The Orb: 'In the day you could get away with anything because nobody else was doing it'
Eighteen albums into his adventures with electronic music pioneers The Orb, Alex Paterson chuckles when asked if he’s driven on by a creative restlessness. “I think it’s called enjoyment,” says the 66-year-old Londoner sagely.
Sustaining everything in the past 35 years had been Paterson’s appetite for collaboration. The ecletic roll call includes Jimmy Cauty of The KLF, German-Swiss producer Thomas Fehlmann, Killing Joke bassist Youth, Steve Hillage of Gong, ambient composer Roger Eno, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Jamaican reggae artist Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.
Since 2019, his main musical foil has been the producer and engineer Michael Rendall but still their latest album, Buddhist Hipsters, includes contributions from Killing Joke drummer Paul Ferguson, lovers rock singer Trevor Walters and Violeta Vicci of Steeleye Span.
The only common thread that Paterson can see in such a diverse catalogue is himself. “If you tried to put Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and David Gilmour together it might sound a little bit weird, but if you put The Orb with either of them you’ve got a result in both cases,” he says. “The idea is that we’re basically a conduit to anything we put our mind to, that’s what keeps it fresh, what keeps the old brain tricking over.”
Not unreasonably, he rates Buddhist Hipsters as “probably one of the best albums we’ve ever done” but concedes that it won’t get the same kind of recognition as The Orb’s groundbreaking early work because his ouput is so vast. “I can’t help that,” he says. “I’ve set up my own label to release my other material, which is an ongoing thing as well.
“It’s good for the soul for me,” he adds, “contributing music that hopefully chills people out and doesn’t make people angry and they see that there’s actually a bit of nature in there that I think we’re all craving for. I was just looking at the skyline of east London from a cemetery in Norwood and just thinking about all these people living in little boxes thinking it’s really cool. There’s this open countryside barely five miles away which people completely ignore. It’s quite bizarre.”
Paterson feels that he and Rendall very much compliment each other as musicians and producers. “If I come up with an idea, he creates the sound the sound that I want as na negineer and he’s actually a really good producer,” he says. “Sometimes he does things so fast you don’t realise how good it is. The bass sound on this new album is absolutely incredible, we’ve been playing various cuts of it live for the last month or so – careful with those speakers is all I can say!”
The energy of Buddhist Hipsters mirrors that of The Orb’s chart-topping 1992 album UF Orb, Paterson believes. “Rather than having something that has maybe four bars of ambience, you’ve got a whole section, you’ve got a whole verse and chorus before anything happens with Spontaneously Combust, which is the first track on the album on vinyl and also it’s the first track we play live. It’s a bit like a very small version of Spanish Castles, but that was 20 minutes long.
“In the day you could get away with anything because nobody else was doing it, which was the joys of pioneering a style of music which was what basically The Orb was doing. we couldn’t help it, it just happened that way.”
The album’s title was inspired by a dream involving Roger Eno. “He sent me an email about doing another track with him but I hadn’t got it until I woke after dreaming about him, so it kind of cemented everything,” Paterson says.
The track The Oort Cloud (Too Night) features British reggae singer Trevor Walters, who Paterson encountered while they were both in hospital. “I’m recovering from a seizure, being told that I can’t leave because I had to have a goitre taken from my thyroid, I only had 3mm worth of airways going down into my lungs. Who should be in the next bed but Trevor Walters?” he says.
“It’s difficult when you meet other stroke victims – I had a stroke a couple of years ago but I kept it quiet, I don’t need people worrying for me, I’ve got an amazing family that will do all that for me, and look after me.”
Before forming The Orb in 1989, Paterson had a varied musical career, playing in bands, working as a roadie for Killing Joke (whose bassist Youth, he had known since school days), and as an A&R man for Brian Eno’s ambient record label EG. Weaving in dance music and dub reggae, they forged a unique path.
“I’d been a champion of ambient music as a DJ for a long time, mainly at squat parties, then I moved up to Trancecentral squat parties and they started becoming hip and (Paul) Oakenfold offered me and Jimmy (Cauty) a residence at his clubnight Land of Oz and the rest, as they say, along with the John Peel sessions, is history. We were doing something different, we weren’t doing boom-boom-boom-boom all the time, we had little rhythms going which chilled people out after the boom-boom-boom-boom.
“It was six record decks, some cassette machines and when we could afford a DAT machine it all changed again. That’s how long ago it was, we were actually using cassettes.”
Buddhist Hipsters is out now. The Orb co-headline with Dreadzone at Project House, Leeds on November 14. https://theorb.com/