THE ORB HAVAR ELLINGSEN AND MARK ENGLAND TALK TO THE INVENTORS OF AMBIENT HOUSE "The Orb, the Orb, give me the Orb! I want the Orb!" (from Woody Allen's `Sleeper') Watching that Woody Allen movie five years ago, Alex Paterson decided that the Orb would be a perfect name for a group. "It wasn't the first time I'd tried to get a band together," he recalls. "But it was the first time I'd tried with someone who knew what he was doing, as opposed to just a mate." Paterson may have sensed that things would be different this time. but he couldn't have predicted the success - not to mention the enormous influence - that his new project would enjoy. The Orb single-handedly bridged the gap between club-oriented dance music and the spirit of early 70s ambient progressive rock, to create & musical style that was a contradiction in terms - ambient house. The Orb's music quickly migrated from the clubs into the bedrooms, as their reoord sales spiralled. Their most recent album, "UFOrb", topped the charts, an incredible achievement bearing in mind its total lack of pop songs. This approach harked back to early 7Os instrumental milestones like "Tubular Bells" and the works of German progressive act Tangerine Dream, whose Edgar Froese even recommended that his proto-ambient "Aqua" album should be listened to lying down with headphones - and that was 1974. In the 1990s, the Orb's music is best enjoyed in the same way! Prior to the Orb, Alex was a roadie for post-punk outfit Killing Joke and their bassist Youth's spin-off dance pop act Brilliant, who eventually featured Jimmy Cauty on guitar. Paterson soon secured an A&R post for Killing Joke's label, the champions of ambient music, EG Records - home to the likes of Robert Fripp (who Paterson worked with several years later) and Eno. When Brilliant broke up around 1986, Cauty teamed up with WEA A&R man and veteran of the Liverpool scene, Bill Drummond, early the following year, to form the highly successful JAMs/KLF empire. Alex Paterson was also keen to work with Cauty and the pair joined forces as the Orb in 1988. Jimmy had created his own DIY studio, Trancentral, at his South London squat, and it was here that all the early JAMs/KLF and Orb recordings were created. The studio - consisting merely of an eight-track Akai console, an OBX organ and a 303 drum machine - proved to be extremely portable, and very versatile. As Alex recalls: "We used to take the studio apart and stick it in the air. Then we'd lay on the floor and mix upside-down." The first evidence of the duo's flat-on-their-backs approach appeared on a compilation assembled by Youth, by then one of the hottest producers around. The compilation, titled "Eternity Project One", was a showcase for Wau! Mr Modo's roster. Youth included "Tripping On Sunshine", a live five- minute Orb acid doodle with little to recommend it other than the fact that it's the group's very first outing. Ask Alex about this inauspicious debut, and his reply is simple: "It's a joke". The Orb's first release proper was the "Kiss EP" in May 1989, where the pairing were billed as `Rockman Rock & LX Dee'. Limited to just 949 copies "because we didn't think we'd sell any more..", it surfaced on the Sheffield-based Wau! Mr Modo label (Wau stands for What About Us!, Mr Modo being the assumed name of Alex's manager, Adam Morris), which is part-owned by Alex himself. The 12" recording was crude and cheap, and constructed almost entirely from samples taken from New York's Kiss FM radio station back in 1982. Housed in a simple 'disco' die-cut plain sleeve, this rare Orb artefact is rumoured to have recently been bootlegged. SIDELINE Around this time, Paterson and Cauty started what has since become a rewarding and lucrative sideline: remixing other people's work. We'll be taking a close look at these collaborations, which include the Yellow Magic Orchestra and Front 242, next month. Meanwhile, the Orb picked up some press coverage with their second 12" - the ultra-ambient "Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The UItraworld" (or "Loving You" to its friends). Using a sample from Minnie Riperton's 70s soul hit was bound to polarise critical opinion, and after mailing out 100 white label 12"s to important DJs and stations like Kiss FM, Paterson notes that "we got some very strange reactions back. It was either `really fascinating' or it was `total shit'. One reviewer, Will Downing, claimed that Riperton would be turning in her grave. He said, `I won't give this five points. I'll give it minus five'." Soon after the commercial release in October, the Orb pressed around 1000 white label 12" remixes of the track (Wau! Mr Modo MWS 17R), some distributed to DJs and specialist dance shops, and around half used for export. Alex explains how these came about: "We pressed up white label dance mixes of `A Huge Ever-Growing...' and sent them out to DJs. They all came back with the same reaction: 'Where's the fucking sample?' So we scrapped that release and did another one with chunks of `Loving You' on it. Big Life were very cautious about copyright, so we had to use a Minnie Riperton soundalike instead." Sensing the Orb's commercial potential, the pair had secured a licensing deal for a reissue of "Pulsating Brain" with the Jaz Summers-owned Big Life label. These later pressings, issued on 12" and for the first time, CD in June 1990, are easily distinguishable by the Big Life logo on the sleeve, and by its relatively sudden, edited ending. Soon afterwards, Big Life also issued the 12"/CD remixes Alex referred to, with re-recorded vocals. Alex offers a further clue for those wishing to locate an original copy: "The second mix on side two is called `Why Is 6 Scared Of 7?', and on the original the answer is etched on the run-out groove. But Big Life scratchcd it out because they thought it was an error." And there's more: "At the very end of `Loving You', there's a little click on the fade-out. That's Jimmy's dishwasher, because everything at Trancentral ran off the same mains system." When the single first appeared on Wau! Mr Modo in October 1989, it contravened the old Gallup ruling regarding the maximum length of a single. Alex explains: "At the time the original version of 'Loving You' came out, I was still working at EG. I noticed that the record stayed in the Top 200 for nearly six months. It clocked in at 22 minutes, and at that time the Gallup limit was only 20, so we were actually breaking the rules. But because it wasn't in the Top 50, no-one actually bothered to check out the timing. Later, when we had a Top 40 single, they suddenly stopped and said, 'Hey!'. So the last four minutes got stripped off by Big Life' when they re-issued it." On 3rd December 1989, the Orb re-recorded one of their finest interpretations of "Loving You" for John Peel's late-night radio show. This BBC recording has since been released by Strange Fruit on vinyl and CD, coupled with a second session (comprising "Back Side Of The Moon (Tranquility Lunar Orbit)" and "Into The Fourth Dimension (Essences In Starlight)" taped nearly a year later. Incidentally, the Orb recorded a third session for John Peel on May 12th 1992, which featured "O.O.B.E." and a cover of the Stooges' "No Fun", but there are no plans to release this yet. Yet another version, this time a mere four minute edit, turned up on Warp Records' "Artificial Intelligence" compilation. According to Alex, this was only a tiny excerpt from a 60-minute DJ mix he has on DAT which is so packed with samples that to release it would be "a lawyer's dream and a publisher's nightmare"! REMIXES The partnership of `Rockman and LX' was producing great results, not only with their own work, but elsewhere - the 'Blue Danube Orbital Mix' of the KLF's "3am Eternal" and the promo-only remixes of "Money" by Fischerman's Friend, for example. But, according to Alex. "some of those mixes came out in Germany credited as KLF remixes. That was done by another company which neither of us had any control over, and we didn't see the cover artwork until it was too late. I went mad, Jimmy went mad, Bill (Drummond) went mad - what was the KLF doing with the Orb? This type of music was meant to be the Orb stuff. It led to a lot of confusion, though the only real confusion is knowing who were the members of the Orb at the time the record was released." In fact it was a row over this very question, of linking the KLF with the Orb, that fractured the original Paterson/Cauty pairing. Alex Paterson remembers that "the 'Sun Electric' project ("O' Locco") was recorded at Trancentral, and Jimmy didn't want to be known on the record as Jimmy Cauty, so we called him Gavin Cauty. That was how ridiculous the whole scenario was becoming." Consequently, details of the Orb's activities around this time are a little sketchy. But we do know that an Orb album titled "Space" was recorded by Alex and Jimmy early in 1990, and that Alex departed in April 1990. taking the group name with him. "Space" was then released on KLF Communications, attributed simply to Space, and with only Jimmy credited by name. The split was decidedly acrimonious. Jimmy and Bill were keen that the Orb should join them on KLF Communications, but Alex felt that was unfair. as "I had always felt that the Orb was myself, with Jimmy working with me". Jimmy already had the KLF, and it appeared that he wanted the Orb as well. (Alex is at pains to stress that the argument is very much in the past and forgotten, as he and Jimmy have since completely made up.) The official KLF press release accompanying "Space" claimed that it was originally intended as the Orb's debut album, but was now simply Jimmy's own creation, as he'd removed all of Alex's contributions. Alex accepts this: "`Space' was done solely by Jimmy. At the end of the day, he took out all of my ideas and replaced them, or just left them as empty spaces. It was a matter of trying to break into a scenario that was happening in `NME', which was the ambient house explosion. I knew it was pointless trying to get an album out to nobody - it had to grow. "I've got a recording of the original version of 'Space', but as far as I'm concerned, there's no need for that to ever see the light of day." Despite Alex's contention, there are still rumours that nothing was actually removed from the "Space" album at all, and that Alex was simply not credited. The next Orb project was "Little Fluffy Clouds", issued on 45 in November l990, which co-writer Youth has cited as one of the best things he's ever done. Unfotunately, Rickie Lee Jones, who took an instant dislike to her voice being sampled on the record (a trippy interview segment where she described those "little fluffy clouds" from her childhood memories), was less amused and resorted to legal action. She settled with Big Life out of court for an undisclosed (or at least unpublishable) sum. Perhaps looking to recoup their money, Big Life have long been keen to re-release the single, without the Jones sample. "They've really wanted to re-market all our stuff, like KLF," complains Alex, who isn't having any of it. The sampling is something from the past, and that's probably one of the reasons why we're not going to re-release those old records: we've had problems with sampling all the way. In those days, we were just a Sunday band making strange, 303 Oberheimer-type acid house music. Despite being a turbulent period, this particular fluffy cloud had a silver lining - Alex's meeting with the recording engineer on "Little Fluffy Clouds", Thrash (whose real name is Kristian Weston). Originally a member of Fortran 5 (who subsequently signed to Mute), Thrash had been a studio engineer for Mark Angelo and worked on several mixes for Wau! Mr Modo, notably "Hotel California" by Jam On The Mutha. Hitting it off very quickly, the pair decided to continue working together and Thrash soon became Paterson's full-time working partner as one half of the Orb. ACCOMPLISHED Collectors should look out for a U.S.-only disc and CD from around this time, featuring remixes by accomplished dance svengalis, Coldcut. However, Alex Paterson is less than happy about the mixes. "They're crap," he says. "That's Big Life remixing behind our backs again!" Instead, Paterson and Thrash concentrated their efforts on what was to become the Orb's first album, "Adventures Beyond The UItraworld. "I still had a day job", said Alex, "though Big Life gave me a budget of 25,000 to make a double album. I eventually did it for 23.500. It was complete mayhem, working with different people every night, laying down five tracks one week, then working through them in reverse order the next. "I spent two days putting the whole thing together as an album, not just as a set of individual tracks. The idea was to integrate them all with lots of strange noises: it was something I'd always wanted to do. The thing with an Orb record is that there is no kind of ending, only when the record stops playing." Pink Floyd references were much in evidence on "Adventures". The cover (indebted to Floyd's "Animals" LP) featured a picture of Battersea Power Station, and only time and money prevented the Orb from flying a large inflatable dolphin above it, as a parody of Floyd's pig. One track was even titled 'The Back Side Of The Moon'. A further connection with the spacey early 70s were guest appearances from ex-Gong members Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy, who've since collaborated with Paterson in System 7. Later in 1991, another album appeared, only to be deleted on the same day. Titled `The Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions', it took the popular remix idea into album territory, lifting the sleeve design from an unused proof cover for Pink Floyd's "Animals" album. "I originally wanted 'Utraworld' to be a triple album", says Alex, "but there was no way in this day and age that anyone would release a triple album by an unknown artist. I asked for a triple and got a double, knowing that I wouldn't get what I asked for, but also thinking maybe I could get a remix album out of this too, as a marketing ploy. Which worked. Ha!" The final track on this set was "Perpetual Dawn: January Mix 3". Collectors might like to know that "January Mixes" 1 & 2 apparently exist on tape, but never made it to the pressing stage, due to some "bad edits". So don't go looking for them! OBLIGED The `January Mix 3' remix also appeared on 45 in the States, although the Americans didn't quite know what to do with the album. "They missed out on a lot." says Alex. "They wanted to cut down all ten tracks and make it into a single album, with five tracks a side. How do you cut a track like `Spanish Castles' down into anything? It is what it is. It was a total mindfuck situation, so I was obliged to chop tracks out. I get away with the whole of the first side, hut the whole of side two is missing. They got the three-minute pop version of 'Perpetual Dawn'. They also got the B-side version of `Star 6&789' and all of `Loving You'." Paterson is proud of the Orbs tradition of lengthy 45s. "Not many other people are doing that," he says. "The mileage we get out of our singles would probably keep some bands going for a few years." However, things looked set to change when, early in 1991, Gallup revised their chart ruling on the maximum length allowed for a single: now only if a track was over 40 minutes in length, would it be automatically disqualified from the singles chart. The Orb had the perfect answer. Their summer 1992 single, "Blue Room". clocked in at 39 minutes and 58 seconds, went as high as No. 8, and earned the group an appearance on `Top Of The Pops', sadly with a woefully shortened three-minute edited version. "The whole show was like 'This Is Spinal Tap'," remarks Paterson. "You get shouted at for moving. We nearly got thrown off the set. I slipped, my chair went back, and Kris got up to see it I was alright and there was uproar: `Don't move!' But that's the music business establishment for you. It's really nice, really gorgeous. It really makes you want to become pop stars. It makes you feel you want to be with them." Even so, what happened next was unexpected. The "Blue Room" single was followed by a second double album, or, if you were quick off the mark, a triple. Released to critical acclaim, "UFOrb" was an instant No. 1 - not just in the indie but the national charts. Just reflect on this achievement: an ambient triple album from a band who had risen through the dance music ranks, not the traditional rock or even indie channels. The Orbs massive underground status had at last infiltrated the mainstream but, unlike equally successful contemporaries the KLF and the Shamen. There were no upfront pop songs or radio-friend1y tunes. ADVANCES According to Alex, the stories behind "UFOrb" are based on several books - Timothy Good's `Above Top Secret' and `Alien Liaisons', Frank Waters' `Book Of The Hopi' and Hill Cooper's `Behold A Pale Face' which, together with Zecharia Witchin's `Genesis Revisited', give anyone with an interest in UFOs a good read and an introduction to advances not yet believed by a church state". Three vinyl editions of "UFOrb" were issued: a standard two-record set, a two-record set with two art prints sealed in a black vinyl sleeve, and a triple-LP package, again with two art prints and sealed in a blue vinyl sleeve. The LP benefitted from the input of guests Steve Hillage and bassist Jah Wobble, To accompany the album, Big Life also released a long-form video, `Beyond The Ultraworld: Patterns And Textures', featuring plenty of computer-treated visuals and occasional glimpses of the Orb's concert at London's Brixton Academy from 1991, together with the remixed soundtrack from that event. The latter made up the third disc in the "UFOrb" triple edition, while original copies of the video gave it away in CD form. The "Blue Room" video is very much a precis of the entire film: they share a lot of the same imagery. Kris (Thrash) isn't particularly fond of the video, though Alex is keen that he should "see it from someone else's eyes now and again. He's a very critical person," continues Alex of his colleague. "It's because we've seen those visuals quite a lot before. But there is a linear feel to all of the videos because they were all done by the same girl. She was doing things for six grand when she should have been paid sixty. Six grand for 51 minutes of film!" Another film is in the pipeline, being made in conjunction with the people behind the Orb's lightshow. The Orb's most recent single. "Assassin" (originally planned to feature Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream), failed to emulate the phenomenal success of "Blue Room", stopping mid-table at No. 12 after its release last October. The song's subject matter. according to Alex, was quite straightforward: "Arabs and bunnies... that's what the Assassin is after ... the one that laid the egg." Hope that's clear! Late last year, after many disagreements, the Orb decided to terminate their dealings with Big Life. It's a very sad state," says Alex. "They just think it's a business now. It's bleeding us dry." Big Life responded earlier this year by issuing two injunctions, one preventing the Orb from releasing any more records, the other forbidding Wau! Mr Modo from issuing records by anyone, in case they might feature the Orb under a different name. This second injunction was legally untenable and caused a good deal of ill-feeling between all concerned parties. The injunction was eventually dropped at the start of June, two days before it was due to go to court, leaving Wau! Mr Modo free to continue with their work unhampered by the legal wrangle that's hung over them for many months. The injunction on the Orb is still being fought, but Alex is hopeful of recording three LPs this year. "We've near enough done two," he says. "We've just got to do a dub album now." With the film already in production, the Orb multi-media experience looks set to return in a big way: they've already paved the way with a headline appearance at last month's Glastonbury Festival, before issuing the results of their collaboration with ambient master guitarist Robert Fripp. "We need to release that amount of music, because it will grab the attention of certain people," says a busy Paterson. "A dub album will appeal to some, while an Orb/Robert Fripp set would obviously attract the ambient crowd, people that got into the Orb in the beginning. That will encompass the visual idea too, of people listening to it at different functions or places... while swimming in pools." INDICATIVE At the other extreme, the Orb have covered the Stooges' "No Fun" for the John Peel show, and the long-promised version of Hawkwind's "Silver Machine" may surface in the not-too-distant future. Is this indicative of a more permanent shift in the Orb's style? "We've had people ask us if we'd like to do an album in that vein, but personally I don't want to take it any further," insists Alex. As we went to press, reports in the music press suggested that the Orb would contribute a collaboration with Pop Will Eat Itself to a various artists LP for the ill-fated "Peace Together" project. due for release in July, but this is apparently incorrect. The fact that Alex Paterson is fending off attempts to re-release the Orb's back catalogue has meant that prices for Orb originals are, as the song goes, huge and ever-growing. "How much our records sell for is beyond our control, and that's something which, perhaps, in a funny, elliptic way, is quite bad really. You know, things like the Chicago house records, which I worship, may not sell for as much as an Orb record. And to me that's, like, wow! But then again, a person buying an Orb record wouldn't necessarily know anything about Chicago records. We're approaching it from two different angles. I'm quite happy having a little collection of Orb records which maybe I could sell if I'm destitute and poor and bald and fat and ugly by the time I'm forty." Collectors should remember that the prices listed for Orb vinyl material refer to Mint records: anything less, and the group's ambient sound gets lost under a haze of crackle and hiss, and the values plummet accordingly. Classifying the Orb's multi-faceted, multi-layered approach to music-making is, as you might expect, problematic. So perhaps it's best to let Alex offer his own version of how he sees the Orb. "There is a way of making music," he volunteers helpfully, "by putting in the reggae, the ambience, taking the house, and then taking a few classical ideas and then putting some world music over the top. And that creates the Orb." At the moment, the Orb are unstoppable. They consistently play sell-out gigs, their back catalogue is massively in-demand, and they've remixed, produced and collaborated on more records than would seem humanely possible in such a short period of time. Legal wrangles aside, the only thing that seems likely to threaten the Orb would be a power cut during a gig. And even then Alex has always got his guitar. Next month: Orb remixes and an update on the KLF market. Thanks to LX Kris and Music & Video Exchange. And a thousand thanks to Ben Housden at Wau! Mr Modo.