The Times Orbital interview.
Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 8:13 pm
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 809886.ece
From The Times
February 27, 2009
The return of Orbital
Ladies and gentleman, stand by for lift-off. The festival favourites and dance-music pioneers Orbital are getting back together
Ed Potton
It’s almost 20 years since two brothers in suburban Sevenoaks, Kent, fiddled about on their dad’s 1970s Pioneer cassette deck, strung together a deceptively simple sequence of beats and bleeps and came up with Chime, one of the iconic tracks of the acid-house era.
In the ensuing decade, Phil and Paul Hartnoll, peering through the darkness with their trademark torchgoggles, played a series of seminal live shows that proved that dance music could work — brilliantly — away from the dancefloor. While Britpop hogged the headlines, Orbital and their peers — Underworld, the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield — were leading a fresher musical revolution. Glastonbury, formerly an electronic desert, became their spiritual home: their 1994 gig there was listed by Q magazine as one of the 50 best gigs of all time
Then, in 2004, after seven studio albums and a triumphant fifth appearance at Worthy Farm, they called it a day, citing the “treadmill” of recording and performing. “The end is nigh” read placards outside one of their final gigs. It wasn’t quite that terminal: Phil formed a new duo, Long Range, with the sound artist Nick Smith and released an album, Madness & Me. Paul released a solo album, The Ideal Condition. But neither made much of an impression, and a generation had lost one of its most beloved acts.
It was a fact of which they were constantly reminded. “People just kept on asking us if we were getting back together,” says Paul, the younger, more considered, of the siblings. They are up from their adopted home of Brighton for the day, sitting in a pub on the banks of the Thames. Paul looks across at Phil, his older, more impulsive, brother: “It just didn’t go away.”
So the great beasts of Nineties electronica awoke from their slumber. Five years after splitting, Orbital are back, with a string of crowd-pleasing, greatest-hits gigs planned for the summer, including festivals and dates at the Brixton Academy, another of their favourite stomping grounds.
They don’t want “to be seen as taking the p*** with a planned reunion,” Phil says. “Like Status Quo: they’re stopping, now they’re back together, they’re stopping,” Paul says. “It’s just about having a good time,” Phil says. “No albums or products. But the time was right — it’s 20 years since Chime.” It’s because of popular demand, Paul adds, almost apologetically: “We’re not forcing ourselves on people.”
And they have missed it, too. “I didn’t for the first couple of years but then it started building up,” Paul admits. “Seeing contemporaries you always used to be on bills with — the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, the Prodigy — still doing it, we started to say: ‘I used to enjoy that; that used to be a laugh’.”
This time round, however, they are marching to a slightly different tune. Our interview has been scheduled to fit around the brothers’ childcare schedules — they have six between them, aged from 2 to 20; nine if you include Phil’s partner’s kids. “It’s like the Brady Bunch,” Paul says with a smile. Family gatherings are “a whirlwind of heads at waist height”.
Indeed the Hartnolls look like the kind of characters you might meet in any East End pub — middle-aged (Phil is 45, Paul is 40) and sparse of hair (although neither of them ever really had much). Only Phil’s sculpted Mephistopheles beard and fearsome-looking MP3 player suggest that I haven’t sat down with a pair of plumbers.
Which is not meant as a slight — Orbital never aspired to the flamboyant stagecraft of the Prodigy or the Ibiza-friendly cachet of the Chemicals. They were all about communing, live and direct, with their audience: dazzling light shows, crystalline synths, arena-sized beats and maybe the odd, incongruous Belinda Carlisle or Ian Dury sample to stop things getting too po-faced.
They were never super-fashionable. “If we played [the seminal acid-house venue] Shelley’s in Stoke we used literally to clear dancefloors,” Paul admits. But they were part of a more enduring early Nineties scene that straddled the fence between indie and techno, cutting their teeth at ground-breaking multimedia events such as Megadog, where they would share bills with squat-party favourites such as Eat Static and Psychik Warriors of Gaia. Then they did the American rock festival tour Lollapalooza, where they played after the metal band Tool.
“We’d be the disco at the end of the night; all these people dancing around wearing Tool T-shirts,” Paul remembers. “We bridged the gap,” Phil adds. “A lot of people say we introduced them to dance music, which is wicked.”
The rock-dance divide is now being bridged by a new generation, including Klaxons and Hot Chip. Both Hartnolls approve. “Are they a dance band or an indie band?” Paul says of Hot Chip. “Who cares? They’re just a good band.”
Their catholic attitude to music was encouraged by the open-mindedness of the post-punk years. Growing up, they were introduced at family parties to Trojan reggae and Tamla Motown, while their dad, a builder, would wake them up to the strains of Isaac Hayes’s Shaft every Sunday as he fried bacon. Phil initially played the protective older brother: “I used to bathe him”. But, left home alone one summer when Phil was 20 and Paul was 16, they bonded over the machine-music of Kraftwerk.
Making music together seemed like the natural thing. Growing up in the Eighties would also make them unusually political for an electronic band; they wore anti-poll-tax T-shirts when Chime made the charts in 1989, and their tracks have alluded furtively to ecology, genetic engineering and water pollution. They have linked Halcyon, one of their most hypnotic anthems, to the tranquillisers of the same name to which their mother became addicted. “The recommended dose is now an eighth of what she was taking,” Phil says. “I don’t know why they didn’t ban it.”
Their working relationship has always been frank. “If one of us doesn’t like the drums on something,” Paul says, “we’ll say so. It never used to end in rows.” Phil adds: “We had one big bust-up, but there was a lot of external stuff. My wife at the time was not easy to get on with.”
But the reason the band split, Paul insists, was simply “15 years of working together, in a pattern”. And at first, they didn’t miss Orbital; both were busy with their other projects. Did they ever get competitive? “No!” Phil says. They have a mock fight. “It might have got competitive if one of us had sold five million albums and the other hadn’t,” Paul adds. “But we both didn’t sell any records.”
Still, money was coming in from other avenues. Both have continued composing film scores. There were royalties from their back catalogue; Phil deejayed in clubs; Paul composed music for Volkswagen and Rolex. But something kept nagging away.
So they hired a rehearsal room in Brighton and got all their old gear together. “It was exciting,” Paul says. “We spent three weeks going through the last live set that we did: Glastonbury 2004.” They’ve acquired brand new custom-made light goggles, some nifty touch screens, and Paul has indulged his excessive side with a formidable new synth, constructed by “a crazy Scotsman called Ken McBeth. It’s a huge slab of a machine, like the techno equivalent of the flying V guitar”.
They’re expecting a big family guest list at their Brighton show. The kids never used to take much of an interest, although now some of the older ones have, as Phil puts it, “gone through that electronic thing, they realise how we fit in”. Hartnoll senior was a far easier convert. “Try and stop my dad from coming to our gigs,” Paul smiles. “Funniest man at the party: at the bar, buying everybody drinks, wearing as much Orbital paraphernalia as he could possibly fit on. ‘That’s my sons up there!’ ”
They are making no predictions about albums or future plans. “Each gig will be a self-contained unit of fun, not a means to an end,” Paul says. But if they do feel like carrying on into old age, pushing buttons isn’t too demanding. “Exactly,” Phil chuckles. “We can be wheeled on like Davros!”
Not that they show any signs of diminishing vigour as they talk excitedly about their plans for the Brixton gigs. The tracks will be the fans’ favourites, but Paul has some new tricks up his sleeve. Phil leans over to his brother conspiratorially: “I want to make the Friday date an all-nighter — can we do that?” An all-nighter, in your forties! Do they still take drugs, I wonder. “Are we allowed to say that?” Phil asks with a smile. “This is The Times,” Paul points out. “Schoolteachers will be reading this. I’d move swiftly on . . ."
From The Times
February 27, 2009
The return of Orbital
Ladies and gentleman, stand by for lift-off. The festival favourites and dance-music pioneers Orbital are getting back together
Ed Potton
It’s almost 20 years since two brothers in suburban Sevenoaks, Kent, fiddled about on their dad’s 1970s Pioneer cassette deck, strung together a deceptively simple sequence of beats and bleeps and came up with Chime, one of the iconic tracks of the acid-house era.
In the ensuing decade, Phil and Paul Hartnoll, peering through the darkness with their trademark torchgoggles, played a series of seminal live shows that proved that dance music could work — brilliantly — away from the dancefloor. While Britpop hogged the headlines, Orbital and their peers — Underworld, the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield — were leading a fresher musical revolution. Glastonbury, formerly an electronic desert, became their spiritual home: their 1994 gig there was listed by Q magazine as one of the 50 best gigs of all time
Then, in 2004, after seven studio albums and a triumphant fifth appearance at Worthy Farm, they called it a day, citing the “treadmill” of recording and performing. “The end is nigh” read placards outside one of their final gigs. It wasn’t quite that terminal: Phil formed a new duo, Long Range, with the sound artist Nick Smith and released an album, Madness & Me. Paul released a solo album, The Ideal Condition. But neither made much of an impression, and a generation had lost one of its most beloved acts.
It was a fact of which they were constantly reminded. “People just kept on asking us if we were getting back together,” says Paul, the younger, more considered, of the siblings. They are up from their adopted home of Brighton for the day, sitting in a pub on the banks of the Thames. Paul looks across at Phil, his older, more impulsive, brother: “It just didn’t go away.”
So the great beasts of Nineties electronica awoke from their slumber. Five years after splitting, Orbital are back, with a string of crowd-pleasing, greatest-hits gigs planned for the summer, including festivals and dates at the Brixton Academy, another of their favourite stomping grounds.
They don’t want “to be seen as taking the p*** with a planned reunion,” Phil says. “Like Status Quo: they’re stopping, now they’re back together, they’re stopping,” Paul says. “It’s just about having a good time,” Phil says. “No albums or products. But the time was right — it’s 20 years since Chime.” It’s because of popular demand, Paul adds, almost apologetically: “We’re not forcing ourselves on people.”
And they have missed it, too. “I didn’t for the first couple of years but then it started building up,” Paul admits. “Seeing contemporaries you always used to be on bills with — the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, the Prodigy — still doing it, we started to say: ‘I used to enjoy that; that used to be a laugh’.”
This time round, however, they are marching to a slightly different tune. Our interview has been scheduled to fit around the brothers’ childcare schedules — they have six between them, aged from 2 to 20; nine if you include Phil’s partner’s kids. “It’s like the Brady Bunch,” Paul says with a smile. Family gatherings are “a whirlwind of heads at waist height”.
Indeed the Hartnolls look like the kind of characters you might meet in any East End pub — middle-aged (Phil is 45, Paul is 40) and sparse of hair (although neither of them ever really had much). Only Phil’s sculpted Mephistopheles beard and fearsome-looking MP3 player suggest that I haven’t sat down with a pair of plumbers.
Which is not meant as a slight — Orbital never aspired to the flamboyant stagecraft of the Prodigy or the Ibiza-friendly cachet of the Chemicals. They were all about communing, live and direct, with their audience: dazzling light shows, crystalline synths, arena-sized beats and maybe the odd, incongruous Belinda Carlisle or Ian Dury sample to stop things getting too po-faced.
They were never super-fashionable. “If we played [the seminal acid-house venue] Shelley’s in Stoke we used literally to clear dancefloors,” Paul admits. But they were part of a more enduring early Nineties scene that straddled the fence between indie and techno, cutting their teeth at ground-breaking multimedia events such as Megadog, where they would share bills with squat-party favourites such as Eat Static and Psychik Warriors of Gaia. Then they did the American rock festival tour Lollapalooza, where they played after the metal band Tool.
“We’d be the disco at the end of the night; all these people dancing around wearing Tool T-shirts,” Paul remembers. “We bridged the gap,” Phil adds. “A lot of people say we introduced them to dance music, which is wicked.”
The rock-dance divide is now being bridged by a new generation, including Klaxons and Hot Chip. Both Hartnolls approve. “Are they a dance band or an indie band?” Paul says of Hot Chip. “Who cares? They’re just a good band.”
Their catholic attitude to music was encouraged by the open-mindedness of the post-punk years. Growing up, they were introduced at family parties to Trojan reggae and Tamla Motown, while their dad, a builder, would wake them up to the strains of Isaac Hayes’s Shaft every Sunday as he fried bacon. Phil initially played the protective older brother: “I used to bathe him”. But, left home alone one summer when Phil was 20 and Paul was 16, they bonded over the machine-music of Kraftwerk.
Making music together seemed like the natural thing. Growing up in the Eighties would also make them unusually political for an electronic band; they wore anti-poll-tax T-shirts when Chime made the charts in 1989, and their tracks have alluded furtively to ecology, genetic engineering and water pollution. They have linked Halcyon, one of their most hypnotic anthems, to the tranquillisers of the same name to which their mother became addicted. “The recommended dose is now an eighth of what she was taking,” Phil says. “I don’t know why they didn’t ban it.”
Their working relationship has always been frank. “If one of us doesn’t like the drums on something,” Paul says, “we’ll say so. It never used to end in rows.” Phil adds: “We had one big bust-up, but there was a lot of external stuff. My wife at the time was not easy to get on with.”
But the reason the band split, Paul insists, was simply “15 years of working together, in a pattern”. And at first, they didn’t miss Orbital; both were busy with their other projects. Did they ever get competitive? “No!” Phil says. They have a mock fight. “It might have got competitive if one of us had sold five million albums and the other hadn’t,” Paul adds. “But we both didn’t sell any records.”
Still, money was coming in from other avenues. Both have continued composing film scores. There were royalties from their back catalogue; Phil deejayed in clubs; Paul composed music for Volkswagen and Rolex. But something kept nagging away.
So they hired a rehearsal room in Brighton and got all their old gear together. “It was exciting,” Paul says. “We spent three weeks going through the last live set that we did: Glastonbury 2004.” They’ve acquired brand new custom-made light goggles, some nifty touch screens, and Paul has indulged his excessive side with a formidable new synth, constructed by “a crazy Scotsman called Ken McBeth. It’s a huge slab of a machine, like the techno equivalent of the flying V guitar”.
They’re expecting a big family guest list at their Brighton show. The kids never used to take much of an interest, although now some of the older ones have, as Phil puts it, “gone through that electronic thing, they realise how we fit in”. Hartnoll senior was a far easier convert. “Try and stop my dad from coming to our gigs,” Paul smiles. “Funniest man at the party: at the bar, buying everybody drinks, wearing as much Orbital paraphernalia as he could possibly fit on. ‘That’s my sons up there!’ ”
They are making no predictions about albums or future plans. “Each gig will be a self-contained unit of fun, not a means to an end,” Paul says. But if they do feel like carrying on into old age, pushing buttons isn’t too demanding. “Exactly,” Phil chuckles. “We can be wheeled on like Davros!”
Not that they show any signs of diminishing vigour as they talk excitedly about their plans for the Brixton gigs. The tracks will be the fans’ favourites, but Paul has some new tricks up his sleeve. Phil leans over to his brother conspiratorially: “I want to make the Friday date an all-nighter — can we do that?” An all-nighter, in your forties! Do they still take drugs, I wonder. “Are we allowed to say that?” Phil asks with a smile. “This is The Times,” Paul points out. “Schoolteachers will be reading this. I’d move swiftly on . . ."
thanks for posting that 