Orbital are a band that were at the very centre of rave when it sprung into open fields around England in the early 90s. Named after London’s M25 orbital freeway – a key passage for ravers to the countryside – the pioneering brothers of Phil and Paul Hartnoll are certainly not lacking in stories to tell. They’re from a different era in electronic music. From a time when techno was more ‘innocent and amateurish,’ and their boyish charm certainly belies the sincerity of their music.

Famous for their distinctive headtorches – with faces barely visible behind banks of analogue synthesizers and sequencers – Orbital’s reputation surely precedes their dynamic live sets. They’ve developed production and live techniques which have been responsible for the success of their career and place in history, so much so British publication Q Magazine placed them in their Top 50 Bands You Must See Before You Die list. Australian fans now have the chance to cross Orbital off their Bucket List when they descend down under this month for their first tour since 1992.

Paul Hartnoll promises that the fire is burning bright, despite Orbital having reformed in 2009 after a five-year hiatus. Audiences can rest assured, this isn’t an “I’m-bored, let’s-make-some-money” return to the circuit, and such a suggestion would only incite indignation from the Hartnoll brothers.

You’ve been touring pretty extensively over the last year; we’re all hoping you guys won’t be burnt out by the time you get to Australia. How are you feeling?

We’ve only just begun mate, I can tell you, and we’re really fired up. By the end of last year we were getting to where we really wanted to be, you know, because we improvised our structures. We know what songs we’re going to play, we know what order we’re going to play them in, but they develop and change over time and we’re really enjoying where they were going; when they stop developing you know that you’re burnt out, but that’s not even begun to happen yet. We were sort of writing bits on the road and adding stuff and taking stuff away and really mixing it up, and we’re back in the studio know trying to write some stuff with the express idea of working it into the set. [So that way] when we finally start playing the same places again we’ve got something different to play. We’re really fired up and ready to go.

That’s awesome, because I have heard and seen you quoted as saying that you weren’t going to writing any new stuff, so that comes as a pleasant surprise really.

Yeah, that’s coz I was lying in interviews you see. I don’t like to give stuff away; you’re supposed to keep back some stuff [back]. We hadn’t started writing at that point, so I don’t like to say it unless it’s happening, but by the time I’m talking to you [now], we’re working on our fourth track. It’s very dancey at the moment, it’s great, we’ve approached this with an agenda which I love. I love it when you don’t have a blank canvas, I love it when your canvas is angled towards a certain subject so when you go to work, you say ‘I’ve got this certain job to do’. And the job at the moment is filling in what we want to do to the live set and how we want to change it. So we’re writing tracks that are made to work in a live environment, we hope – that’s our aim anyway. So they’re quite big and bulky and anthemic.

In the last two decades you guys have been given a lot of wraps for live sequencing, or ‘sequencing on the fly’. Is this the sort of live show you’re going to be bringing to Australia?

Oh yes, we’re going to be bringing the full thing. You know people try and take gear when they’re traveling long distances, but if I can’t do it properly, I don’t want to do it at all. We’ve got a full stage of gear, we’ve got full modular synths, you know it’s all analogue synths up there, so we’ve got total freedom for messing with the sounds and that kind of thing.

Was there any performance in the last year, the 20th year of Orbital, that really captured the last two decades for you?

Apart from one in Ibiza – which wasn’t a bad gig, it was just badly organised – they were all good. I don’t think we had a bad one happen last year, and that was what was amazing about it because we took to it straight away, it was like ‘Oh yeah, I remember this’. From the first gig, from feeling as though you’re chasing yourself, to the last gig where you feel like you’re really sculpting things and developing it, each [one] was different. They had their own twists and turns and it really felt like a creative process. I think one of the big ones for me was the Big Chill festival, because we know those people personally, and they were the ones that got us to reform and play at their festival, so we thought ‘Alright, lets give it a go’, so I am indebted to them for getting us out of bed as it were. Also playing Brixton academy in London, which feels to me like my home town gig, [having] lived in London for the whole time that Orbital existed.

It’s good news for me that each gig has its own character, because I was watching the Glastonbury footage of you guys and the images are pretty stunning. Also, Q Magazine listed the ’94 Glastonbury performance in the top 50 live gigs of all time and has also put you in the top 50 bands to see before you die. Not to put any pressure on you or anything, but I’m kind of expecting the seas to be parted…

Well, what can I say, I’m gonna come down there, and I’m going to do my best like I do everywhere else and if that parts the seas for you, brilliant! If it doesn’t, well… shit [haha]. I’ll do my darndest.

Your performance on Top Of The Pops (see the video embed below) has always made me laugh…

It makes me laugh as well [haha]!

I’ve read some accounts where the performance reaffirmed the belief in the eyes of the more traditional music scene that a lack of ability went into producing electronic music. What’s your take on it, in the context of that time, and what was going through your head when you were doing it?

Besides the two double vodka and oranges that were certainly going through my head; I’d just had those with Gary Davies in the BBC bar, and he was saying ‘Alright, guys, just relax, where you from, Sevenoaks? Yeah, ok,’ and then we went down. It was just surreal, Top Of The Pops is like Doctor Who; it’s an institution to people like us in this country and walking on stage and having thirty people screaming and cheering… You’ve had this impression that it’s this big mad party and it’s just people who have been invited for free! Seeing the facade of it, it’s just incredible. You might as well just thrust me onto the planet of the Daleks from Doctor Who, for the awe inspiring ‘whoah!-What’s-happening?!’-feeling.

Then, of course, they don’t let you play live, you just have to stand there and mime. Because we didn’t have a singer we had to have a dancer, so we had to have someone’s mate there dancing like a buffoon and she hated doing it, and we hated her being there, but it’s what they did, it’s what they did for dance music. It just so fuddy-duddy, old school English BBC bullshit. They tried to give us flashy keyboard stands but we were used to playing on trestle tables, so we went and got some trestle tables out of their canteen and piled the gear up on the boxes as we would in a real scenario, to at least make it feel more like we’re used to. If you watch it we’re just standing around trying not to laugh. I felt stupid touching anything so all I did was fiddle with the on/off buttons and twiddle the plug sockets. That was all I could do without feeling like a tit. It was hilarious fun.

You know the other stupid thing about that is, I was washing dishes in a pizza restaurant at the time and when I went in on the Monday I discovered on the Wednesday – when I was supposed to be on Top Of The Pops – that I was on the work roster, so I had to pull the boss in and tell her I couldn’t work, could I swap. She said, ‘Well I dunno, why…?’. ‘Well I gotta go do Top Of The Pops’ I said, and she just screamed; ‘Oh my god, I’ll bloody do the dishwashing on that day, it doesn’t matter, just go, just go!’ I said, ‘You know what, I don’t think I’m going to be back either’... That was how bizarre it was, I was washing dishes on Monday, and I was on Top Of The Pops on Wednesday. They invited us to a party afterwards where we sat next to Boy George and Neneh Cherry or something… bloody hell.

That’s gotta be up with there in the top resignations of all time…

Well it felt good to me, I can tell you. It felt like a working title [for a] Hugh Grant film.

I’ve always considered Orbital as a socially and politically in-tune band. I know there’s a lot of eco-politics that influence your songs, I believe The Girl with Sun in Her Head was recorded in a Green Peace solar power generated studio, and a lot of the spoken samples in your songs are particularly loaded. I’m really interested in whether this was an agenda you had back then, because I think mine’s a generation that has always pigeon-holed electronic music as apolitical or without a voice and always hedonistic…

Yeah, I grew up with Kraftwerk; they always had a voice didn’t they. They were very tongue-and-cheek, doing ballads to neon lights and things like that; a man in awe of his pocket calculator. ‘Oooooh, look what I can do’. They were all very tongue-and-cheek and taking the piss out of people but that’s the way I always took it. I also grew up listening to the Dead Kennedy’s, they were my benchmark. What are you supposed to say? Well you tell it like it is, talk about what’s annoying you or you point the finger at whatever you feel the need to. I always wondered why people don’t do that in electronic music, why isn’t that happening.

You’ve sampled heavily throughout your career, including Doctor Who and Star Trek. Was it much of a legal process back in the earlier period, clearing samples and using them for your music?

It was a very grey area back then and I think it was quite good like that – big people answering to the little man, so to speak. And really, was there any point in taking a band like Orbital to court for 100,000 record sales, when there’s a tiny snippet of your TV program there? Not really. I mean, if we had had a worldwide hit, maybe, but it was a very grey area and everyone was quite innocent. There were no real laws laid down to say you could or couldn’t do that kind of thing. Nowadays it’s all very clear, you can’t do it without asking permission, so you have to [ask permission]… At the moment we’re doing stuff we just couldn’t possibly clear, but we don’t care coz we’re doing it for the live set. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The mighty Orbital hit Australian shores this week, performing headline live shows along the east coast for the first time in 12 years:

Fri 19th Feb – Billboard, Melbourne – WIN TICKETS ON ITM!
Sun 21st Feb – Playground Weekender, NSW
Tue 23rd Feb – The Forum, Sydney – WIN TICKETS ON ITM!
Wed 24th Feb – Family Nightclub. Brisbane – WIN TICKETS ON ITM!

Check out the video proof of Orbital’s very amusing Top Of The Pops appearance (as discussed in the interview above) right here!