Techno Grows Up

When Orbital's first single, Chime, made its smart progression from underground favourite to Top Of The Pops hit in 1989, few could have predicted that the Hartnoll brothers would still be in business at the tail end of the century. Dance music? Nah mate, no future in that sort of thing. The Stone Roses, now . . . When you consider the other dance acts who were making waves alongside Orbital - including the likes of Guru Josh and NJoi - you can understand why long-term career plans and ambitions were more dreams than anything else. But 10 years and five albums down the road, we find Orbital in The Middle Of Nowhere - and slightly stunned to be there.

"It's all gone a bit grown up, hasn't it?" Paul Hartnoll observes. "When we started writing this album, I sat back and went `Wow, five albums, I feel like a progressive rock band!' It seems like an awfully large amount if you're flicking through someone's record collection and they have all five albums by a band. It looks like an endless career. You can't claim to be fresh, you can't claim to have just begun with five albums under your belt."

But if you look at the other acts who make up the dance world's hierarchy, such longevity is not so remarkable. The Prodigy, Underworld and even the Chemical Brothers have a couple of albums apiece on the shelves, and none of them are showing signs of slowing down. Suddenly, dance music can offer you a career. Somewhere out there, probably, is techno's Mick Jagger, a man who will still be sweating and playing with samplers on stage when he is 50. Is that a role for Hartnoll? "I certainly hope not!" he laughs. "I'll still be doing music but probably not jumping around in hot, sweaty venues. It is my hobby; well, it was, and then it turned into a career."

To flick through the back pages of Orbital's catalogue is to get a sense of how (and why) dance music went from being the sound of underground, outdoor raves of the late 1980s to its current position as the ubiquitous sound of the high street, the new rock'n'roll. At each twist and turn, you'll find Orbital. Playing albums like Snivilisation to 40,000 people at Glastonbury and Feile; putting on shows to rival any rock act; creating tracks like Satan and The Box, which not only took them into the charts time and time again, but also showcased their winning innovation, techno; Orbital have mapped out a whole new blueprint for dance music.

The Middle Of Nowhere appears to be more than just a good title, though. It seems to pinpoint just where Orbital are at present; slightly apart from their contemporaries and approaching issues from a totally different angle. Unlike their other albums, which were inspired by various sounds then in vogue, this one is Orbital playing it straight - classic Orbital, you could say. All the beeps and bleeps are present and correct but there doesn't appear to be one unifying theme.

"It's a jolly album," maintains Paul. "We did want InSides to be a jolly album with lots of short tracks, but look how that turned out! That's our way of working - we go in to do something short, snappy and jolly and come out with all these long, moody tracks. You can't predict how it will turn out because your mood every day going into the studio may not be the same, or even jolly."

Certainly, this time around, there was no one sound or influence which set the brothers in motion. "You do take your influence from everything you listen to. When I first moved to London, I listened to all the pirate radio stations and they were playing all this early jungle stuff, so I wanted to do something like that. We steamed in, had a go and ended up with Are We Here? on Snivilisation. It wasn't exactly a drum'n'bass record, but you could hear where we were coming from. I have to enjoy myself in the studio because if I don't enjoy it, how can I expect someone else to shell out money for it and enjoy it?

"You can get caught up in thinking you have to do things that people will like, but you end up with a watered-down sound that no one is sure about. I might be quite happy to do my own thing, but that often means total imitation of what's going on that I like. One of my main theories about originality is that you can often end up been totally original by trying to copy someone else and getting it wrong. That's happened to us loads of times - I've tried to copy someone, it has gone terribly wrong and we've ended up with stuff that people think is highly original."

Like many dance acts, Orbital have dabbled with film scores. They recorded the theme for the re-make of The Saint and collaborated with Michael Kamen on the soundtrack for the sci-fi flick Event Horizon. "I can't get enough film scores," Paul enthuses. "They are so easily available now and you don't have to trek to specialist shops to get them and pay £100 for something like Barbarella. I admire David Holmes, Ennio Morricone, Danny Elfman who is excellent, one of the best of the new gang of film composers. When I was preparing for this tour, I couldn't get enough of his score for Black Beauty, and the Edward Scissorhands score is one of my favourites."

Hartnoll has his own theory about why so many dance acts get their kicks from celluloid. "It's all about instrumentals, and that's what most dance artists do. Playing with technology is a bit like having your own robot orchestra to conduct. And it's better because they never go for lunch and they don't have to have their tuxedos dry-cleaned. You just buy a piece of equipment and that's your investment; there's no other outlay. But there are other problems . . ."

Paul is referring to the recent computer crash which wiped out all Orbital's sound files and samples from the new album a few days before they were due to go on tour. "Technology basically lost its memory. It's one of those things; you lose a week's work but you still have it somewhere. So you do it all again and you do it quicker. It was cramming two week's work into a week - but it made the first gig on the tour explode, that sense of release."

Not that he is a computer boffin. "It's a standing joke with me," he claims. "I bought a computer simply to use the sequencer and I have to get someone else to do stuff on it. Someone even came in one day and cleaned my screen! We were based in a place called The Strongroom and it was wall-to-wall computer buffs. Someone would come in, look over and say `What's wrong with your computer then, it's really sluggish'. So they'd happily spend a whole afternoon just cleaning up the system files and deleting all the crap on it. I'd just stand there, looking bemused by it all."

The Middle Of Nowhere is released on April 5th on ffrr.