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The Orb were dressed as though for a midwinter set in Glastonbury’s wooded stage, the Glade, a home for veteran acid-rockers, dub reggae DJs and frazzled electronic acts. Dr Alex Paterson — the issuing authority for his doctorate is unknown — was swaddled in a big jacket and had a woollen hat perched on his bespectacled head. His younger assistant Michael Rendall, the latest in a long line of Orb colleagues over the past 35 years, wore a parka coat over a hoodie.
Like the winterwear, the beats were chunky and warming. A cheer went up when Paterson, 64, felt sufficiently toasty to remove his hat, revealing a gleaming bald pate. He has come to resemble The Orb’s forerunner in electronic adventuring, Brian Eno, who was on the roster of the London-based record label where Paterson worked in the 1980s before starting his band. But whereas Eno’s baldness is connoted as a sign of deep-thinking, the mark of the egghead, Paterson has a different air about him.
The Orb were influenced by Eno and German electronic pioneers of the 1970s such as Cluster. But the conceptualism of these predecessors has been largely absent from The Orb’s music. Formed in 1988 by Paterson and Jimmy Cauty, they began as rave pranksters sampling whatever they could lay their hands on. The piratical practice overlapped with Cauty’s notorious other group, the KLF. Paterson split from him in 1990, and kept The Orb name.
Joined by a succession of accomplices, he co-piloted The Orb into what became known as ambient house, a less tame precursor to the soothing sounds of chillout. They were playful and trippy, like jesters at the court of electronic music. In 1992 they had a UK top 10 with “Blue Room”, a 39-minute single longer than many albums. The light-fingered approach to sampling continued, as with the purloined snatch of speech from singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones in their signature track “Little Fluffy Clouds”, which also borrowed from minimalist grandee Steve Reich.
Their Dingwalls gig was a diminution in scale from the days of all-nighters in front of thousands. Far-out visuals were projected on a modestly sized screen behind the duo. The audience was a blend of grizzled heads and a decent scattering of younglings. The equipment (CD turntables, faders, mixers, laptop) was that of a live DJ set rather than the keyboards and synthesisers of live electronic instrumentation.
They opened with the distinctively curved notes of David Gilmour’s guitar-playing. The music was taken from their 2010 collaboration with the Pink Floyd man, Metallic Spheres, a rejigged version of which was released last year. It is a first-rate record, joining the dots between 1970s cosmic rock and the dubby, crusty, post-rave milieu of The Orb’s peak years. Then with grizzled heads and younglings jiggling about with ever greater intensity, we were off into an accelerated tour of their expansive discography.
The ambient side of their character was played down in favour of a more active style. There were passages of house, techno and drum and bass alongside the blocky beats of their core 1990s sound, a kind of dance-music boom-bap. Old tracks were filtered through this supercharged framework alongside recent ones from last year’s album Prism. Their support act Violeta Vicci, who guests on it, joined them on violin for a 10-minute section of the set.
Someone in the audience blew bubbles, a low-grade tribute to the ludic spirit of rave. A couple in front of me swapped something from a packet: boiled sweets, it seemed, rather than contraband of a more intoxicating variety. Big cheers went up at the end for “Little Fluffy Clouds”, which was followed by a genial ska stomper from Prism, “A Ghetto Love Story”. The Orb’s transit might not touch the heights of old these days, but it shows no signs of faltering.
★★★★☆
