Journalist: Have you been aware of acid house? David Gilmour “No. (then, after receiving explanation). So it has almost come back round to our time again (laughs). I hadn’t heard about that.”

- New Musical Express, 9th July 1989

 

“So, an album sounding like Pink Floyd without all the self-indulgent solos. Samples from around the globe and quite possibly the universe. Is Alex Patterson the Eno of the ‘90s?”

- review of ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’,
NME, 13th April 1991

I’m standing in the Electric in Brixton bearing witness. The Orb are playing a twenty-fifth anniversary gig to celebrate and commemorate their fabulous debut LP, 1991’s The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. It all seems a little strange and surreal as Alex Paterson warms up the crowd with a DJ set - whilst I can accept that its around forty years since punk detonated across the consciousness of the nation in 1977, it seems almost impossible that twenty-five years have passed since The Orb released their seminal 2-LP set.

As for the gig, after Paterson’s set his longtime Orb partner Thomas Felhmann DJs for a while before an Orb super-group amble onto the stage. Youth starts plucking some notes from an upright double bass before strapping on an electric one and the show begins its ascent into the higher musical planes that The Orb are now famous for. As this is a special anniversary show the line-up includes Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, Tom Green, Andy Falconer and Hugh Vickers. To ice the cake and give the party a special kick, Sex Pistol Paul Cook is on drums. So punk and ambient music celebrate an anniversary together.

A couple of weeks later, I’m knocking at Youth’s door in South London. When he opens up I get the sort of greeting you want when writing a book, “Hey man, you’ve caught me in my kimono!” The Kimono in question comes down to just above his knees, but after he makes me an espresso the legendary producer pops upstairs to shower and get dressed. When he comes back down we discuss his time with Killing Joke, Brilliant, his move into production and, of course, Alex Paterson, Jimmy Cauty and The Orb. He hardly needs any prodding to discuss the twenty-fifth anniversary show. “It’s great that Alex has managed to keep The Orb going, and that gig was a really wonderful celebration of The Orb, him and everything that we’ve been through on the way. It was a real family affair. Jimmy wouldn’t do it. Jimmy offered to do a show in a matchbox that he could take on tour with his miniatures (ADP Riot Tour installations). Alex really loved the idea but Jimmy said, ‘I’m joking!’”

It was a shame Jimmy Cauty chose not take part in the celebration of this classic LP - although he and Paterson had parted ways by the time of its release in 1991, his role in what became The Orb was vital, and Ultraworld included a live mix of the seminal Cauty/Paterson track A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld that is the cornerstone upon which The Orb’s entire journey across the decades was built.

The origins of The Orb extend back to where Paterson and Youth were schoolmates at Kingham Hill Boarding school in Oxfordshire. Paterson was a year older than Youth, and both took part in the ad-hoc bands that played together when students had time to themselves. Youth even recalls Paterson singing a cover version of Mud’s Tiger Feet in one of them. When punk broke out Paterson formed a band called Kill Bloodsports, who, by 1978 when they played the Roxy in London as a support act, were just billed as Bloodsport. The line-up was Paterson (vocals), Graham Wheelan (guitar), Kenneth Topley (guitar), Wally Walden (bass) and Paul Fergusson (drums). “That was with Wally, the original bass player with the Sex Pistols,” recalls Paterson today, “Wally we met in a squat and he introduced us to Cookie and Jones (both former Pistols by this point).” Bloodsport were still mobile when Youth joined Killing Joke in 1978, and Youth and Paterson hooked up again as Paterson was keen to become involved in Killing Joke in some way or other. He was soon serving as drum roadie for his soon-to-be-former Bloodsport bandmate Paul Ferguson.

As Killing Joke built a live reputation and began a recording career, Paterson began to perform encores with the band. At this time he had blond hair, and Killing Joke tour manager Adam Morris, who was also involved in the record label Malicious Damage, who released the first Killing Joke EP, recalls that, “they used to do Bodies by the Sex Pistols as an encore and Alex used to sing it. Coleman used to hate him because Alex was a better front-man than Jaz.” Frank Jenkinson, who was close to the band took some photographs of Killing Joke during this period, including some of Paterson performing with them, “he was Youth’s friend and became the roadie of sorts, he sang Bodies now and then.” According to Paterson, the real reason he got to sing encores with Killing Joke had more to do with the economics of agreements over the length of shows with the venues they played. “Rehearsals,” he cackles, “Singer’s disease. Jaz would go home early and the rest of the band were pretty psyched up but did not have any more numbers to do. They had forty minutes (of material) in the first year and Jaz refused to do covers, but the sets sometimes had to be forty five or fifty minutes, so they got me in to do Bodies, No Fun or both to extend the set time, and then they got paid. I was still on a mattress and one-bar fire wages in those squat days. I didn’t understand what money was then, it was more like, ‘Can I barter with you, sir?’”

According to Paterson, Bloodsport was still active when Killing Joke began to gain traction, and “they nicked my name and put it on the first album” as the title of an instrumental track. There was supposed to be a Bloodsport record issued by Malicious Damage, and the band even went into the studio to record it, “we had a multi-track done but Malicious Damage didn’t pay the bills for the tapes and they recorded over them. The stuff of legend!”

Youth left Killing Joke in 1982 after the band had recorded their third album, and things went a bit strange and Icelandic before they carried on without him and he formed Brilliant. Killing Joke, however, “asked EG (their label) to give Patterson a job, and he became an A&R guy and they had him looking after Editions EG, which was Eno’s ambient label,” as Adam Morris recalls, “So he started getting into all of the ambient stuff and he started to DJ.” Paterson was one of a small number of people who had developed a taste for the output of America’s Kiss FM, and anybody visiting New York was told to come back with cassette copies of some of the shows. For Paterson, “’87 was the turning point, when we started getting these Chuck Chillout tapes coming in quite regularly as there was an EG office in New York, so I was getting the (female) A&R scout over there to record Kiss FM tapes, purely for research purposes darling! And personal enjoyment as well. We got an hour of Chuck Chillout, then half an hour of Tony Humphries, who was playing all this weird fucking techno from Detroit and Chicago house, so it changed from hip-hop to this new weird thing, (Roland) 808s and 303s. We were like, ‘Wow!’ so I phoned her up, or telexed her I think in those days. ‘Can you stop recording Chuck Chillout and start recording the whole of the Tony Humphries show - we want to hear what is going on.’ (She said) ‘I can’t do that, I’ve got to get up in the middle of the night to turn the tape over.’ It never did quite come off that bit.”

Cauty and Paterson first met in the mid-80s. “I got to know Jimmy when he joined Brilliant as I was a part-time roadie with them and a part-time roadie with Killing Joke. The spy in both camps, basically. I got on really well with Jimmy.” Even at this stage, Paterson had already cut his teeth as a DJ, playing before Killing Joke sets, with his own adventurous listening experiences being reflected in what he played. One of the key factors in developments between he and Cauty was not only playing DJ sets at parties held at BENIO but the establishment of Cauty’s home studio, where he could work on musical ideas, not only with Drummond but a number of other ad-hoc collaborators, like Tony Thorpe and Paterson. The music he made was inspired by the emerging dance music scene they were all tapping into.

The seminal early acid house club in London was Shoom, which kicked off in late 1987. “I first went to Shoom in order to shut Farley up,” Andy Weatherall told Melody Maker in 1991 - Terry Farley was the friend and fellow remixer and DJ the now-famous producer had started a football fanzine with. “He’d been going on about it for ages, saying how the music was mad and it was full of football lads, Ibiza lads, and I just thought, ‘Fuck off, it sounds terrible.’ But as soon as I walked in I knew it was something special - the strobes and the smoke were on from start to finish, and I had to keep touching people to make sure I wasn’t alone in there. I had a ball.”

Richard Norris, who graduated from being a journalist with his finger on the pulse of the dance scene to forming The Grid with Soft Cell’s David Ball, told Music Week in 1989, “Yeah, it’s a bit like the first Sex Pistols gig – five million people at Shoom. But it’s true - you only had to experience that atmosphere once to know that something was going on and a change was taking place. I feel incredibly lucky to have been part of what went on. And it wasn’t just Shoom, I went to clubs just as good in Liverpool, with forty people who knew nothing about what was going on in London.” This was probably Mardi Gras on Bold Street, or, from 1988 on, The State, which held considerably more and began to hold house and acid house nights on a Monday night under the name Daisy. This was run by Cream founder James Barton, who initially approached the resident DJs Mike Knowler and his partner Andy Carroll with the idea. Knowler we’ve met before – he’d previously run the MVCU recording facility in Liverpool before becoming a DJ.

“We were playing more or less what they were playing at Spectrum, which was at Heaven in London on a Monday night,” he recalls, “We were playing the same stuff that Paul Oakenfold was playing. A lot of this stuff was being released in the UK, and I remember some of the stuff was coming in from Italy, like Airport 89 by Wood Allen.” Later on he began to play a track by The KLF, “I thought What Time Is Love? was beyond belief, but we didn’t play it (at first). It was big in London at Spectrum, but it didn’t go down particularly well in The State at the beginning. But in 1990 they did a remix with a rap, and I think that’s an absolute classic. All power to Bill Drummond for doing that.”

It was Nancy Noise, the receptionist at Pete Waterman’s PWL studios at this time, who was instrumental in steering Youth and Alex Paterson towards Paul Oakenfold and Spectrum. “Yeah, I worked for Pete at the studio and got to know Youth and Jimmy as they were recording the Brilliant album there,” she says, “Also, Bill was the A&R man, so he was around a lot too. I used to talk to Youth quite a bit as he was out and about a lot, so we spoke about different clubs and stuff. I thought he was really cool as he was always at the Wag and places like that.” Noise was to later leave Waterman, and not only played a part in importing the Amnesia experience from Ibiza to the UK but also became a DJ herself.

“When I got back to London after Ibiza and had started DJ’ing,” she recalls, “I rang Youth and invited him down to The Future. Ian St. Paul and Paul Oakenfold, who I’d been hanging out in Ibiza with, had started the night and asked me to play there. I remember ringing him up saying, ‘Hi Youth, I’m a DJ now’. Youth came along that Thursday, and I think he kind of liked it and got into the vibe straight away. At that time I really wanted to share what I’d experienced and what was happening with my friends, as it was such a beautiful thing. As Youth had come along, Alex and Jimmy and Cressida started coming to the nights, that’s when Spectrum had got going too. I’d probably introduced them all to Paul and Ian at the clubs, so then the connections were made. Everyone was really enjoying the music and the vibes.” Among other things, Noise raved about a Paco De Lucia track to Youth, which was sampled and ended up on a on a Wau! Mr. Modo track.

Oakenfold had some ideas of his own for his run of Sunday nights in Heaven. “I think he liked the idea of me and Jimmy,” Alex Paterson recalls, and Oakenfold asked them to DJ upstairs at the club in the smaller VIP area. Armed with a set-up of three turntables, a DAT machine, a tape recorder and a mixer, they would serve up sets whose vibe was important, not the beats. “The first night Alex did the VIP bar, I remember him setting up all of his stuff, and when the music stared I was like, whoaaa…” recalls Noise, “there were clocks chiming, sheep noises, voices, along with the music.” The music Paterson and Cauty played was wide-ranging, and crucially not just confined to the emerging Chicago house, Detroit techno, Belgian EBM (Electric Body Music) and early acid house records. “It’s the sort of music that functions as just being there,” Paterson told a journalist during the Land of Oz residency in one of his best summations, “It’s a rhythm of rather than for life, a heartbeat. With The Orb we use house music and whatever else, and then take away the beats, although occasionally in Heaven we throw in a few breakbeats to make sure people are still alive.”

Ironically, according to Paterson this now legendary residency was almost ended after one week by the most unlikely of spanners - Ford Timelord! “When we first did Land Of Oz, we nearly lost our gig after the first night. It was around four o’clock on a Monday morning and everyone was coming out of the club - titted as usual. Jimmy goes, ‘Watch this!’ and starts putting all the lights on on his police car. He opens the bonnet, and it’s got shark teeth in there. Everybody starts to fucking worship the car. He puts the sirens on. Wow! It’s got sirens! He gets a little bit of smoke coming out of the back. Wow! He’s got smoke! He starts up and everyone is following him, and he goes around Trafalgar Square with all these cars following, worshipping this car. The next week we turn up at the club and Oakenfold goes, ‘You do that again and I’m gonna have to fire you!’” Suffice to say, Ford Timelord was on his best behavior after that.

As the residency at the Land Of Oz developed, Paterson never kept a set-list of what he played and so the music is lost in the mists and memories of good times, but it may or may not have included suitably spaced out tracks like Virgo’s Do You Know Who You Are, DTR’s Journey Into A Dream, Confidential’s Inner Space, A Split-Second’s Flesh and Manuel Gotting’s E2=E4. Adam Morris, who was allowed a VIP pass, recalls, “It was a mixture of everything - Ron Trent’s Altered States was a favourite, that was a fantastic record - I can also remember him playing When The Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin at one gig, and Mark Moore from S-Express was there and he came flying across the room going, ‘What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?’ He’d never heard it before. It was right across the board.”

Speaking today, Paterson remains bemused as to the impact that Led Zeppelin can have in a club. “I’ve done it several times with that track and it never ceases to amaze me. I played it at a Primal Scream gig at the Hammersmith Palais and all of these kids came running up going, ‘Is this the new Beastie Boys remix?’ I’m going, ‘This is an original, mate.’ They’re like, ‘Who is this?’ and I’m going, ‘Led Zeppelin,’ thinking. I don’t believe this, am I getting old? That happened twenty years ago!” That said, Mark Moore very much had his finger on the pulse at this time, and was following through what artists like The JAMs and others had started in 1987. “The really big difference between now and ten years ago,” he wrote in Melody Maker in December 1989, “is that at the start of the eighties people just didn’t think you could make a record unless you turned up with loads of drums and guitars and songs that were written. If you’d have said, ‘I want to take a bit of an old Rolls Royce riff and throw in a bit of this and a bit of that with a few voices’ no one would have understood it.” So hearing a track at a club, be it Airport 89 or something ‘obscure’ like Led Zeppelin, was all grist to the mill of the creative process.

The fact that Patterson was mixing something like Led Zeppelin into his sets with vinyl from the EG catalogue, elements of classical music, spoken word and other records shows just how fluid and open things were. The key thing for Cauty, and especially Paterson, was a DJ’s ear for what could flow and be mixed together to maintain a musical journey throughout the night. People were coming to their room to take a break from the martial dance beat, and wanted something more suited to a reflective state of mind. Later, there were visuals as well, projected onto screens. “I was there pretty religiously every week to listen to what they were doing,” recalls Richard Norris. One night he was there, Paterson even played a record - Rainbow Dome Musick - that led to a future collaboration, “I’d heard the name Steve Hillage,” Paterson told the New Musical Express in September 1991, “but that was as far as it went. Then this bloke comes up whilst I’m DJ’ing and says, ‘Hello, I’m Steve Hillage and that’s my record you’re playing.’” Hillage got his VIP pass as he was a friend of the guy who’d actually put the sound system into Heaven, and these two happy accidents - the pass and Paterson playing the record - led to them working together with The Orb and System 7.

Going to clubs and playing sets at Heaven and parties at BENIO was opening a path that was leading forwards, and Paterson’s work at EG also meant his ear was always open to new sounds and sonic opportunities. “We would get together once a month, me, Youth and Alex, as we were still mates,” recalls Adam Morris, “We kept saying we should start another label based around this acid house and rave culture that’s kicking off. It was the new indie DIY.” This was soon to become a reality - Youth and Paterson had already decided on a three-point plan, of which two points were to set up a radio station and their own record label. To this end they’d set up a production company called Wau! Morris had also formed a company called Modo, “My partners name was O’Donovan, so it was MO for Morris and DO for O’Donovan - it was Youth who came up with putting it together as Wau! Mr Modo, and we thought, ‘Sod it, let’s just go for it.’”

Soon records began to be issued on Wau! Mr Modo. The first was Let Jimi Take Over by STP 23 (1988), and comprised a number of Jimi Hendrix samples. “Then Youth did a record (under the name Mister E) called Extasy Express,” recalls Morris, “which used samples of Trans Europe Express. He got a vocoder and he just went ‘Extasy Express! Extasy Express!’ over the top. They were sort of issued as bootlegs as you couldn’t get clearance on them. A few years later I met Kraftwerk at Sheffield City Hall. They said, ‘Yes! Yes! We’ve got that record, Extasy Express. We think it is very funny!’ That was the start of it.”

As they were playing DJ sets together and seeing each other socially, it seemed logical that Cauty and Paterson also look to record something together. In fact, the third part of the Youth/Paterson plan was to set up The Orb. “I was always much more into hanging around with Jimmy than Bill,” recalls Paterson, “Bill was not my rival in any way. I respected what he was doing (with Jimmy), it was just one of those things that it happened to be that I was an A&R man as well at EG.” According to Paterson the personal chemistry was also right. “I think it was just a natural gelling,” he recalls “I remember the first day when I walked in and there was a synthesiser he (Jimmy) had bought and he didn’t know how to turn it on. It was just a stroke of luck that it was the same keyboard I’d been looking after for Killing Joke for six years, so I certainly did know how to turn it on! Also I knew all of the presets, and that was the day The Orb was born, with me and him. It really was that simple. It was very chaotic.”

As to where they started, things are unclear as Cauty was also working on other material at Trancentral, at Village Recorders in Dagenham and at other studios with Bill Drummond, but as he had his own home studio it was just a question of finding time to get together with Paterson. The first fruits of their collaboration appeared on the Eternity Project One LP on Gee Street, issued in February 1989 and also showcasing some of the earliest output of Youth and Wau! Mr Modo outside of white label 12” records. A track by The Orb called Tripping On Sunshine appeared, which was, simply, “Tripping On Sunshine with loads of samples all over it,” according to Paterson.

This was followed by The Kiss EP, which was limited to nine hundred and forty nine copies because, as Paterson later related, “we didn’t think we’d sell any more.” It was his love of Kiss FM that saw Paterson drive this particular 12” forward. Morris agrees, “The Kiss EP was samples that Jimmy and he had put together of Kiss FM, and I pressed that up and put it out for them and everybody told me that I was mad because it was awful (laughs). And it was, but it had an amazing press release written by Bill Drummond.”

It was only fitting that Cauty’s partner in musical crime penned the first words about this collaboration: “The Orb spend their weekends smashed out of their heads making noises by turning on a drum machine and leaving it running, recording everything, including mistakes. They make no claims that the results of their efforts can be considered music, or has any relevance to the outside world, or contains any elements of a tune, or tracks of anything vaguely memorable. The only positive thing I can say about The Orb is, when I’m off my cake on Monday nights I love it. Cross-over potential: Nil.”

This first EP didn’t have enough weight behind it to suggest that The Orb were going to be anything more a footnote in the growing DIY scene of 12’ records that were being made and farmed out to shops across the country. This was a scene where it was the DJs who were emerging as the masters of the dance, and it was a question of playing the right records to enthuse crowds who just wanted to have a good time, whether or not they were taking ecstasy. Many of the musicians were faceless to their audience - just a name on a 12” single - and were hardly going to get coverage in publications like the New Musical Express, Sounds or Melody Maker, who were hard-wired to associate good music with good band photos, an image and quotable lead singers. Saying that, they did begin to interview the early movers of Chicago house and Detroit techno, like Todd Terry, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Frankie Knuckles, as well as UK acts like The Grid, who included Richard Norris and David Ball, formerly of Soft Cell. Norris had secured a record deal on the back of the Jack The Tab compilation LP and the fact that they told label executives they were “the new Pink Floyd.”

When their debut LP, Electric Head, was released in 1989, Norris was keen to stress that The Grid was a duo based around a loose grouping of people, “It was important for us that the label see us like that, rather than as some simple, calculated chart project. And it was important to do it on a major label, because it’s something major labels should be able to do now - put out fairly leftfield music and get it into the charts.” Whilst The Grid’s early singles and debut LP failed to chart, the next Orb single not only became a breakthrough 12” but a musical landmark that helped to establish them as the new Pink Floyd.

The track was titled Loving You on early Wau! Mr Modo white labels, although it soon became better known as A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld. The title actually came from a BBC soundtrack record featuring music from the cult TV series Blake’s 7 called A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Core. “It started off as a synth idea, it started off as a bassline and then it became a synth line,” Paterson recalls of the genesis of this remarkable track, which clocked in at around twenty minutes and was a compelling, hypnotic journey. Paterson told the New Musical Express in 1989 that Loving You was recorded after Cauty and he had attended a rave in Brighton. “We wanted to capture the warmth of the day, the sun and the sea’s sound. Initially we started recording the piece with a drumbeat - we built the track around that but it felt wrong. So we took out the drums and it was perfect. It was the chill out music we’d always been trying to find.” Today, he believes that one thing that helped them find this music was the state of Cauty’s head at the time. “Jimmy had a really big, heavy headache and I was as bored as shit listening to chaotic drum patterns. I got Jimmy to turn the drums down and the rest, my dear, was history!”

Indeed it was history, and even today Adam Morris recalls the moment he first heard it, “I’d moved up to Sheffield by then but was coming down to London a lot, and I met Youth in the West End. I was in my car, parked up, and Youth got in - he had a cassette and said, “It’s Modo, put this on. I think Alex has got a result.” We put this cassette on and it was Loving You. We were sat there for twenty minutes going “Fuck me! What is this? It’s fucking epic!” It was going to be a monster one way or another.”

This original version featured a sample of Minnie Ripperton singing her classic, Loving You, which had been a big hit in 1975, so that was the obvious title for the early, pre-release white labels. As he knew a certain DJ quite well, Morris made sure one went to the right place. “You put the white label out and got it to John Peel. If John Peel played it - the good ones - he would rave about it, and the others he played even if it wasn’t good.”

Peel received and played a test pressing of the Kiss EP, and not only wrote the name of the tracks on each side - for example, “The Orb Roof 1. Kiss Your Love 4.25” - but even gave them his legendary star rating, with all four tracks receiving two stars. As soon as he received it, Peel began playing Loving You, and it received the rave treatment. At this point, though, Wau! Mr Modo were on the horns of a dilemma as the sample of Minnie Ripperton was uncleared - “so, a nightmare” according to Morris - especially as she’d died young in 1979 after a battle with cancer. At this time, with the entire issue of sample clearance potentially toxic, trying to secure permission through the estate of a dead artist was hard due to their usually conservative nature. Thus, a new white label pressing without the sample was sent out. “They all came back with the same reaction (on the reaction sheets),” Paterson stated in 1992, “’Where’s the fucking sample?’ So we scrapped that release and did another one with chunks of Loving You on it.” On 2nd December 1989, Melody Maker reviewed a retitled copy, “This is designed specifically for showing off to your mates, none of whom will have the faintest idea of what The Orb are about, but will love it nevertheless. Fasten your seatbelts.”

This last comment about fastening seatbelts was apt, as John Peel had asked The Orb to come into the studio to record a session, and a day after the review was printed – 3rd December 1989 - Cauty, Paterson and a friend who helped them with their equipment arrived at Maida Vale studios. They arrived early and worked in the control room rather than the massive main studio, although they had to relocate when the producer allocated for the session turned up late and threw them out. Paterson recalls it was all about ambience, from the setting to the music, “we got some settees from the corridors, a lampshade, some plants, and made a little front room, like we would do at Trancentral. We used to mix things on the floor, we used to put the mixer on the floor if we wanted to do an ambient project, and now we were immersed in ambience with this tune. It was all in different sequences, but we just had to place the samples on the multi-track, it was eight-track and it didn’t take that long. We were out of there by seven thirty. You started at two o’clock normally, and the producer turned up about five, pissed, pretended he was producing, gets a credit for it and goes off home. He turned up halfway through when we’d actually done most of the work, like an engineering thing with the sampler and the keyboard going straight into the mixer rather than having to take it outside and patch it through.”

When the first Orb session was broadcast it not only made it into Peel’s 1990 festive fifty but became the most requested Peel session of all time. It’s easy to see why - opening with the crow of a cockerel and gentle ocean waves, a repetitive synth line emerges and acts like an acoustic canvas over which samples and sounds are added. These range from birdsong to spoken word, and even the cunning deployment of a snatch of iconic Pink Floyd guitar from Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which, thankfully, was able to be cleared for broadcast through Guy Pratt, a former school friend of Youth and Paterson was now playing bass with Pink Floyd. The mix of A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld was crucial as it allowed the music to ebb and flow, and when Minnie Ripperton seeped through for a refrain of Loving You it gave the song wonderful warmth, before the repetitive synth part re-emerged to take it back into the ambient rainforest of sound. There was also what Paterson describes as “typical Orb humour,” possibly aimed at Peel, with the line, “What, you’re a disc jockey. What’s that?” mixed in from either a spoken word record or a sample captured from a radio or TV broadcast. Although the track lasted for twenty minutes it felt like ten, such was its compelling and immersive nature.

The exposure by John Peel, as well as positive reviews and music press coverage, led to record company interest in The Orb. Cauty and Paterson were already developing more material, and as early as November 1989 the New Musical Express’s Jack Barron reported that, “there are three albums on the way dealing with ambient house. A WAU/MR Modo triple affair which will be one complete track, a KLF special called Chill Out and a Jimmy Cauty and Dr Alex bumper on EG called Space.” There was certainly a particular ambience in the air. “It’s obvious that album-based, album orientated bands are going to do really well. Someone just has to come up with Tubular Bells and they’ll make a fortune,” Richard Norris told the New Musical Express around this time, “That’s how we got signed in the first place. I said we were going to be Pink Floyd for the house generation and we got signed. It’s really funny because I talked to Bill Drummond about that and he said, ‘Yeah… I’ve been going round saying that as well!’”

Of course, Bill Drummond being Bill Drummond, he was not only talking about it but was actually doing something about it with Jimmy Cauty, which would emerge in 1990 as the Chill Out album under the name The KLF – so Barron was right on the money, as was Norris, who was hoping it would be The Grid who would serve up their own Tubular Bells.

It was at this time, however, that things grew complicated for The Orb. “Big Life had come into the equation,” recalls Morris, who was now also managing Paterson. “Youth had made another track for us by that point, which was Naked In The Rain by Blue Pearl, and had got Jimmy to do a trance mix of it. So the original Naked In The Rain comes out as a four-track white label with these trance mixes that Jimmy had done on the back. Originally that was going to be on BMG, but then Big Life heard about it and decided that they wanted it on their label, and they steamed in and we did a deal on that. They had a sales team going around the shops called Contact, and when they started taking Naked In The Rain around the shops and when they saw our logo on the label they said, ‘Can you get that other one on that label by The Orb with Minnie Ripperton on it?’ so Contact told Big Life that we had this other one.” Blue Pearl was, in fact, a collaboration between Youth and Durga McBroom, a backing singer with Pink Floyd who Youth had met through Guy Pratt at their gig in Venice in July 1989. When she came to London, Youth, ducking and diving as a producer at this time, had done a deal with the studio where it was recorded - in return for free time, he would give them a percentage of any profits if it became a hit. He’d done this with a lot of tracks at the time and, “I did that with Naked In The Rain,” he laughs today, “and it cost me forty grand!”

By this time, Youth had already remixed The Only Way Is Up by Yazz for Big Life - that had been a massive hit in 1988 and both he and the label were on a roll. “He said he was going to take our Blue Pearl record, Naked In The Rain, into the top five and he did exactly that,” Adam Morris told Music Week in a profile of Big Life boss Jazz Summers at the time. As Big Life was also a management company, Summers offered to manage Youth and secure him work, telling him he was, “the rarest cat in the jungle,” a writer/producer. Summers was now interested in signing The Orb, and Youth was worried that if they didn’t sign with Big Life his days as a cat in the jungle might be numbered!

“There was this whole debate over the ownership of The Orb,” states Morris, “I remember Bill sending me this sarcastic letter saying, ‘Who do you think owns The Orb? Do you think that you own The Orb or does The KLF own the Orb?’ I was like, ‘well, it’s Alex’s band and Alex is part of Wau! Mr Modo, so I think that we own The Orb.” I never got a reply to that.” As for Summers, apparently he also had a meeting with Bill Drummond where he may or may not have discussed the possibility of Drummond not being able to stand on one of his legs for a short period of time.

Summers wanted to sign The Orb to Big Life and develop them into a major act, “We’re not interested in one-off twelve inches,” he told Music Week. “I’m not going to sit here and say I’ve got the best ears in the business, but I have been right quite a few times. I’ve been right on Yazz, I’ve been right on Coldcut, I’ve been right on Lisa Stansfield. I do rely totally on what I feel.” And he felt that The Orb was going to be big.

This certainly seemed to be the case after Cauty and Paterson were asked to remix a track helmed by David Stewart of the Eurythmics, an instrumental called Lily Was Here and featuring Candy Dulfer on saxophone. “That was a funny experience,” recalls Paterson. “We just dovetailed the beginning and the end, gave it a funny title (and) told and them to send the money on a bike. They sent the money on a bike and we gave them the DAT, and we just thought that we’d got away with it. Suddenly it became a top ten hit and suddenly everyone wanted an Orb remix on that basis.” Paterson’s work with EG Records also led to an early Cauty/Paterson retooling of a track called Money $ for a German band called Fischerman’s Friend. Although attributed to The KLF on the label when issued in 1989, the Orbital Club Remix was by Cauty and Paterson and must have been worked on around the time of their Peel Session, as two of the same vocal samples – “So you’re a disc jockey?” and “The music just turns me on” - were worked into the mix. Whilst this record sold reasonably well under the radar, the Space Centre Medical Unit Hum version of Lily Was Here went top ten in March 1990, and gave the profile of The Orb a massive boost. “That did us a lot of good - suddenly we were flavour of the month,” states Paterson. “The press, Peel…. at the end of 1989 the press were looking for something to do in the ‘90s and picked on us for a while.”

For his part, Jimmy Cauty was keen for albums with an ambient feel, like Space, to appear on KLF Communications, but Paterson - who also had a stake in Wau! Mr Modo - was worried that if he went with KLF Communications The Orb might become a side project to Cauty’s main work with Bill Drummond. After all, 1988 had seen the Drummond/Cauty partnership score a Number One hit with The Timelords’ single Doctorin’ The Tardis and, when the money began to roll in from this, start to make The White Room film and soundtrack album, as well as engaging in other musical projects, including a number of house records as The KLF and spin-off projects like Disco 2000, who they were trying to turn into a two girl Bananarama. So, for Cauty at that time The Orb probably was a side project, like some work he did with Tony Thorpe of The Moody Boys at Trancentral that ended up being released on XL Recordings as the Journey into Dubland, 12” in 1990. The five tracks – Dub Me Right, Free, Lion Dance, Pumpin Dumpin and A.U.N. – clocked in at nearly thirty minutes and remain a lost gem.

“I was always into multi-track EPs and liked the way that labels like Nu Groove and those releasing Frankie Bones stuff in the USA would just say, Yo, here are some cool track rather than just offering up one cut per side,” recalls Nick Halkes of XL, who decided to put the record out. “Obviously Jimmy Cauty co-produced and it’s a slight regret that I didn’t manage to get to know him during that process as The KLF obviously exploded in subsequent years and I wouldn’t have minded signing them to XL too actually. But maybe signing The KLF and The Prodigy would have been plain greedy (laughs). Like Jimmy and Liam though, Tony (Thorpe) understood the potential and power of the underground scene, and it was a pleasure to work with him.”

Whilst all of this was going on The KLF released their first LP in February 1990 - Chill Out. The record was, in effect, Drummond and Cauty’s take on what became known as ‘ambient house’, and, in true Drummond fashion, review copies came with a photocopied, hand-written sheet headed: Ambient House - The Facts. What followed were eighteen points that ranged from the amusing – “Ambient House is just a Monday night clique in the VIP Lounge in Heaven” via the very amusing – “Ambient House is what the angels chill out to after the Christmas rush” – to the profoundly true – “Ambient House celebrates the sounds we have heard all our lives but never listened to.”

As well as dealing with the basics – “Chill Out is The KLF’s first complete LP. The music it contains is that ‘the media’ have already dubbed ‘ambient house’. For those that need a handle it’s as good as any” - the press release for broadcast media issued by Appearing also put its tongue firmly in cheek by extending enthusiastic credit to one of the vocalists on the album, “The KLF have discovered, through working with the guest vocalist Sheep on Chill Out, that sheep, far from being the lazy, mindless animals of easy virtue that is their stereotype, are spiritually highly-evolved creatures who are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”

The album cover depicted a number of sheep in a field, and captured perfectly the music contained on the LP. Drummond had given each track a very detailed and specific title too – Brownsville Turnaround On The Tex-Mex Border; A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back – which were probably intended as coat hangers on which to drape the music as some kind of soundtrack to an imaginary film. But each side of the LP, or the whole thing played continuously on a CD, really didn’t need titles as the music took the listener on a journey only limited by their own imagination. Opening with running water, birdsong, snatches of radio and the brief refrain, “We’re justified and we’re ancient, and we like to roam the land”. We then hear passing trains and soft country guitar before a relaxing synth theme emerges and the first track ends with another train passing. The entire album manages to convey a sense of tranquility and relaxation, especially when elements like the sound of sheep are deployed and synth themes and country and western guitars rise up again. Then there are the Tuvan throat singers, who give the impression at one point that one is listening to an updated version of the Residents Eskimo LP, whilst the introduction of a radio preacher gives a strong sense of Americana.

One of the most imaginative elements of Chill Out was how Drummond and Cauty worked in a few well known songs, such as Elvis Presley’s In The Ghetto and Acker Bilk’s Stranger On The Shore, which give the impression of cross-faded radio broadcasts coming together. All told, it was a stunning album – a classic that has stood the test of time amazingly well.

Upon release, the reviews ranged from the positive to the positively baffled. Crucially, however, Drummond and Cauty had staked a claim in the territory of ambient house with one of the first albums in the genre to be released. As to how it was recorded at Trancentral, Cauty later told Record Collector, “Well, Chill Out was done with two DAT machines and a cassette recorder!” Drummond added, “Chill Out was a live album that took two days to put together from bits and pieces. It was like jamming with bits from LPs and stuff we had lying around. We’d run around having to put an album on here, a cassette on there, and then press something else to get a flow.” Cauty was keen to stress that, “There’s no edits on it. Quite a few times we’d get near the end and make a mistake and so we’d have to go back to the beginning and set it all up again. The two DAT players, the couple of cassette players, a record player, and a twelve-track were feeding into a mixer and back out to one of the DATs.”

The cover of Chill Out, with its pastoral setting featuring a number of sheep, provided a visual motif that Drummond and Cauty were quick to use as capital for publicity. Drummond struck a deal with a local sheep farmer near his Aylesbury home in Hertfordshire to arrange for a photo shoot that was also attended by freelance journalist Ian McCann. “I’m not sure why these creatures were chosen,” states McCann, “it was doubtless some comment on the flock mentality of music fans, but as ever with The KLF, you were left to work it out. The sheep were duly sprayed with the band brand – it was like creating your merchandise before it had even been knitted! By the time it came to the photos, the sheep had had enough and wanted to go back to being fans of Lamb or whatever it is they do, and it took a bit of time to shepherd them into position to be shot – with a camera that is. The farmer was surprisingly agreeable to the whole palaver – perhaps there was an Art Council grant involved, or some payment under the EU’s agricultural policy/rave music commissioning division. Considering what a farce it was – the weather was grey and it was getting dark and doomy, and it was by no means clear that these photos would ever be usable - Bill was particularly earnest about it all, and determined to get it done. Which proved correct, as the photos were excellent in the end. What did we learn? That art, however ridiculous, requires commitment.”

Cauty and Paterson stopped working together in April 1990, having come to an agreement that Paterson could retain the name ‘The Orb’ whilst Cauty would issue the material they had been recording that was intended to be their debut LP. “There was a split in that one person had one record label and the other person had another, and he also had The KLF as well,” Paterson told the New Musical Express in 1993 when the battleground was three years older. This allowed Paterson to sign The Orb, via Modo, to Big Life. He would eventually be able to move out of A&R and become a full-time Eno himself.

As for the Paterson and Cauty recordings that were intended to be the first Orb LP, “Jimmy went back to the Space recordings,” stated Adam Morris, “and took all of Alex’s bits of it and changed the name of it to Space and put it on - I’m not sure it was on KLF or not (it was) - but he put it out through their network. Through Rough Trade.”

Thus, on 16th July 1990, Cauty’s Space LP was issued, and advance copies contained another Drummond-penned press release that waxed lyrical about a mythical figure in the KLF canon - Distribution Girl. “She picks up the unopened album mailer. She already knows what’s inside. Can she be bothered opening it? She knows. A KLF Communications Promo LP and press release. She shuffles off to bed. Lying there she attempts to read the press release.”

Crucially, the press release made sure that it hammered home the fact that Space was the work of one man:

Whether it was intended or not, the Space LP could have killed the career of Alex Paterson and The Orb stone dead. There is probably no disputing that Cauty was the musician of the two, with Paterson serving as a kind of vinyl Eno who had a unique sense of knowing just what to add to a recording to give it a wonderful sonic flavour. Youth, who was close to both at this time, speculates that one reason for the split – apart from the label tug of war – was possibly that Cauty, “came up with some lame excuse over publishing – DJs don’t write music, they’re just DJs – and they fell out.”

Looking back, Paterson muses that the fact that the version of Space he recorded with Cauty wasn’t issued may have been a good thing for his career. “We were trying to do the planets, the different planets, and rather than call it The Planets we would call it Space. Pluto is really cool as Pluto doesn’t exist on (Gustav) Holst’s Planets. So we were taking references from there and putting it on the Space album as a DJ sample thing. We could have ended up like Beats International, getting sued really heavily by a whole orchestra for using a piece of music on there, so in retrospect it wasn’t such a bad thing that we didn’t put it out, and Ultraworld was definitely a statement of intent by myself because I had to prove to Jimmy - I didn’t have to prove anything to Youth – that the impetus that I had drove me to make a double album that still stands out today.”

Taken on its own merits, the Space album is a fantastic record and still holds up today. Although divided into eight different tracks – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto – it is best enjoyed as either two short vinyl suites or one continuous play. Like A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld it has a wonderful organic flow, and is dominated by sequencer rhythms and sensitive samples, ranging from classical voices to an excerpt from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Jupiter, for example, blends elements of classical music, spoken word, ice crystal piano and gamelan.

Whilst reviews were positive and strong - “This is head music for the ‘90s, a possible soundtrack to altered druggy states, and it is immaculately and intelligently crafted” - it didn’t chart, but became, as intended, a perfect album to relax and chill out to. It was, in effect, one of the new Tubular Bells that Norris had spoken about – just without the platinum sales. When Cauty spoke about the recording of Space there was no mention of Patterson, “I had nothing written,” he told one interviewer, “It was just a jam all done on Oberheim keyboards. Loads of samples and different bits and pieces were chucked in there as well. I started on a Monday morning and by Friday it was all done. It was basically a record for 14-year old space cadets to go and take acid to for the first time.”

Whilst Chill Out and Space were amazing ambient house soundscapes, Drummond and Cauty also took the genre into the visual realm when, some time in 1990, they decamped to the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides with Bill Butt in tow and set up part of Cauty’s Trancentral studio on a convenient beach. Journalist Ian McCann was on hand to bear witness and recalls, “There was much talk of burning a wicker man beforehand, but it didn’t happen while I was there. Instead, I was flown to Glasgow, then another short flight to Islay, followed by a ferry to the south of Jura. Installed in a country house, it was not clear what The KLF’s plan was. The following morning Bill took me out in a jeep, driven by the owner of the house, to get a decent look at the island, which was beautiful and unspoilt. Bill seemed comfortable in this environment, while I found it forbiddingly wild. When we to back to the house, some of the band’s gear was being taken to a nearby beach where Bill Butt, The KLF’s cinematographer-director in residence, was preparing to film what became Waiting. By mid-afternoon filming started. The few music business related people who were present sat around the gear; Hendrix played through a small PA, joined by house beats: two forms of acid music melded. Bill Butt was dashing around with a hand-held camera, creating his own action I guess. It struck me how out of place I was. Most people present were chilled, looking like they’d be happy at a rave. I was wearing a jacket and shirt and looked way too smart. I was waiting for the real business to start, but it already had: this was just a part of it, some blokes on a beach, some plastic foil flapping in the wind, music playing over and over. Waiting for something that was already there.”

The resulting forty-minute short film, Waiting, was not a concert, or even a Jura travelogue, but a kind of visual and aural wallpaper. The soundtrack was not culled from Chill Out or Space but made up of a wide range of musical sources, from various chants to elements of What Time Is Love? Sold on VHS by mail order (for £9.99 plus 95p postage and packing), it received some baffling reviews, with Sounds being right on the money when, after praising elements of Jura’s natural beauty, Tim Peacock stated, “you’re unlikely to miss anything important should you decide to take five and do that washing-up halfway through.”

As for Paterson, despite a report in the New Musical Express that he was going to use his EG connection to re-tool some Brian Eno tracks, he next began to work with Youth on a tape recording he’d received containing some female spoken word. “They’d already done Loving You, which was just seminal,” recalls Youth, “and I just followed through with Alex after they’d fallen out with Little Fluffy Clouds.”

Little Fluffy Clouds was also a seminal record, and unlike A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld had a dance engine, partially moulded from slowed down drums purloined from Harry Nilsson’s Jump In The Fire, beneath elements of Steve Reich’s composition Electric Counterpoint, played by guitarist Pat Metheney. This acted as a wonderful base to the spoken word part taken from a Rickie Lee Jones interview disc – “We lived in Arizona and the skies all had little fluffy clouds.” An opening cockerel crow was followed by a purloined sample of a mouth organ part taken Ennio Morricone’s famous spaghetti western soundtrack Once Upon A Time In The West.

“We got in touch with him and he said, “Give us £500. End of,”” recalls Morris, “No royalties. Give us £500. Easy.” Both Rickie Lee Jones and Reich were flattered by the imaginative use of their material, although Big Life did later make payments to them. Youth, Paterson and Kris ‘Thrash’ Weston, who mixed the track, artfully blended a classic, and Little Fluffy Clouds received rave reviews upon release in November 1990 and sold strongly, whetting the appetite of listeners for an Orb LP. “It took a long time for me to appreciate Little Fluffy Clouds without my pop head on,” states Paterson today, “Pop head works perfect, but to me Huge Ever Growing Brain is to lay down a marker of any intent of what you intend to do in the world. And what a perfect record to start, or nearly start, with.”

When it came to recording an Orb LP, Paterson had told Jazz Summers at Big Life that he wanted to release a triple album, but it was eventually agreed that he would record a double album set. Paterson knew what and who he wanted, and collaborated with a number of people, including Youth, Thomas Fehlmann, Thrash, Steve Hillage and even Paul Ferguson, over a number of sessions.

Due to the peaks and troughs in the music, where some parts would be quiet whilst others exploded sonically, and the sheer length of some of the sides, there was some difficulty in cutting the LP, and a number of test pressings were made before sonic satisfaction was achieved. Indeed, the initial pressing was made to the standard of a ‘classical’ record, using new rather than recycled vinyl, which was usually the norm for the rock and pop market. Review copies came with a “track by track visual talk over by Dr Alex Paterson.” This was a typed sheet of his thoughts - very clever marketing and a nice personal touch. “So begins an amazing trip into little fluffy clouds that cover a third of the planet Earth, growing into a rhythm of colours, to taste the universe, for most of us the furthest we will climb,” ran the opening passage, before ending with something that could have been penned by Bill Drummond himself, “We float over colourless massive stars until at last we fade into a flyby and many left over ideas and pictures – and rest sleepily - and take the kettle off as it has burnt dry as you forgot that you were making tea.”

Of course, the words that mattered were those penned by reviewers, and when released on 25th March 1991, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld received rave reviews, and became the ambient equivalent of Tubular Bells and Dark Side Of The Moon rolled into one. Matters were helped by cleverly use of an image of Battersea Power Station on the front cover, visually riffing off the Floyd’s Animals LP. “I felt sorry for Richard Norris in that sense,” Paterson states today, “I kind of saw what he was doing but I wasn’t in any way copying him. I wasn’t copying anyone. It was a different ballgame and we were never in a thousand years intending to be the new Pink Floyd - that was a label the press put on us and that was a thing that we couldn’t get out of.” That said, The Grid later went on to score a hit singles in 1993 and a hit album in 1994, so Norris also put himself on the map. Better still for Paterson, he eventually got a triple album version of Ultraworld into the shops. “We did the mix album as I said, ‘Can I get all of the artists to do their own interpretations of the tracks on Ultraworld and see what it sounds like?’” The album was released and deleted on the same day, but got into the charts and earned Paterson a gold record into the bargain.

After the release of Ultraworld, The Orb were soon flying, especially as they became a touring act, and Paterson set the controls for the heart of the sun on a journey that still continues to this day. Although, like many creative artists Paterson is always looking forward towards his next recording project or his busy schedule as an international DJ, he does reflect that the link between The Orb and The KLF was mutually beneficial. “All press is good press, so just the words The Orb mentioned with The KLF for many years has always been a good thing. I know a lot of KLF people pick up on things by The Orb due to the Jimmy connection and become immersed in The Orb. It’s not, ‘Oh I listen to them because Jimmy is in them.’ No, it’s, ‘The Orb is actually quite good. I like what they are doing.’”

With The Orb in their third decade in the field, there are many people around the world who share the same sentiments, and in 2016 Canadian filmmaker Patrick Buchanan premiered a documentary called Lunar Orbits about their history and the recording of the album Moonbuilding. When it came to the section that dealt with the genesis of The Orb, although Jimmy Cauty was contacted and asked for an interview he declined to take part. “The first email I ever got back from him was a no thanks to being interviewed on camera, he just didn’t want to appear,” Buchanan told me, “he seems to have moved on in life and his focus is his artwork and models.”