The very singular Beth Orton can be thorny, but Tony Clayton-Lea finds her basking in the rosy glow of her rave reviews
The signs aren't good: weeks of will she/won't she/where is she phone calls have deteriorated into ultimatums of the "we-need-to-know-now" variety. It doesn't have to be like this, of course, but when you're dealing with participants in the entertainment industry you need to be aware that "yes" can mean "no", that "no" can mean "maybe", and that "maybe" can mean "who do you think you're writing for - Q magazine?" So last week when - finally, after a bit of a wait in a chilly lane off Dublin's Thomas Street, home to the Vicar St venue - Beth Orton arrives looking tweedy and tall, and in a good mood, it seems the signs have turned from grey to blue.
And so it proves. Beth Orton is in fine fettle, the new album (Comfort of Strangers) has been receiving the best possible coverage, the gigs have been great. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief because in the past Orton hasn't been so amiable or generous with her time or demeanour. She has been, in her own way, a thorn. Today, however, she is a rose.
Part of this is most assuredly the positive fallout from the release of the new album. The proud owner of across-the-board four and five-star reviews, Comfort of Strangers is easily Orton's best to date (her fourth, it comes after 1996's Trailer Park, 1999's Central Reservation, and 2002's Daybreaker). She puts this down to her perverse sense of singularity and the collaborative process with the record's producer, former Sonic Youth guitarist Jim O'Rourke.
DOES SHE GET better results when she collaborates with people? She prickles slightly at the inference (unintended though it may be) that she needs someone to spark off in order to produce better music. She sits with her feet up in the Vicar St VIP room (which looks like a cross between an Arabian Nights boudoir and a swish hotel suite), and picks from a collection of jelly beans beside her. "What I do is very much in a solitary capacity," she says. "I write alone, I play alone, I spend a good proportion of what I do on my own, but, yes, I got my album produced by Jim O'Rourke, and it was a collaboration that was more a coming together of minds. All musicians collaborate, don't they - that's what they do, isn't it? I love it when there's chemistry and magic, and that's certainly what happened with Jim.
"I don't think there's ever been any suggestion that I collaborate with people because I'm not good enough, and if someone did say that it'd be very cynical. I'm just driven by a great amount of enthusiasm and inquisitiveness. To a certain degree I still find it hard to consider myself a musician - I don't know why that is, because I'm always ready to learn and meet with people."
Orton has been a noted figure in rock/rave music for more than 10 years; she first came to notice as a floating member of William Orbit's Strange Cargo project in the early 1990s, and then subsequently through her idiosyncratic work with the likes of the Chemical Brothers, Red Snapper, and Primal Scream. Her mid-1990s debut, Trailer Park, achieved what many had considered unlikely if not impossible - it made her folk-influenced music hip among the clubbing community. She considers the description applied to her since then - Queen of Comedown - somewhat negative, and the description of her music - trip-folk - redundant.
She is, she stresses, far more grown up these days, a woman in her mid-30s who has experienced life in some of its peculiarly unfair ways. A recurring illness has abated, and the songs she has written for Comfort of Strangers reflects not just the return of balance to her health system but the ability to cope better with emotional upset.
"I've spent a lot of time with these songs. When they were first written I recognised they were different. I knew it, could sense it, and that's why I'd always wanted to make a record that was just voice and guitar. With these songs I felt they could benefit from the sparseness of sound, a total and direct honesty. I thought the only way to get that was to produce the album myself - keeping the integrity and the identity without getting carried away with things. And I did try producing it to a degree, but even co-producing didn't suit my limitations or strengths. My strengths are writing songs. When it comes to production it's someone else. It's good to know your place. Jim totally got the vision of the songs - just to keep them as they were, not to mess around with them . . . We collaborated on arrangements but that was about it."
When you write lyrics as honestly as you have done for Comfort of Strangers, is the process as much therapy as art? "Making it therapy tends to denigrate it," she replies. "That said, when you write things down over a period of time you tend to work things out. I did have a sense that writing songs for the record was just for me, although whether that was just a game I was playing with myself to make it more intimate and honest I'm not sure. But this is a very personal record, and complex, too, in its lyric writing. So yes, I do sit down with a handful of questions, and by writing words and taking my own counsel, answer them."
It's been 10 years since Trailer Park set Orton on a course of being regarded as the early morning sober answer to a late night drunken query. Her early influences (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young) resonate in her songwriting, while her attitude (assertive-spiky) is clearly derived from her time as a "right little punk".
"Punk is way dead at this stage," she reckons, "and for me folk music is the closest there is to the spirit of punk. Why? Folk music is essentially about people, not about fashion. They're the maddest people, too, folk musicians. The music is so true to itself, it's about not giving a damn and doing your own thing." Which is what Orton has been doing in a rather ramshackle, frustrating but often endearing fashion for more than 10 years. She comes across as a genuine person, equal parts tough and tender, fractious, frail and impassioned.
Her chill-out, cheerful composure is ruffled only once. I mention the album title, a steal from the Ian McEwan book - does it have any significance beyond the obvious? Not really, she says. "I didn't even think it was good title for a record, but at the end of making it, it just seemed to sum it up." We chat about how talking to strangers we feel reasonably comfortable with - the kind you might connect with on a long train or 'plane journey - can produce some remarkable revelatory conversations.
"STRANGERS CAN BE very comforting, can't they? Some, anyway. Some strangers - you tell them things you'd never tell your best friends. Isn't that mad? That's exactly what I'm talking about on this record. To me, the comfort of strangers is that type of conversation you have with someone you've never met before, and you end up telling them everything." Orton is getting peeved about something. She rushes on. "And then you get home to the people you've known for years and years, and you can't say a f***ing word. What's that all about?" Her face is flushed by this stage, her feathers ruffled. "Can you press the stop button now?"
Comfort of Strangers is on EMI