Classics in Orbit

At first glance, William Orbit's CV and his latest album, Pieces In A Modern Style, don't seem to go together. When Madonna, Blur and All Saints need a touch of class or a whole new direction, they call in Orbit. As a producer, he has gained a reputation for quality pop which ensures that he can pick and choose projects with the elan of a man who doesn't have to worry about the next paycheck. This, you could say, is his day job.

As performer and artist, William Orbit inhabits a different galaxy. From Bass-O-Matic and the Strange Cargo releases, right through to this year's audacious album, Orbit's own moves have been astute and clever in all the right ways. When he turns his attention towards dance music, he produces dance music with a twist - so it should come as no surprise that Pieces In A Modern Style is classical music with many a brazen knot in its folds.

Pieces is Orbit's take on selected works from a wide range of classical composers, including Gorecki, Barber, Handel, Vivaldi and Satie. While classical critics have been less than fulsome in their response, the public has voted with its record tokens and credit cards. The album has sold 200,000 copies in the UK in seven weeks. While Orbit believes this success is due to the lack of anything else interesting in the shops at the moment, a Top Three chart placing for the Adagio For Strings single (not on the album) before Christmas - largely due to a bland trance remix - and the celebrity status afforded by the clients he has produced albums for are also factors in its commercial success.

Few can say that they saw this coming: "Everybody apart from my manager thought I was overoptimistic," recalls Orbit. "I thought it would do very well. This was based on my experience of working with people around me, I felt it was reasonable to expect that. But when it does well, lo and behold, you are surprised. It's the dual nature of optimism and pessimism but, after all, if you didn't think that it would do well, you wouldn't do it."

This is Orbit's second attempt to release the album. "I had to pull the record from release five years ago because I did a version of Arvo Part and he didn't like what he heard," he explains. "He just doesn't buy into the idea of having his work reconfigured by someone else. I still admire his music but it sure hurt when I had to pull the record. I was probably too arrogant with what I did to the piece and he was probably shocked. I don't hold it against him."

The experience hasn't put him off eastern European composers: "I'm going to Poland in a few weeks' time to meet with a few of their luminaries like Preisner and hopefully Gorecki, who lives in a small village outside Warsaw. They may not be so concerned or bothered about meeting me but I'm thrilled to bits. I would love to work with them more; they're the source.

"With a bit of luck and timing, this one could run and run and run. I don't mind people using the word `ambient' to describe it, it's absolutely laid back, you don't have to stop and concentrate on it, you can listen to it on the backburner in your mind. If I don't do a second album, someone else is bound to! Even if this hadn't been a success and was panned and quickly forgotten, I would have gladly done a second album."

Certainly, an audience seems to exist for modern takes on classical styles. "The audience for popular music is far more discerning than we ever give them credit for. I'm certain that there is an agenda to dumb down pop music for so-called mass consumption. It's because people are thinking more about the bucks than the music and it's to the detriment of the sound.

"There's a great wave of people saying that music sucks right now, that it was much better in days gone by. I always try to resist joining in with that refrain but the fact is that it is beginning to suck right now, there is so much shit music out there. Turn on MTV and even in the pop field, it's bubblegum which will not last. I try to see the longevity in some of the stuff which is being produced now but I just can't. Good pop music lasts the course of time and becomes classic. This stuff won't. And people do want to have something intelligent."

Enter stage left, Orbit, with his idiosyncratic composer's baton: "there had to be a take on the pieces because there had to be something different about them but that wasn't going to occur through my performance. I don't have those sort of abilities. I'm not a concert hall kind of guy. A lot of its success came down to timing, to luck. People don't really get a lot of this kind of music, you don't find a lot of records like this displayed prominently in the rock and pop sections of your local record shop. "If you look at how other records like this are doing, you know that you can do very well numbers-wise. You can sell five million records - Gorecki's Third Symphony did that," although Orbit quickly adds "I don't want to draw comparisons between my record and his but it does indicate that people will go in search of music like this."

Orbit has mixed views about people delving further into the classics on the strength of his album. "What I wouldn't like to see happen is to have someone listen to my record all week, go into the classical department of a record store on a Saturday and blindly pull out some Handel or Barber from the racks because they could very well be disappointed. "The Handel and Barber pieces I selected for my record are not necessarily typical and I have treated them quite radically to conform to the sound I wanted. A lot of Handel especially can be very unpalatable. What I may end up doing is putting some pointers on my web site because there is so much beautiful, beautiful music there that I want to make sure my audience goes for that. I do want people to explore."

His clients certainly seem to like the album. "Madonna really went for it. She released it in America on her label, Maverick. It has done very well there because she is so supportive and that spreads through the label. Believe me, there is nothing like a bit of support from your label head to get things moving. But the best thing that is happening there is that there is huge support from the stores that are playing the record and getting people walking up to the counter to find out what it is. It's even helping the stores to sell other albums which may be like this one."

While we wait for the inevitable tour and the equally inevitable second set of Pieces In A Modern Style, Orbit will go back to applying his platinum studio touch to various pop acts. "To be honest, I turn down most of the jobs I am offered because I don't have enough time. I've done things like All Saints which were just one-offs, one tracks. I wouldn't mind doing a full album with someone later this year. I'd love to work with the American equivalent of Blur, if they exist, just for the experience of it."

Pieces In A Modern Style is on WEA Records