Beth-lehem

MEAN APRIL 1999

By Sue Carpenter
Photos by Katrina Dickson

Beth Orton is like a down comforter-welcoming, warm and difficult to get out from under once you've been pulled in. A single listen to the moody, broody lyrics and straightforward, soulful voice Is all it takes for the songs to slip into your subconscious and make themselves so at home that you sometimes wonder how you lived without them. But it wasn't until two years ago that any of us had heard of her.

Plucked from obscurity by wunderkind William Orbit and thrust into the limelight by way of the Chemical Brothers, Orton is widely regarded as the bridge between folk and electronica. With Trailer Park, her 1997 debut, the 27-year-old Londoner quickly became a critics' darling and musical staple of nearly every college radio station, coffee house, clothing boutique, living room, cafe, diner and dive on either side of the Atlantic. Central Peservation, her most recent release and first on a major label, cements her status as a bona fide IT girl.

And Orton wears it well-quietly, unassumingly. Six feet tall and flat chested with pale, makeup-free skin and shaggy brown hair that has not been chemically altered, she looks seriously out of place in Southern California. Dressed in faded, oversized Levi's and a 70s style leather jacket, Orton certainly fits the folkie image, but look a little closer and you'll see hints of an anachronistic, playful nature. Her fingernails are painted with florescent orange polish, and her narrow feet are slipped into fluffy pink mules, one of three pairs of shoes she'd bought during the previous day's shopping binge.

"I love shoes," Orton says unabashedly over lunch at L.A.'s upscale Water Grill, though she won't comment on whether her collection could rival Celine Dion's, at 500 and counting. "I'll show you another pair as well." She reaches into her handbag and pulls out a hot-pink sequin number which she holds in awe as if it were Cinderella's lost slipper.

Clearly, Orton is enjoying her time in Los Angeles. For two weeks, she has been doing what she likes to do most-shop, hang out with friends, play with different musicians experimenting with sounds, and go to shows-while waiting for her protege, William Orbit, who is also in L.A., to finish recording with another artist.

Since producing Madonna's Grammy-award winning single, "Ray of Light," Orbit has become a hot commodity. But in 1990, when Orton and Orbit first met, they were both virtual unknowns. At the time, Orton was performing in a fringe theater group when Orbit, who had a friend in the same theater company, heard her speaking voice and suspected there was something more there. The two started hanging out, and not too long afterward, on a Christmas Eve, Orbit asked her to recite some spoken word onto a tape at his studio. "I was a bit drunk, so I sang instead," Orton remembers. "It was Francoise Hardy's 'Catch a Falling Star."'

As with any successful artist, Orton's life has been threaded with serendipity. And, as she soon learned, she actually had a knack for catching rising stars. While Orton didn't think much of her singing, Orbit apparently did. He turned the tape into a demo and played it for some friends. "They all decided I could sing," she remembers. "They said It was kind of like Nico."

From there, she began working more closely with Orbit. "William had been doing some pretty mad, interesting stuff even back when I met him," Orton recalls, between bites of grilled bass and sips of Evian. "He has sort of a touch of genius to him. There is something about him that's mad professor. He's a highly intelligent person."

It was with his mentoring and encouragement that Orton began to blossom, discovering, unlike many female pop singers who sing like children, a deep, rich and honest voice. "[William's studio] was just a little space in which I could really express something that had been inside for a long time," Orton explains. "I'd spent so much of my life being superficial in the day to day runnings. Because I was quite funny, I'd always be a bit frustrated. At the end of the day I'd think, 'That wasn't everything I meant or totally how I feel.' When I started singing, I thought, 'Oh, this is where it comes out."'

Music had always been a large part of Orton's life. Born in Norfolk, England in 1970, she grew up listening to Scottish folk music and her brothers' record collection. "[They] were into all sorts of things-mod and punk-and I used to just listen to the ones that had melody-the Rolling Stones and the Clash," Orton recalls. "It's kind of irritating to admit, but it's true. Their record collection was a huge influence. And my mum. I think I was quite lucky.

The records my mum had were Revolver and the New Seekers," Orton says, before singing a bar: "I'd like to teach the world to sing."

As a teenager, Orton had a habit of breaking into song spontaneously, but it was always in private. "Every night I used to come home from school and lock the door and dance around and sing," Orton says of her after-school antics, once she'd been thrown out of the school choir. "I used to sing into my hairbrush all the time. And in the bath. I used to make up my little version of a blues song, and these songs would go on for hours. I'd be gettin' all pruny in the bath."

At age 14, she moved to London with her mother, who was a children's rights activist, and two brothers, four and six years older, both in punk bands at the time. Orton jokes that the only reason she started playing folk and learned to play guitar was in reaction to their music. "I'd been brought up with such loud people. Everyone shouting all over each other," she says. "I'm pretty loud myself, but when I learned to play, I learned to play quietly, trying to fit into the space that was left. There were always guitars laying around the house. I used to pick one up every now and then and just piddle around, but I really started playing when I was in the studio with William, and it just sort of took. I had been told to shut up so many times growing up, and suddenly I wasn't being told to shut up. I was being told to let it all out, but the thing is, I never thought that's what I'd end up doing."

Yes, Orton had wanted to be on stage, but as an actress. Now she can't wait to tour. Her records, both of which have been co-produced with Victor Van Vught (who also works with the Tindersticks and Nick Cave), feature lush, textured sounds. But when on the road, Orton keeps the sound stripped down and simple. During her tour for "Trailer Park," she played with just one other musician,

In 1997, she performed at the yearly estrogen fast that is Lillith Fair, along with Erykah Badu, Natalie Merchant and the relentlessly perky Sarah McLachlan. With ease, she out-classed everyone else on the bill. Why is it that most female folkies make you want to toss oat cakes but that Beth Orton makes you want to slow dance with your boyfriend in a spring rain? The secret is in her singing. Orton has a way of leading the music with her voice instead of self-consciously following the rhythm.

While the beats and electronic artistry that characterized Orton's first record take a back seat to orchestral instrumentation on "Central Reservation," they give play to even more powerful vocals and compelling melodies in a collection of intensely personal songs that ponder the passage of time and muse about love and loss. Within the mature lyrics, there is a sense of childish wonder and amazement, mostly about her own success. On "Devil Song," produced by David Roback of Mazzy Star, she writes: "Looking back in retrospect, did you ever really get what you'd expect?"

"I was talking to William recently," Orton says, while pondering dessert options. "I was sitting there going, 'Can you believe that I'm a singer now and that our records are on the same rack in the same shops? Isn't that bizarre?' He was like, 'Mmm, yeah. What interests me more is that you went away and got your own band together and your own musicians and found a way to do it and it's really worked,' and that's true."

"It's just great to be able to make music, really. To be able to take it out of my bedroom."