Beth Orton

Off the record

Beth Orton's music earned her the title of the 'comedown queen' for a generation of ravers. But, she tells Laura Barton, she has always felt there is more to life than music

Tuesday May 30, 2006

The Guardian

'Longhand ... that's my big dream' ... Beth Orton. Photograph: David Levene

'I was thinking about Hay-on-Wye, and stories, and books I've loved reading, and it sent my mind all whirring." In the British Library cafe, Beth Orton's long-limbed sentences clamber across the table with an unmannered, coltish glee. "Because when I started to get into music it was always through stories," she says. "My brother used to play music and I always used to listen out for the story. I liked the Clash cos they had stories and the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, the Cockney Rejects, Joni Mitchell and Rikki Lee Jones. It didn't really matter what genre it was, as long as it was telling me something, as long as it had a story."

Orton is very excited about playing the Hay Festival on Friday. "I remember when Pulp did it and I thought wow, that must be a pretty interesting piss-up. Cos you imagine all those amazing literary types when they have a few drinks, just sitting around talking."

Besides, she loves books. For a long time she was what she describes as an "autumnal reader. It was a phase I'd go through - autumn would come round and I'd just start reading loads." She doesn't know why. "But it is my favourite time of year. All the seasons are better in Britain. I live here for the seasons. And I don't think anywhere is as beautiful in terms of countryside - not even America with all its mountains and its this and its that. I mean, their autumn is bright orange! Just calm down a bit," she instructs America, sternly. "The thing about Britain is, it has every shade of green. You can stare at those trees and there's big buds of green and all those shades are right in front of you. You don't get that anywhere else in the world." Now living in the thick of London, she has to make an effort to seek out her fix of greenery. "I go to Norfolk. But that's more for the soul. I plug into some little 'neee'," and she mimes a high-pitched frequency tuning in to her brain.

Orton lived in Norfolk, first on the north coast and then in Norwich, before moving to London in her teens. She returns to the county often, but largely tries to sidestep the city. "Norwich used to be beautiful. It did, it did," she says with a mournful droop to her voice. "All cobblestones, very authentic. And now it's like a big old shopping mall. I feel like I'm indoors there. I feel a little bit claustrophobic." Instead she heads out towards the coast. "You just drive out a little way, or hitch as we used to, and suddenly you're in the most gorgeous rural countryside in the world; the wheat fields in the summer and all the mist that would come up off them, I never forget all that. I think nature is one of my biggest inspirations," she buckles into a half-embarrassed smile. "Really! I get out in nature and it doesn't matter where I am in the world - as long as there's natural landscape, trees and all that malarkey, I just get all lit up."

Indeed, Orton's most recent album, Comfort of Strangers (the title not altogether uninspired by Ian McEwan), is threaded with a rural, alt-folk sound, pruned back to the bare branches of her voice and guitar, and produced by Jim O'Rourke, whom one might unsatisfactorily describe as an experimental noise musician. "He is one of the most humble people I've ever met," says Orton, "and one of the most talented. He's got a touch of genius. I'm sorry - I have to say it." She pauses. "He really has, though."

It is a stride away from her earlier work, a sort of folk electronica, curated by William Orbit and the Chemical Brothers, that earned her the title "the comedown queen". "With dance music I was so shocked and horrified at all these people monging out," she recalls soberly. "I thought it was a government ploy to just numb everyone's brains, carpet-bomb them with ecstasy, and make them loving when really it's a massive holocaust. I thought: WHAT is going on? This is awful! I was a terrible snob. And then I met William Orbit, so that's how I started to find out about that kind of music, I started to become a bit intrigued; I went to a rave, and it was shirts-off sweaty geezers and it really scared me - it was like the modern age and what's it coming to? This is the beginning of the end and the apocalypse!"

She wanted, she says, to be "the voice of reason in all this madness." When Orbit asked to work with her, she thought, "It could be subterfuge, get in there when people were wide open and put beautiful thoughts in their heads. It sounds terribly arrogant but I really felt a passion for it."

Over the past 10 years Orton feels she has "done my learning", and she works differently now, enjoys the times when she is "thinking songs, not writing them", which can sometimes last months at a time, "and then sometimes I'll realise [what I was thinking] was a song after all and I have to live with it a while, like a new pair of shoes you need to wear in." She also harbours a dream to write books. "Longhand," she calls prose. "That's my big dream - I would love to go and study literature and creative writing." She has contemplated applying for the famed creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. "It's the best creative writing course," she says, "but I'm in a bind cos I'm like, shit, it's in Norwich."

Today she is itching to talk about books. "I've made a list!" she announces, fishing a piece of A4 out of her handbag and unfolding its quarters to spread it flat on the table next to her soup bowl. "Anne Tyler ..." she reads, "... Paul Auster ... Bukowski over Henry Miller, can't get into Henry Miller, they're similar, but Bukowski's just filthy." She smiles. "Sylvia Plath, she does my head in, got to be honest, but The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm is about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and that's good." She recalls a boyfriend she had when she was 18, whose dad was an antiquarian book collector. "I loved going to their house, it smelled of books!" she gushes. "I used to get up in the night when everyone was alseep. Their house was like their cat - they had this really old cat and you picked it up and it would just mould into you, and their house was just like that. I'd pad around and and I read all their Graham Greene."

But the book she remembers most fondly is the one given to her by her mum when she was little, "about this little boy who drew a lion and then the lion came to life, and the little boy was really timid and the lion made him do loads of really brave things, like save a girl's football out of a tree. And when he got home he realised that his drawing book and his pencils were in the dark room where he couldn't reach the light switch. But he tapped his back pocket, and he felt his lion there, and he thought, 'I'll be fine'. And when he went back to his bedroom with his drawing book he pulled out his lion, and it was an apple! And the lion had written on it 'You know how to be brave on your own now - you don't need me'." She sighs. "I loved that story."

I wonder if, before she goes on stage, she ever pats her back pocket to check for her lion. "I do feel a bit like that," she laughs. "Somebody said this brilliant thing to me recently: 'Do you think music's like an invisible cloak? Do you think it's something you can put over yourself that means you can stand on stage and say anything you want?' So yes, yes," she nods, "I'm going to be there at Hay, with my cloak and my lion".

· Beth Orton plays the EOS Marquee on Friday.

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