Consisting of brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, inventive dance duo Orbital have been a staple of the electronic scene since their rave days, producing their early music under the stairs of their parents house in the early 90s. More than 30 years later, having “found their audience” at Glastonbury, graduated to more mainstream venues and produced a series of hit albums, the pair are now taking a chance to look back.
Specifically, they’re heading out to play their self-titled 1991 debut, now more commonly known as ‘The Green Album’ live for the first time. “Going through the old kit has been like working with 22-year-old us,” they say. “It was amazing and weird, like a computer version of back to the future. Little notes to ourselves were still in the kit.”
“We started to try and unravel it all and get all the old information. We found all the discs, most of them worked, and we found a working Atari computer. The last couple of months have been like being one of the old duffers in the repair shop, and it all still sounds lovely.”
“When we play live, we improvise with the sounds, but it’s totally loose each time we construct it. It is seat of your pants stuff, fresh. Going back and doing the Green Album is nothing different to doing a new album. We’ve never played most of it live, which makes it exciting to do.”
“We’re changing things from how we did them then. It’ll be wildly different, we’d imagine. There was no multi-track on these albums, it was all created live, so we’ll be doing that, using the loops to improv. There are some tracks we haven’t even listened to in a long time, but the excitement came quite quickly.”
“As soon as I started hearing tracks like ‘Mobius’ broken down into its bits,” Phil Hartnoll says, “I knew it was going to be fun. The old samples have a certain quality to them, and we’re going with those original sounds, which has been a really interesting process, breaking those tracks down 30 years later and approaching it from a wiser and older, well definitely an older, perspective.”
A particular Irish reference stands out on The Green Album, and it recalls the days the duo didn’t yet have an album out. “The track ‘Belfast’ was written when we went over to play at David Holmes’ club in the city in 1990,” Phil explains.
“It was a fantastic gig and everyone was so lovely. The whole vibe was brilliant, the opposite to what we’d been fed in the media on what Beflast was meant to be like. We had left David a tape with that track, unnamed, on it. He rang up two weeks later and said he loved the track, so we named it ‘Belfast’ after them and that night. It is about what was going on in ‘belfast’ in the early 90s, but its about how lovely the dance music scene was and how it brought people together. It was amazing.”
“Our audience have grown older with us, but a lot of young people come, too,” Paul continues. “We’ve evolved. Who wants to stay in the same place forever? That’s the challenge of playing this old album. It’s going to be different, chaotic, and fun, done for a modern audience because we listen to music in a different way now. The old raves were a great time in our lives, but we’ve always wanted to bring that mentality into other venues. At this show, we’ll be playing the album in full, but also supporting ourselves with B-sides and rarities from that era.”
The pair have a final twist, too, for Irish fans. “We’ve been thinking about going to live in Dublin for a while,” Paul says. Maybe, before too long, Orbital will be a staple of the Irish scene.
