LIFE IS A HIGHWAY - ORBITAL

Given the impressive legacy Orbital left behind when they called time on their career after 15 years in 2004, it’s hardly surprising their return to the live arena has been hailed as akin to the second coming. For while they’re one of the few electronic acts of the post-Second Summer Of Love era who can rightfully claim to be an ‘albums’ band – long-players like 1993’s techno-centric Orbital 2 (aka ‘The Brown Album’) and the cinematic scope of In Sides (1996) oozing more creativity from within their stadium techno throb then most critics of dance music would think possible – Phil and Paul Hartnoll also crafted their share of timeless megabombs, tracks like Chime, Halcyon + On + On and Doctor? (their reworking of the theme from Doctor Who) rightly regarded as anthems in any era.
But despite still being a live drawcard to rival contemporaries like Underworld and The Chemical Brothers, critical response to the penultimate The Altogether (2001) and final Blue Album (2004) was muted – and even the brothers Hartnoll themselves believed the writing was on the wall.
“To us it started to sound all samey,” Hartnoll says. “To us it was like we’d been here before, done that before – when making music in the studio, that’s what it felt like all the time. We’d sort of lost our way really, you know, ‘what are we doing this for?’. I don’t want to sound spoilt or anything, I’m really lucky and happy with how our career went and everything, but it just got a bit stale I think and we got a bit set in our ways.
”We got into this habit of studio, tour, studio, tour, and it eventually got the worst of us in the end. And it got to the stage five years ago when we’re like ‘you know, we’ve had enough of this, we’re losing our objective as to what’s going on here’. So we had to break away and stop what we were doing at the time, and that was it.”
With the safety net of Orbital removed from underneath them, Phil and Paul both spent their five year hiatus wisely. While Phil plied his trade on the DJ circuit and teamed up with Nick Smith and some local associates to release the Madness And Me album under the Long Range moniker in 2007, Paul worked with an orchestra on his 2007 solo debut The Ideal Condition.
The Orbital story began in 1989, when the first pressing of 1000 copies of their debut single Chime sold out immediately. It was swiftly licensed by FFRR and went on to become one of the signature tracks of the acid house era, charting at number 17 in the UK (and receiving a second lease of life when The Shapeshifters re-booted it in 2008). Subsequent releases saw the brothers follow a significantly darker path, with tracks such as Halcyon + On + On and The Girl With The Sun In Her Head shining like a ray of hope through a musical vision which seemed to grow more complex with each release. And though across their evolution you can chart developments going on in the greater electronic music world (jungle on In Sides, breakbeat on The Middle Of Nowhere and The Altogether), it always seemed as if Orbital existed in their own world, only occasionally popping their heads up for a look around.
“We are very keen on all sorts of music really, all sorts of different vibes and stuff, and I do think you do get influenced and you have to get influenced,” Phil muses. “But we’ve never been caught up in that whole ‘oh, the ‘80s are back, so let’s do some ‘80s stuff’, or we’ve got to do this because this is the current trend. Obviously it’s a really silly thing anyway, because once the current trend is around and you start making music like the current trend, it’s not the current trend by the time it comes out anyway. So it’s a ridiculous chasing your tail exercise.”
Though few of their album releases crossed over on a global scale, it was as one of the first of the stadium techno live acts that Orbital made their mark. Their live set at Glastonbury 1994 was later rated by Q Magazine as one of the top 50 gigs all time, and their comeback tour through the European summer festival circuit saw DJ Mag declare them as best live act of 2009. Unlike many of their contemporaries the Orbital live show has always been far more than a ‘plug in and push play’ scenario, and Hartnoll says they’re staying true to their original approach of tracks that “can go a for a minute of an hour” with a few technological modifications – a laptop running Ableton Live and Lemur touchscreen controllers now replacing the “archaic” Alesis MMT-8 sequencers as the brains of their live rig. And when they reconvened to prepare for last year’s show, the creative juices inevitably began to flow.
“We’ve come up with a track already that I played out on Saturday and it sounds great, it’s a really dancey tune,” Hartnoll reveals. “But rather then think about an album like we used to, it’s more like sculpting the songs into the live set. Because there isn’t any new stuff really, the live set that we’re playing is like the favourites, a ‘golden oldies’ sort of tour I suppose. So to make that blossom more, we’re trying to inject new stuff which you’ll hear when we play live, so that’s our angle now.”
And as for those trademark torch-mounted headsets?
“Because we were playing in the acid house clubs with the smoke and the strobes and stuff, a mate of ours got back from America wearing a pair and we were like ‘that is what we need’,” he says of their origin. “They were cheap, fixing your car sort of things that he got for five and a half dollars in a novelty shop, and so we got loads of them and they kept breaking, so in the end I cut out the innards of them and strapped some mag lights into them and Bob’s your uncle really. And we finally got some updated ones after 20 years – they used to be all strapped on with gaffer tape but now we’ve got the 2010 model.”

WHO:    ORBITAL
WHAT:    PLAY PLAYGROUND WEEKENDER / THE FORUM
WHEN:    SUNDAY 21 FEBRUARY / TUESDAY 23