Beth-lehem

CMJ NEW MUSIC MONTHLY JANUARY 1999

By Andrew Beaujon
Photo by Chris Clunn

The time is probably right for a genre-bridger like Beth Orton. Ten years ago, Bon Jovi had the #1 record in America, and similarly uninspired light metal owned the majority of the rest of the top 10. It was a time that made George Michael's Faith seem like a forward-looking LP, and nothing that couldn't be categorized into Sam Goody's thin racks stood a chance. Today Jay-Z is in the top spot with a record that combines hardcore hip-hop with show tunes. Lauryn Hill is at #2 with a record that references Aretha Franklin and Bobs Marley and Dylan. And while Shania Twain (Q) mixes country with power balladry to the tune of five million sold, the Dixie Chicks, an all-female band whose members have tattoos and play good old country music in the style of the Lennon sisters, are at #10. Even if pastiche weren't the best route to the top of the charts, Orton can only benefit from the tide of goodwill that's lifting the fortunes of accessible female artists in Lilith Fair's profitable wake.
But like the music she makes, Beth Orton resists characterization. The Englishwoman's raspy tenor first crossed the Atlantic on the Chemical Brothers' backs, when she provided vocals for the song "Alive Alone" on their debut LP, Exit Planet Dust. Orton's second LP Trailer Park was her first to get a US release. It brought an electronic sensibility to live-band earthiness and sold 80,000 copies, helped in no small part by Orton taking part in last summer's Lilith Fair tour. Just don't lump her in with Natalie Merchant yet.

"I think a lot has been made out of the Lilith Fair," Orton says over the telephone, speaking from a friend's house in Norfolk, England. "It was just a concert, as far as I was concerned. I didn't look around and compare myself to the other acts, even though they were women." When pressed to name any artists on the tour she enjoyed playing with, she mentions that she "thought Jewel was incredible" and that Emmylou Harris was her "favorite out of everything." Then she immediately reiterates that to her, a gig is a gig.

And that she's not a folky; a sobriquet that has followed her since Trailer Park was issued. It's not accurate, she maintains: "Maybe it's the sound of my voice-I'm quite lyrical. And also because people have to label you." She pauses to consider this last statement. "I grew up around a lot of folk musicians, if you like, but, then again, I grew up around a lot of blues people. I don't see that folk is anything outside of-I mean, Rolling Stones to me are folk, you know? If folk is music for the people, then, I don't know, I'm as much a folk-singer as the next person."
Beth Orton was born in Norfolk in 1970. Her mother worked in an arts center. "From about the age of eight," Orton says, "I was around that sort of stuff. Loads of my family are quite musical." But she's not exactly sure that her upbringing should be characterized as "hippyish." "I suppose in some ways you could say it was hippyish," she says, laughing. "But you know, nothing's that black and white, is it? I could say to you, 'Yes, I had a hippy upbringing,' but that would completely discredit another part that was really authoritarian."

Orton went to school in Norfolk until she was 13, when she and her mother moved to London. She was always interested in performing. "I always wanted to act, I was always doing something like that. Every year my mum put on these sort of play things where all the kids would go in the summer when their parents were working in the holidays. And in the end you'd put on a play. So it was never really like professional as in big theaters or anything, it was like street theater and local fairs and stuff. I don't know, there's a different sort of thing in England, all the sort of hippy fairs-"

Hippy fairs?

"Yeah," she laughs, pausing to scream, "Bloody hippies" at her friends, who have stolen her lighter.
In 1989, Orton took a play she was acting in to Russia. "We were going to have a grant so we could go and then it fell through, so I just went mad and started phoning up all the big companies I could and got us out there in the end." On the troupe's first night there, Orton says, "We were hiding in the comer of Red Square drinking a bottle of champagne in secret out of paper cups-you had to drink it really fast otherwise all the champagne dripped out of the bottom. It was just when Gorbachev was being overthrown and all that was going on." The play, which Orton characterizes as "this here-and-now method of acting where everything was cast-devised and cast-directed and there was no leader," was successful. When it returned to London, a man named Orbit saw Beth Orton act and decided to make her a star.

William Orbit is a seminal figure in dance music. Whether or not you've heard of him, you've heard him. As things are done in his milieu, Orbit records under many different names-Torch Song, Bassomatic, his own - and remixes everyone from Seal (he did the famous remix of "Crazy") to Prince. Recently, he produced Madonna's Ray Of Light record and Blur's next one. When he met Orton, he was upset about Virgin's handling of the last Bassomatic album and had decided to start a new band. "He liked the sound of my voice and he wanted me to do some spoken word on a record," remembers Orton. "I sang a Frangoise Hardy song called 'Catch A Falling Star,' and he put a beat to it and just messed around with it and that's kind of how I found out I could sing, just by chance."

The band they started was called Spill, though they also put out records under the name of Strange Cargo (a song called "Water For A Vine Leaf"). "It kind of went on from there." Orton says. "There was just, you know, guitars in the studio and I'd just pick up a guitar when I was sort of sitting around and started learning guitar and just started singing melodies and writing words and just sort of went on from there. It didn't really stop once I started writing. I just kept writing, really." Spill split for unclear reasons (Orbit's website simply says that "the project failed"), and the album it made, Superpinkymandy, was released only in Japan, and with only Orton's name on it. It is out of print and virtually impossible to find. Orton describes the sound as "a lot of elements: electronic and band, just different instruments." In a lot of ways, the beginning of her sound.

After Spill, Orton guested on a couple of tracks, "Snapper" and "In Deep" with a band called Red Snapper, which was made up of most of Primal Scream, plus another producer/remixer extraordinaire, Andrew Weatherall. Growing gradually better connected, she came into contact with two DJs called the Dust Brothers,who were looking for someone to sing on the song that would close their debut LP. By the time the album was released, its makers had to change their name to the Chemical Brothers to avoid a lawsuit by a couple of guys in California. Orton had also put together a band of her own-two guitars, drums, keyboards, and double bass- and begun to make Trailer Park with Weatherall and Victor Van Vugt, who had previously produced records by Nick Cave and the Tindersticks.

Beth Orton's new record, Central Reservation, is due out in February on Deconstruction-Arista, and she took a year to make it. Not constant recording, mind you-rather what Orton calls "the ultimate sort of creative process." After some pretty extensive touring for Trailer Park, Orton went to see the American musician Terry Callier play in London. Callier's an interesting, quasi-mystical figure who grew up with Curtis Mayfield, sort offell into the crack between folk and jazz music in the '70s and hasn't been too easy to find since. While he spent most of the '80s working as a computer programmer in Chicago, the '90s have seen him recording again and doing shows, mostly in Europe. Orton had been turned on to Callier by Red Snapper's bass player. "I listened to The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier constantly for a year," she says.

After Callier's show, she went up to him backstage, "to literally ask for his autograph-'Cause I'm that sad and we just got chatting and someone said, 'Oh, Beth sings; you should hear what she's doing.' And he said, 'Yeah, send me a tape."' After Callier heard and liked Orton's music, she suggested they sing a duet together. "It was just a mad suggestion, being cheeky really," she says, "but if you think about it, musicians like working with musicians-don't they? That's what we do."
The result of her "cheeky suggestion" was three songs, two of which were issued on Orton's 1998 ER Best Bit. On it, she and Callier covered Fred Neill's song "Dolphins," most notably covered by Tim Buckley. "It just so happened that Fred Neill was Terry's all-time hero, someone he used to emulate and see play a lot when he was younger. It just sparked something in him and he came in and we sung together," she says. "Total beautiful twist of fate, really.”

The third song Pass In Time," is on Central Reservation, which Orton says was her toughest recording second [album]' but I think it's 'really fucking hard third.' Part of me really wanted to get then another part wanted to keep my music as good as possible. I must admit that the other day I sat down with my guitar and I realized I have learned. My guitar playing's a million times better."
This is evident on the new record; what's surprising is that with as many chefs-Orton's original demo share disc-space with productions by Van Vugt and Mazzy Star's David Roback-Central Reservation sounds like it could been have been recorded over the course of a month, rather than a year. Though it treads a lot of the same ground as Trailer Park, it’s more proficient, more fleshed-out, more soulful.And compared with the crunchy chicks usually mentioned as evidence of the future of music being female, Orton actually kind of edgy. Unlike, say, Jewel's, Orton's voice sounds as at home on a track by the Chemical Brothers (on whose second album she made a return engagement, with "Where Do I Begin") as it does on one of her own hazy trippy, yet acid-jazzy numbers. But the woman who sang, "Once they've got you where they want / they don’t want you to know" on Trailer Park's "How Far" is not about to settle for any old definition of success.

"My hopes are that it won't get completely [dissed]," she says. "My hopes? God, I hope that people like it. I think it's a winter - I don't know. Fuck it, I don't know. I think it could work in the sun as well. Listen, I don't know, I mean, my hopes are, obviously, that I'm not barking up the wrong tree."