a sleepy country town to a world of 24-hour nightclubs, hard work and pethidine drug abuse.

The songs were songs based on real men and women who worked the scheme. During the two-year community arts development process that led to the play, Simic, Branson, Moriarty and Martin spent time in Cooma meeting the people.

They found that early-mid 20th century Europe was not their usual kind of music, but rather a hotbed of musical styles, with the old world of waltzes, polkas and mazurkas meeting swing, rhythm ’n’  blues and rock ’n’ roll. In 2015, inspired by their research, they brought out an EP, “The Alpine Way”, and a limited print of another CD to sell after the shows.

“Cooma has a fantastic past, but now it struggles get back to its cosmopolitan heritage,” Pip says,

“We met lots of lovely ladies who gave us sandwiches and cups of loose-leaf tea.”

A Ukrainian lady who owned a restaurant in Cooma treated them to vodka, herrings and sauerkraut and an 88-year-old bocce player taught the Gentleman how to play that curiously European form of bowls.

The stories of the Snowies, they found, were of hard work and awful experiences, but underneath it all, “they always had music to help them through – a celebration of life through tragedy.”

“After the Flood” at the Polish White Eagle Club, Turner, Friday, June 10, bookings to 6248 8563 or tickets at the door. Peak Festival in Perisher, June 11-12, bookings to peakfestival.com.au