Beth Orton and Me... — Vinyl Magic

When I put out those first records, success came very quickly. When that happens, there are things to do to build on success, and a lot of it I think went against my grain. And also, maybe I wasn’t that good at it. I thought it was a phase, for sure, what a funny phase! And then what’s happened over the years is: no, this isn’t a phase. Actually you might just have to admit that you love what you do, and shut the f*ck up and get on with it. Accept what is possible, and what hasn’t been possible, and where I might have been able to figure it out a bit better and been a better version of myself. Or wish that other people had been better versions of themselves, and not be afraid of my darkness.

Beth Orton

Everyone’s poking you with sticks, What are you, are you successful? What kind of music do you make, what’s your thing?’ I don’t know, I’m just muddling through. I’m a f*cking mess, all right? I’ve become a ‘mother’. I meet my children at the gates of the school, and I don’t know if I am that person, but I’m trying to be. I’m also a singer and a songwriter, and I’ve been famous – did that happen, I’m not sure? Trying to incorporate all those incredibly disparate bits of the self into one is ... I just don’t know any more. I don’t know who the f*ck I am.

Beth Orton

Central Reservation (1999) signed by Beth

I met Johnny Marr. I’d just come off stage in LA and he was talking to a friend of mine and I was just chatting to the two of them. I didn’t know who this other guy was and I was just talking for about half an hour, getting on really well, having a laugh and then I was just like, So what do you do? And he was like, "Oh, I play guitar." And I thought, Right, okay. And anyone I might have heard of? And he was like, "Well, maybe. Yeah, The Smiths." I was: I know you’re Johnny Marr. Oh, okay, okay and then I sort of expected that embarrassment set in and just thought, Oh, but it didn’t because he’s just such a sweetheart and we just carried on. It was like a blip, and then we went or whatever and just carried on talking. And then it turned out we’re staying in the same hotel, and he came up one evening and we just sat on my balcony drinking wine and playing guitar until like the wee hours, you know, and it was just beautiful. It was like it was amazing. And I had these songs and I was” I’ve got this song” and I had "Concrete Sky." I’ve had that knocking around for a while and and he just got very excited about that song in particular and, and started adding these chords underneath and then sort of said, 'I know, what about this idea for a bridge,' then help me with my chorus, you know and just kind of like galvanized it and I don’t know, made it into what it is really.

Beth Orton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGVgbKQldEA
"Concrete Sky" Daybreaker 2002

That tag? I don’t mind it as long as it’s not a gimmick. I mean, I was playing around with that and it was my ambition to mix those two things. And it also made me laugh because both of them are such kinds of genres, just full of snobbery. You know, you’ve got your dance snobs and you’ve got your folk snobs and you got this thing. And it was just hilarious to bring it together in a way, and also I just thought it could be really beautiful.

Beth Orton on "Folktronica"

Daybreaker is a word I made up when I was talking to Johnny Marr. I was trying to describe how I wanted the song to be outside. You know, like a daybreak, like a song. It’s a daybreak and a song. For example, I’d been at a friend’s house and we were up all night drinking and talking. And he and his wife were there, and we were just having the best night. And before I left in the morning, like 6 a.m., they gave me a copy of Dusty in Memphis (by the great Dusty Springfield). And I went home and I put it on and I watched the sun come up with a head full of dreams and, you know, and you’ll just be like, oh, drifting around. You just had a brilliant night with your friends, and you listen to the most beautiful record you’ve ever heard. That is a daybreaker.
Beth Orton

I don’t think it’s easy, I don’t think it’s easy at all, and I think that sounds whatever it sounds. It’s funny, I was walking past a hotel yesterday with my daughter in New York, and I was like, “I used to stay there,” and she was like, “wow, it’s massive,” and I was like, “yeah, huge, and it’s really fancy,” and I said, “but you know what, I’m so happy to be walking past that hotel pointing it out to you but walking down the street with you.” Not staying in that hotel, but looking at it and going, “I did that once. I’m so happy that I’m here with you now and not there.” Not because I didn’t enjoy it, because the success wasn’t lovely and all of that and given me the chance to have a nice home to bring my kids up in, not fancy, fancy, but good enough — it’s all good. And I’m just like, did I handle it well? Probably not. Was I gracious? Not always. I came out of nowhere in a very particular time of my life when … It’s a lot, maybe more than people realize.
Beth Orton

Trailer Park (1996) signed by Beth

For over thirty years, Beth Orton has been creating beautiful music and delighting audiences with her exquisite songcraft. She defies categorization. A singer-songwriter who adds elements of folk, electronica and beats, Beth has collaborated with mix masters the Chemical Brothers, Four Tet, William Orbit and Andrew Weatherall on many of her recordings. For her efforts, critics labeled her music 'folktronica," which sounds as nonsensical as it seems. Rather than all the categories which critics revel in, I prefer Duke Ellington's description: "There are simply two kinds of music, good music, and the other kind." Beth has been nominated twice for the prestigious Mercury Prize, an annual award (since 1992) for the best album released by a musical act from Ireland or the United Kingdom. Though she lost in 1997 to Roni Size & Reprazent (whoever that is!) and to Talvin Singh in 1999, she is in good company with Adele (0 for 2), David Bowie (0 for 3), Radiohead (0 for 6), Paul Weller (0 for 2), and Amy Winehouse (0 for 2). Apparently, the Mercury Prize has a track record as unenviable as the Grammys!

Born in Dereham, Norfolk, Beth moved to Dalston, East London when she was fourteen. Her father, a journalist and public relations consultant, left the family three years earlier and died shortly thereafter. It was a hardscrabble life for Beth, her two brothers and her mother as Beth ruefully recalled, "Vodka and white bread seemed to be what we lived off." Beth was also afflicted when she was seventeen with Crohn's Disease, a debilitating inflammatory bowel ailment. To lessen the pain, Beth sought non prescriptive cures, "I was out drinking on it, drugging, living the life, The highs were very high and the lows were very low." Unfortunately, Beth's mother passed away from cancer when she was only nineteen and now she was on her own.

Initially, Beth wanted to be an actress, and she enrolled in the Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington, outside of London. Founded in 1968, this school was one of the first to welcome working class students. As a result of the poor reading skills by some of the pupils, improvisation was encouraged and deemed essential. The Royal Shakespeare Company, this, clearly, was not. Thus, Beth embarked on a tour of the UK, Russia, and Ukraine in Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), a poem turned play written by Arthur Rimbaud, with subject matter as cheery as its title implies. Regrettably, it was probably an accurate representation of Beth's life at the time. It was at a different music theatre production that producer and beat master William Orbit (later to collaborate and have outsize success with Madonna, Britney Spears, and Pink among others) saw her and enlisted her to work on the third installment of his Strange Cargo series, which featured "Water From A Vine Leaf," a song co-written by Beth and Orbit. This led to Beth's first album, Superpinkymandy, named after a ragdoll Beth owned as a child, produced by Orbit and released in 1993 in Japan to little or no fanfare. Despite an imaginative interpretation and reinvention of English folk singer John Martyn's "Don't Wanna Know About Evil," and her composition "She Cries Your Name" which later appeared on Trailer Park as a single in 1996, the album didn't sell very well. A limited pressing of only five-thousand copies didn't help.

Sugaring Season (2012) signed by Beth

Her relationship with Orbit wasn't just professional and it was hardly a cheery Hallmark Card, as she disclosed, “He wanted me to be all like part of his world and we started going out together and he wanted me to sing. I was like ‘F*ck off, I’m not going to be some bloke’s bird who sings but can’t even sing, but because they’re going out together he gets her to sing on his record.' I was really indignant about it. I remember I was really drunk and on ecstasy – I used to make him do loads of ecstasy, he never went out or did anything – and then all of a sudden I was popping pills in his gob and we were lying under a mixing desk being all mental. And I sang ‘Cry Me A River’ as a joke, and ‘Catch A Falling Star’ by Francoise Hardy. And then he made a little demo of it.”

Despite this inauspicious and unsettling beginning, four years later, Beth had her critical and commercial breakthrough with the release of Trailer Park, a proper release through proper channels. Her first single was a cover of The Ronettes' "I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine" which bore little resemblance to the swirling Phil Spector power pop originally recorded in 1965, and Beth's career was off and running. Initially, Beth wanted to name the album "Winnebago" but licensing from the manufacturer of mobile homes proved impossible. Beth remembered the vibe, "Trailer Park conjures up the same kind of filmic American images, images of transience and dislocation... and funnily enough, when we shot the video for the first single (in an actual trailer park)... I had all these odd, rather desperate people coming up and giving me their entire life-stories in a second, even though I didn't want them to." Not everybody is a star, I reckon...

Kidsticks (2016) signed by Beth

The disappointment of the elusive Mercury Prize notwithstanding, Beth has had a phenomenal career, releasing eight albums while collaborating with an eclectic list of artists, Ryan Adams, Dr. John, Emmylou Harris and Terry Callier, a singular soul singer and writer of renown. It seems as though her cadence is to release an album, well crafted and lovingly written, every four or five years, and it is always worth the wait. Her latest album Weather Alive is no exception, and it is exceptional. The rigors of Covid wrought its own challenges. Beth was set to work with a (as yet unnamed) "super-fancy" producer before he bolted, "Anyway, lockdown happened, he disappeared, the whole thing went to sh*t." The record label wasn't happy either with the dour and dark songs that Beth was creating and dropped her.

Undaunted, Beth took out a loan in 2022 and self-produced Weather Alive, the first time she had ever done so. The songs were born in a studio shed on her property where she went to escape during the pandemic, "This old piano really spoke to me and held an emotional resonance I could explore in a way I wasn't able to on guitar, a depth, or a voice I'd never worked to before. For me, the mood and atmosphere were another instrument. They were always consistent... In a way, when I was making the record, there was something about those last few months when I was just on my own in the shed, and I was working remotely with people, and I was taking the beautiful music that had been kind of played around the songs and started to sculpt it and create a new sonic world for these songs. It was kind of an indulgence for me, I really loved it. I loved the experience of getting to transport myself and the music is transporting anyway. There was some gorgeous, gorgeous stuff to work with. It's lovely to think of making a record that people can lose themselves in, because it's not always the most jolly record. It's not dark, but it's deep."

Weather Alive (2022) signed by Beth

Erin and I were lucky to see Beth perform Weather Alive at the Sacred Heart University Community Theater in Fairfield, Connecticut on September 7, 2023, the first gig in the US to preview this impressive work. The theater is an old vaudeville relic opened in 1920, and was recently purchased by Sacred Heart University and upgraded. It is an intimate venue with only four-hundred seats. Accompanying Beth were Alex Bingham on guitar, Stephen Patota on bass, Ben Sloan on drums, and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler on keys, horns and everything else. Jesse was also the opening act as his solo band, Pneumatic Tubes, had just released a beautiful aural and ambient excursion, A Letter From TreeTops, dedicated to his late father, his upbringing in Woodstock, New York, and the camp he attended as a child, TreeTops. It was a mesmerizing performance as Jesse used pedals, loops and added occasional flute and saxophone flourishes to take us on a spellbound journey. Read more about Jesse here https://www.vinyl-magic.com/blog/pneumatic-tubes-beth-orton-and-me

Jesse Chandler, Beth Orton at SHU Community Theater, September 7/ 2023

After a brief intermission, Beth and the rest of the band came out and opened with the title track, “Weather Alive,” a brooding yet hopeful piece that featured Beth’s moving vocals amidst the haunting sounds. Like the great Lucinda Williams, her voice cracks in all the right places, she is perfectly imperfect. Other highlights off Weather Alive included "Friday Night," wherein a Proust name drop is always welcome, and a bubbly "Fractals," written in tribute to the late Hal Willner, a producer who succumbed to the ravages of Covid in the early days of 2020. Beth had worked with Hal in 2006 on a concert tribute to Leonard Cohen along with other luminaries Laurie Andersen, Nick Cave and Lou Reed. As she said in a recent interview, “Hal allowed for a freedom of creative expression that I had not had anywhere else. "Fractals" was written to him, written to that feeling. When Hal died I felt him so close, and I got into this: I have no control, though my brain is rattling around telling me I have, and everything is a projection anyway.” Beth also did a beautiful version of "Central Reservation" accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and "Pass In Time," a lovely paean to the loss of her mother. The encores were the obligatory "Stolen Car," which a fan had shouted earlier in the show, to which she wryly responded, "Yes, he's here, he's at every show," and "Call Me The Breeze," an original written by Beth, not the J.J. Cale song which was famously covered by Lynyrd Skynyrd, an enduring staple in the cock rock canon. It was a glorious evening of music.

After the show, Beth was kind enough to sign her vinyl and I thanked her for her music. Hopefully, it won't be another five years between albums and tours. Perhaps, her hard earned freedom as a self producing artist augurs well for future endeavors, as she recently revealed, "I've spent a life handing elements of my work over to men in a room before I'm ready and having them reinterpret my perception, add chords to make something else happen and sometimes, in the process, take the music to a place I had no intention of going. It's subtle the ways that could happen, but to be able to hold on my own intention throughout has been a powerful experience." None more powerful than her performances transmitted directly to an audience.

Choice Beth Orton Cuts (per BKs request)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYUXWwMWbGE
"Friday Night" Weather Alive 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2TeBrO8pqc
"Don't Wanna Know 'Bout Evil" with William Orbit 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xXaNZEUNeY
"I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine" Trailer Park 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh4es2xulPg
"Pass In Time (with Terry Callier)" Central Reservation 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjF6akZ2WqI
"The Sweetest Decline (with Dr. John)" Central Reservation 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxjJnSvjKHs
"Someone's Daughter" Trailer Park 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSDliZi9d6U
"Fractals" Weather Alive 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMaOipvolgM
"Carmella (Four Tet Remix)" The Other Side Of Daybreak 2002

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiUHKOK6PUE
"Carmella" Daybreaker 2002

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvpRUqPrR4k

"Lean On Me (with Terry Callier)" Best Bit 1998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFZc4ax4tJs&list=RDQJ-63s5xHy4&start_radio=1
"She Cries Your Name" Trailer Park 1996

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rHa78_M16I

"Thinking About Tomorrow" live Paste Studio 2003

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK8mGUS11iY
"I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain" Tim Buckley cover with The Chemical Brothers 2018

"We must have recorded it around the same time as I made Central Reservation; The Chemical brothers would have just released Dig Your Own Hole. Sometime in 1998 possibly. I imagine the track got put to one side, slotted into that book that I told myself I’d read someday and never did, and the track got forgotten. Found by chance last year but released with every intention I hope you enjoy this offering."
Beth Orton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StRW1XrKJaY
"Water From A Vine Leaf" with William Orbit 1993

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUrmm7EARZY
"The State We're In" with The Chemical Brothers Come With Us 2002

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ35dnfYKrQ&list=RDSjF6akZ2WqI&index=22

"Stolen Car" Central Reservation 1999

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08XxjGkCbTc
"Call Me The Breeze" Sugaring Season 2012

Bonus Picks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtEmjwI2a7Q

"I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine" The Ronettes 1965 recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12qiOFv6OHg
"Lean On Me" Terry Callier Occasional Rain 1972

all photos by me