Rather, Paterson takes aim at an aberrant feature of Australian sport. “What about football? You guys call it soccer, you nobs. Americanised twats, come on sort your life out,” he wryly suggests.
Thankfully, sporting divides will be irrelevant when Paterson’s electronic ambient masters The Orb perform a 25th anniversary set at the Rainbow Serpent festival later this month. That’s right, 2013 was The Orb’s 25th year in action and to celebrate a retrospective boxset entitled The History of the Future was released. The compilation is a startling document of the group’s decorated history and Paterson reveals there’s more coming this year.
“What we basically did was we cut this whole project into two, so [this] year you get part two of the history of The Orb, which is the non-Island years [Island Records, the label they were signed to from 1992-2001] and all the stuff from after and before then.”
2013 was also Paterson’s 25th year living in his London home. Yet, unlike The Orb this relationship has reached its conclusion. He reveals that while preparing to move he’s uncovered some lost artefacts. “I’ve just been under the stairs and, my God, I found fifteen boxes of records I didn’t even know I had,”
The move means that he’ll have to part ways with some of this vinyl, but he definitely hasn’t been converted into a digital listener.
“I’m not going to be like everyone else and sell my record collection. That would be, to me, suicidal because there’s some gems in there. I’ve got some that are worth… well you couldn’t put a price on them.”
Indeed, Paterson’s affection for his favourite piece of wax transcends currency evaluation.
“My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts acetate – by Eno & Byrne. If anybody’s never heard of that then I don’t know why they’re bothering to talk to me because that to me is my kind of bible. Just the way it was put together is very similar to what an Orb record is about.”
Of course back in 1988 when The Orb started releasing music, vinyl was the standard format. Since then Paterson has witnessed the rise and apparent fall of the CD and he sceptically observes the contemporary digital saturation.
“Vinyl is something that will be a big big big resurgence. My grandchildren will certainly make sure of that. This digital age is going to fall flat on its face.”
This dismissal might seem a little hasty, but Paterson’s confidence in the virtues of vinyl is surely augmented by the fact that The Orb’s fans are increasingly vinyl-hungry.
“When we do gigs, we sell a lot of vinyl,” he says. “We sell a lot of music from our store, in fact we sold out of everything that we took on the road in the last three months and there’s a big demand for more vinyl. The vinyl of the Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry album sold out immediately and we had to get it re-pressed.”
Now, this brings us to the topic of The Orb’s two most recent releases. Both 2013’s More Tales From The Orbservatory and its predecessor The Orbserver in the Starhouse are collaborations with dub/ reggae supernova Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Understandably, Paterson was honoured to work with Perry, “He’s a legend beyond legends. He’s out there with the Bob Marley’s of the world that man.”
Bob Marley is actually one of the many acts Perry himself produced – others include The Clash and the recently deceased Junior Murvin. Meanwhile, Perry’s formidable solo discography exceeds fifty album releases and Paterson explains how The Orb’s fruitful partnership with him developed.
“I became friends with him DJing with him on gigs in England, Mexico and Finland, of all places. Then we went into sending tapes over [to him] and it took nine or ten months before we got a reply. The whole thing took about 18 months and we eventually got him into the studio for a week and we recorded enough material to make two albums.”
Going into the recording sessions, Paterson and The Orb’s co-commander Thomas Fehlmann had some specific ambitions for what they wanted to achieve with the dub pioneer. However, the highly-charged sessions surpassed their expectations.
“We thought ‘OK, we’ve got five new tracks, that’s easily enough for the week’. He got there Monday night, his working schedule was from 6pm to 6am. That was his way of working, which was a bit odd for us. Anyway, [he] turns up at 4 o’clock in the morning on Monday and we start recording Tuesday night. We’ve done five tracks by Wednesday [and] we’ve got him until Sunday.” Paterson says incredulously.
“Knowing that he’s not going to get up until really late we then start writing a load of tracks on the Thursday. He gets up Thursday night and as a DJ I start playing him loads of stuff and he’s just singing along to it [while we’re] recording his vocal. We ended up with seventeen new tracks. How do you like us now?” he laughs. “We had vocals done by Sunday and we had Sunday off.”
Not only do the two records expand upon The Orb’s previous dub/reggae explorations, but Perry’s vocals apply a melodic root to The Orb’s ambient atmospheres. The simple fact that the albums comprise songs with verse-chorus structures makes them unique.
“Completely different ball game. By having songs you have to have verses and choruses and bridges, which is something else that was quite alien for The Orb,” Paterson explains. “Normally it’s just dubs with a few bits of vocals. There are normally timely sarcastic comments, a bit of humour or a bit of enlightenment, but this time it was vocals all the way through.”
The addition of Perry’s vocals inevitably made the songs assume a more conventional form than The Orb’s characteristic meandering. “Instead of something like ten minutes of a doodle it became a four minute pop song. The most we got was six and half minutes. That was on Soulman, which we edited down as a single anyway.”
Metallic Spheres, the album that came before the two with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, featured Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Paterson notes that The Orb will continue to involve outside musicians on their next LP.
“We’re looking at working with some other people on the next album, but not so much as a whole. Different people coming in working on different tracks. We’re looking at Peter Hook, ex-New Order, [to] come in and do some bass lines. The other one is [techno progenitor] Juan Atkins who will come in and give us some atmospheric Detroit sounds.”
The Orb competently achieved commercial success long before embracing pop-song structure or enlisting the help of revered associates. Their second LP, 1992’s U.F.Orb, could be one of the most unlikely records to ever top the UK charts and the group’s whimsical electronic music continues to hold the attention of a legion of fans. Paterson says that he’s never felt inclined to pander to standard record company criterion.
“The record label was our own record label at the very beginning, so we didn’t have any problem releasing stuff. Then within two years it snowballed because, from putting out A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain in February ’89, it became a sought after tune.”
Paterson reminds us how improbable it was for this song to become a hit.
“That was a 19 minute ambient piece, a doodling, and yet it came up as the most noticeable tune we’d ever written at that point. By Christmas ’89 we were doing a John Peel session. The rest, as they say, is history.”
The group’s illustrious history certainly hasn’t reached an impasse. Paterson describes how working with Perry indicated there’s plenty of productive years ahead.
“I used to look up at one of my mates who’s 65 now and think ‘When I get to that age I want to be like him.’ Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is 78 so I’ve got someone else even higher to go ‘When I get older I want to be like him.’”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
