The next century has arrived, and with it comes a new generation of dance kids. But what happens to the old clubbers, the ancient beatmasters who remember the rave wars, and who are now growing into techno-centric middle-age? Easy: they become the U2, Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones of dance.
Paul Hartnoll is still a ripe young 32, so he's not a dadrocker just yet. His brother and bandmate, Phil, is just four years his senior, so he's still on the right side of 40. Their band, Orbital, has been going since 1988, which makes them the old guys on the block. But don't brand them dinosaurs of dance: Orbital has evolved too far to be fossils just yet. As the band heads into its second decade, Paul Hartnoll still feels like a fresh, fired-up young clubhead. They're just putting the finishing touches to their new album, the followup to last year's excellent Middle Of Nowhere and tonight they play Dublin's Point Depot as part of a short-and-sweet mini-tour.
"We're just keeping our hand in, really," says Paul, "just doing a few gigs and keeping it nice and light, rather than just tour, album, tour, album. We finished touring around the end of last year, and then started writing the album. We've been to South Africa, Greece, Australia, Japan, and we did a little small gig in London. So it's nice to keep it going, really."
One sign of getting old is when you start reminiscing about the good old days, and how much better it was back then, and you try telling that to the young people of today, and they won't believe you. Hartnoll, however, has no ecstasy-tinted view of the rave aul' times - in fact, he doesn't think things have changed much at all down t'old club mill.
"It doesn't seem that different to me, really. Taking the fashion and technology aside, the fundamentals don't seem to be that different. The only difference I see is that when it started off, there were a lot of free parties, and that sort of thing is gone. There were the big events like Universe and Sunrise, but they're still going in some way, because now you've got the big superclubs like Cream and Homelands. Also, I think it's all diversified a little bit more over the last 10 years."
A downside of diversity, in Hartnoll's mind, is when clubbers close themselves off into one little sub-genre of dance, listening exclusively to either drum 'n' bass, garage or deep house, and practising a form of musical fascism which condemns all other dance styles as inferior. On albums such as In Sides and Snivilisation, Orbital has happily hopped from hard techno to lush 1960s soundtracks; it has covered the theme tune to the 1960s TV cult series The Saint, and played a prestigious gig at the Royal Albert Hall.
Growing up in Sevenoaks, in Kent (near the M25 motorway which gave Orbital its name), the Hartnoll brothers' influences were mainly punk and garage - not the UK two-step garage we know today, but the dirty, grungy, guitar-driven kind of garage as practised by The Hoodoo Gurus and The Lime Spiders. The Hartnoll household, says Paul, was a den of diversity, with the sounds of The Clash and 999 blaring out of one room, Roger Dean prog-rock posters adorning another, and Dad listening to Shaft downstairs. For the forthcoming album, there's a whole other set of influences, from the jackhammer sound of Tool to the hardneck punk of Ian Dury.
"Ian Dury was a firm teenage car favourite of mine. The mad thing was, we were doing a track and sampling loads of Ian Dury stuff on in, on the same day that he died. I got home at the end of the day and got an email telling me the news. That was a bit weird. I didn't have a moment of silence when he died, I got out all his albums and had a whole day of Ian Dury noise."
The new album is now finished, complete with Ian Dury samples, the only thing left to do is put titles on the tracks and come up with a name for the album.
"We just finished mixing the last track last night, so now we sit down and listen to it, put it in order, get drunk and go, oh yeah, that's what that's called. Quite often it works out that way for us - at the moment it's a blank canvas."
The album's not due out until March 2001, but fans should get to hear some of the new tracks tonight at the Point. Hartnoll has already tested the new songs in his solo DJ sets, when he played in Barcelona earlier this year, alongside Welsh singer-songwriter David Gray. Besides spinning some new Orbital tunes, Hartnoll also dropped in his own techno remix of David Gray's Please Forgive Me.
While other celebrity DJs wouldn't cross the road for fewer than 5,000 punters, Hartnoll seemed content to play in front of just a couple of hundred Catalans.
"There's a big difference between doing an Orbital gig and me just sitting there doing a DJ gig. I can't justify playing a few records and charging big money. I'm not Carl Cox. That kind of skill and determination that someone like that puts into purchasing their records, putting their DJ set together and mixing it. For me, it's just a chance to try stuff out. I'm DJ-ing again down in Brighton soon, just a small place, and I'll be trying out loads of stuff from the new album, and see which tracks make them shuffle around, and which ones send them to the bar. It's a bit of a laugh, really."
Orbital plays the Point Depot tonight alongside Pete Tong, Mr. Spring and DJ-C1. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are still available, price £30.
