Orbital talk new collabs with Tilda Swinton and Confidence Man and revisiting ‘The Brown Album’

Orbital have teamed up with actor Tilda Swinton for new single ‘Deepest’, a reworking of the duo’s 1989 track ‘Deeper’. Check out it below along with our interview on the reissue of the classic ‘Brown Album’.

‘Deepest’ was debuted live last year, when Swinton joined the dance pioneers, brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll, onstage at Orbital’s Glastonbury performance. She had previously worked with Orbital when playing the mysterious Traveler in the video for 1996 single ‘The Box’.

“Tilda has the right gravitas to be a hypnotist on ‘Deepest’,” Paul Hartnoll told NME. “If she hadn’t done it, we’d have asked Derren Brown.”

The original voice on ‘Deeper’ was male, but Hartnoll revealed: “To do a new version of a song, you need something else to happen for it to be different. Also, there are so few women in the dance world. Speaking as yet another balding, white, middle-aged man, we have to try to redress the balance wherever we can.”

Alongside ‘Deepest’, Orbital have also announced an expanded reissue of their classic second album ‘Orbital 2 (The Brown Album)’ from 1993, to be released on May 23. Orbital have been touring ‘The Brown Album’ alongside 1991 debut ‘Orbital (The Green Album)’ for the past year, including a sell-out show tomorrow (April 5) at London’s Brixton Academy.

Revisiting the two albums on tour is inspiring new music, as Hartnoll explained: “It feels like I’m playing a completely different person’s music, in some ways: 22-year-old Paul’s music, not 56-year-old Paul. It’s nice to be jamming with my younger self. It’s had an effect on what I’m doing now. The new music I’m writing doesn’t sound retro, but it’s got a leanness and keenness to it, with a bit more of the swagger you have at 22.”

Read on for Paul’s full interview, where he discusses incorporating Greta Thunberg into the tour, plans for a collaboration with Confidence Man, thwarted hopes of working with Mel C and Doctor Who, and why ‘The Brown Album’ isn’t really that brown.

NME: Hello, Paul. Has touring Orbital’s first two albums made you view the originals any differently?

Paul Hartnoll: “It’s been invigorating, remembering what my reason was for making those songs. It was trippy, mad and fun doing them back then. That’s reinvigorated my drive for making music.”

Do any songs go down better in concert now than in the ‘90s?

“All of them! We were exploring when Orbital started and people didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Satan’ cleared dancefloors up and down the country. People would see us on the strength of (debut hit) ‘Chime’, so when we’d play ‘Satan’, everyone would fuck off from the dancefloor. We’d be going: ‘No, this new! You can dance to this too!’”

After ‘The Green Album’ did so well, what had been your plans for album two?

“Phil and our manager got a studio on Old Street. They were trying to get me to move to London, but I was a terrified 23-year-old who didn’t want to move out of my home village near Sevenoaks.

“Before I went to test the waters in London, we toured the US for a month with Meat Beat Manifesto. It was a massive voyage of discovery, life coming at me like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I came back thinking: ‘I’ve got to get out of this house’, moved to the spare room of a mate’s house in Dalston and never looked back.”

The live version of ‘Impact (The Earth Is Burning)’ samples Greta Thunberg. Is she aware of her role in the show?

“I doubt it. We tried to get Greta’s permission to sample her for our remix album, ‘30Something’, but couldn’t get through to her. We didn’t want to use her voice without permission. But, with everything going on in the world, we can’t not keep Greta in there. I looked at ‘the Greta button’ during a show and thought: ‘You’re going in the show tonight.’”

‘Planet Of The Shapes’ samples Paul McGann from Withnail And I. In 1993, the film wasn’t that big…

“It wasn’t. I saw it with a mate at a half-empty cinema in Sevenoaks and thought: ‘Yeah, it’s alright.’ I met Paul years later, at a Spiritualized gig. I wasn’t sure if he was going to punch me, but he said: ‘I was quite touched by that sample.’ Sampling was much more innocent back then.”

Why is ‘The Brown Album’, well, brown?

“Like a lot of musicians, synaesthesia comes into music for me, as it has certain colours. I knew ‘The Green Album’ had to be green. But it was our sleeve designer, Grant Fulton, who said: ‘I think this one should be brown.’ He said he’d give the album a nice ’70s brown look. I thought: ‘Yeah, I like your style.’”

What colour do you think ‘The Brown Album’ is, then?

“‘Impact’ is burgundy, ‘Halcyon’ is sky blue and light purple with silver and white, ‘Monday’ is very burgundy and dark brown, ‘Planet Of The Shapes’ is a steely blue with flecks of dragon red. That’s a lot of colours, but the one that dominates for me is… let’s call it an Aston Villa colour.”

How quickly did Tilda Swinton get the right playful tone to her voice on ‘Deepest’?

“Her first take was a deep voice like a regular hypnotherapist, It wasn’t quite cutting through. She said: ‘I’ll also try it like this,’ and it felt like: ‘This is what you really want to do.’ We were sniggering at her delivery, thinking: ‘There you go, that’s the one.’

“I think Tilda is singing it as her Octopus from The Boys. It wasn’t until after she recorded it that I clocked all the clicks and inflections in her voice that are just like that octopus.”

As well as performing with Tilda, your Glastonbury show last year saw Melanie C guesting on ‘Spicy’. Any plans to release that too?

“We’ve every plan to release it, but trying to get it past certain gatekeepers is proving very difficult. It’ll have to remain a live classic until we can.

“Melanie had heard about our track sampling her. She does a lot of DJing now and we gave her ‘Spicy’, saying: ‘You’re the only DJ who’s got this. Use it wisely!’ When we asked Melanie if she wanted to do it at Glastonbury, she was: ‘Fuck yeah!’ Melanie being the only DJ to own ‘Spicy’ is a nice way to honour her.”

Orbital and Confidence Man have remixed each other’s tracks. Any plans to do more together?

“We’re going into the studio in a few weeks, to see what happens. Listening to our respective remixes, I think a lot of magic will happen. They’re my kind of dance band: wild Australians who don’t take themselves too seriously and get away with it.

“They have an Australian attitude to what they do: it’s just fun. They appeal to my absurdist nature. There’s something mad to what Confidence Man do that I really enjoy. It’s a good match.”

 

Your Glastonbury performance in 1994 is legendary, but Moby in 2003 was the last dance act to headline the Pyramid Stage. Why the long wait since?

“Since the big ones of the ‘90s – The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Underworld – there haven’t been many contenders: Daft Punk, Deadmau5. There are plenty of big stadium DJs, but for people playing live? Bicep are the best of the current stadium house people, and Kneecap are coming up very fast. So there are youngsters who could pull it off.”

Speaking of Glastonbury, you covered the Doctor Who theme with Matt Smith guesting in 2010. You and Phil are both huge Doctor Who fans – would you ever soundtrack the show?

“Oh, I totally went for it when the BBC announced it was coming back 20 years ago. I had meetings with the BBC to do the music. But the showrunner, Russell T Davies, got his own regular composer Murray Gold in. That’s how it should work: if someone is in your team and it works, then why not? Those meetings were just the BBC doing due diligence, checking out other people.”

After the Green and Brown albums, will Orbital’s other albums get reissued too?

“It’s nice to have the ammunition of having more albums to reissue. But it’ll be a new album next, probably next year so as not to cram our releases too close together. I will say, we won’t do (third and fourth albums) ‘Snivilization’ and ‘In Sides’ as a tour together.

“What we’re doing on this tour will have an influence on new music. It won’t sound like ‘Green’ or ‘Brown’, but it’ll have that lean dance-iness to it. Not club music, that isn’t what we do. It’s more like festival, crusty rave dance music. Club music? That’s a whole different thing.”

Orbital’s new single ‘Deepest’, featuring Tilda Swinton, is out now as part of the digital EP ‘Radiccio’. ‘Orbital 2 (The Brown Album)’ is reissued by London Records on May 23 as 4CD and 4LP boxsets. The tracklisting is as follows:

Disc 1:
‘Time Becomes’
‘Planet Of
‘Lush 3-2’
‘Impact (The Earth Is Burning)’
‘Remind’
‘Walk Now…’
‘Monday’
‘Halcyon + On + On + On’
‘Input Out’

Disc 2:
‘Halcyon’
‘The Naked And The Dead’
‘Sunday’
‘The Naked And The Dub’
‘Lush 3-3 (Underworld)’
‘Lush 3-4 (Warrior Drift) (Psychik Warriors Ov Gaia)’

Disc 3:
‘Lush 3-5 (CJ Bolland)’
‘Lush (Euro Tunnel Disaster ‘94)’
‘Walk About’
‘Semi Detached’
‘Attached’
‘Impact USA (The Earth Is Burning: Diversion)’

Disc 4: Live At The Limelight New York 1992
‘The Naked And The Dead’
‘The Naked And The Dub’
‘Sunday’
‘Remind’
‘Halcyon’
‘Walk Now’
‘Kinetic’
‘Choice’
‘Chime’
‘Satan’

Orbital are touring ‘The Green Album’ and ‘The Brown Album’ throughout the spring into summer. See the remaining dates below and visit here for tickets and more information.

APRIL
4 – O2 Academy, Leed
5 – O2 Academy Brixton, London

MAY
23 – Chalk, Brighton
25 – Rough Trade East, London
26 – May, Pryzm, Kingston, London
28 – Paradise City, Belgium  

JULY
11– BBK Live 2025 – Bilbao, Spain
24 – PopMesse, Brno, Czechia
26 – Forest Fest, Eire

AUGUST

1 – Wilderness Festival

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