It's the 10-year anniversary of dance, with all manner of retrospectives and stuff being released to commemorate the event. Away from all the techno and house stuff, a new "Best of" compilation looks at one of dance's sub-genres - namely, ambient, through its best exponents, The Orb. The band is basically Alex Paterson and whoever he's collaborating with at the time.
Back 10 years ago he was one of the resident DJs at Paul Oakenfold's Land Of Oz acid house night at London's Heaven nightclub; putting together an unfeasible amount of turntables and samplers, Paterson constructed six-hour soundtracks which leaned heavily on the likes of Brian Eno and Pink Floyd. Chill out music, otherwise known as Ambient House for the E Generation, was born.
A former roadie for Killing Joke, Paterson's first incarnation of The Orb was with KLF's Jimmy Cauty. They made an immediate breakthrough with A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Universe, which was an inspired ambient take on Minnie Riperton's 1970's chart hit, Loving You, which had to be edited down to manageable form from its original 60-minute length. If you have a first-week release of the single, hold on to it because it's worth a fair bit of dosh. Apparently, Minnie Riperton's people told the band to take her voice off the song and all subsequent pressings were done with a sound-alike. Very much a landmark moment, The Orb's blissed-out grooves went on to influence many a band, but none who could ever come near their idiosyncratic capabilities.
After Jimmy Cauty left to concentrate on KLF, which later mutated into The K Foundation (scourge of The Turner Prize people, who once burned £1 million on a Scottish island as a symbol of their distaste for materialism, or something like that), so Paterson hooked up with another Killing Joke roadie, called Trash, released the debut album Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld - as part of the press promotion, the album was only played to journalists who agreed to listen to it while being suspended in a flotation tank. The band then released the single they're still best remembered for, Little Fluffy Clouds, which also ran into legal trouble, this time because Ricki Lee Jones didn't want her voice sampled on the record.
The next album, Perpetual Dawn, went straight to number one in the charts and The Orb soon found themselves as the most in-demand re-mixers in town - doing their ambient stuff to Depeche Mode, Erasure, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Audioweb amongst others, but most notably a landmark remix of Primal Scream's loved-up anthem Higher Than The Sun.
Steve Hillage from the atrocious band Gong then hopped on the bandwagon and things went a bit prog-rocky for a while. Interestingly enough, when John Peel was playing a re-mixed 20-minute version of Huge, Ever Growing Brain . . . on his show one night, fellow Radio One DJ Andy Kershaw rang in to complain that a lot of this Ambient House stuff was merely letting a Tangerine Dream-type sound in through the back door - after everyone thought a stake had been put through its heart.
Things got back on track somewhat when the band recorded a cover of The Stooge's No Fun, but the next single proper was something else indeed. Called The Blue Room, it came in at a duration of 39 minutes and 59 seconds (the BPI guidelines at the time were that a single, to qualify as a single, must come in under 40 minutes). The Blue Room effortlessly sailed into the top 10 and the band distinguished themselves by appearing on Top Of The Pops wearing white space suits and playing chess. As they themselves point out: "Anything else would have been silly."
A move to a major label, Island Records, didn't really fulfil expectations, with the resultant Pomme Fritz album dividing the critics in that it was more of a full-on electronica affair than anything they had dabbled in previously. It did, though, establish them in America, where Rolling Stone made it album of the year in 1994.
Now back performing live gigs, as "Le Petit Orb", they remain one of the most wilfully contrary and experimental bands ever to emerge from the general dance genre. And naturally they are to be applauded for telling Jean-Michel Jarre (the James Last of the keyboard) what to do when he wanted them to remix his entire gazillion-selling Oxygene album - instead the band contented themselves with writing their own song, Toxygene. Possibly only a box set would placate the many Orb anoraks out there, but this 24-track double CD is really all you need to know about the band.
U.F. Off (The Best of The Orb) is released on the Island/Polygram label
