Orbital: The ’90s Revival Is On (And On)
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Orbital is, from left to right, Paul and Phil Hartnoll.
Orbital is, from left to right, Paul and Phil Hartnoll.
When brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll began making their own version of the American house music and techno sweeping through English pop in the late 1980s, they took their name from the motorway that circles London's suburbs and, back then, linked the new rave scene together. The two were from Sevenoaks, a southeastern exit on the Orbital, the moniker they've recorded and performed under ever since.
Right from the start, with their 1990 debut "Chime," Orbital specialized in big, warm riffs that were equally effective at moving masses of bodies in a field or causing outbreaks of air-keyboard among those listening on the radio. When they performed, the pair almost always played live. Most acts that don't just DJ on stage sound harder, techier. But the Hartnolls wrote tunes whose repetitiveness seemed integral to their melodic structure, not incidental to it one of their big live favorites was titled "Lush," and that's a canny self-description.
Orbital became one of the premier festival groups of the '90s, not just at big dance-music events in the U.K. like Tribal Gathering but at the rock-oriented Glastonbury too. That extended, partly, to the U.S., where the brothers frequently got over with tracks like the guitar-shredding "Satan" and "The Box," featuring a dulcimer. But Chemical Brothers-style chart crossover eluded them, and in 2004, after seven albums and endless tours, the Hartnolls decided to part ways professionally.
It wasn't too surprising when Phil and Paul began performing their classics again in 2009 the lag time between "retirement" and getting back in the game is growing smaller by the year. But while most reunion albums sound like the uninspired, profit-taking ventures they are, Orbital's eighth non-soundtrack album, Wonky, sounds refreshed, as if the duo's time off together had rejuvenated them creatively.
As Phil Hartnoll told me in two separate Q&A sessions conducted for The Record in August 2011 and March 2012 some of that can be put down to the fact that much of the music was written for them to play out, injected in between their hits, like "Halcyon And On And On" and "Impact (The Earth Is Burning)."
You had a ringside seat to the American record biz trying to sell electronic dance music to America in the '90s. What was your impression of the music's popularity in America at first?
PHIL HARTNOLL: We came over with Meat Beat Manifesto in 1992. That was our first proper tour of America. We had people little ravers following us around from gig to gig. The geographical size of England is so small it's a breeding ground for subcultures. When we went over to America, with the huge enormity of it, you [had] little pockets of ravers and rave culture in every little town and every city that we played. But it was never on a national scale at that point. It was represented quite a lot, in each little city, but the only way of talking from city to city was via the Web. The ravers had uniforms: the big baggy trousers, the Dayglo, pacifiers. They pretty much stayed uniform in that. It was the same nationally. They had their own little dress code.
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Orbital: The '90s Revival Is On (And On)