HI ALEX. Last summer The Orb celebrated 25 years of your Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld album with a special London gig featuring Orb 'family' like Killing Joke's Youth and ex-Gong prog wizards Steve Hillage and his partner Miquette Giraudy. How did that come about?
One of the reasons we decided to celebrate Ultraworld is because it still sounds fresh today and we hadn't ever really done the album live in full before.
That's why we pulled out all the stops for the Brixton show and got all the musicians who played on it to come and play with us. Apart from Steve and Miquette (who co-wrote Back Side of The Moon and Supernova on the album) all the others involved in Ultraworld were really good friends of mine.
There are songs we had never played live before and so it was good fun doing the whole thing together. And it worked, it was almost like a mini-orchestra – albeit an electronic one.
Plus, as an old Sex Pistols fan, one of the best things about the Brixton gig was getting Paul Cook to come and play drums with The Orb. That was totally unreal.
So it's going to be a bit of a squeeze to fit the Orb 'family' on the stage at The Limelight, then?
No, it's not going to be that way inclined in Belfast – it's just going to be Thomas (Fehlmann, Paterson's co-conspirator since 1991) and myself. We run things off computers, samples and laptops and things – and it all works. We've been around America, Europe and Britain already with this show.
In Belfast we're doing a 'two shows for one' evening: one set of Ultraworld and then some of the tracks off the new album, COW, with some of the old classics that people enjoy like Toxygene (their infamous Top 10-making molestation of the Jean Michel Jarre classic Oxygene) and some of the Lee 'Scratch' Perry stuff (from 2012's The Orbserver In The Star House LP) that we're still very happy with.
The Orb were one of the first 'dance' acts to attract fans from outside the subculture, probably because of your diverse influences from dub to hip-hop to rock. How aware of that were you at the time?
We were totally aware of it – and don't forget prog rock too. The beautiful thing about the Ultraworld album was that it brought a lot of rock kids into dance music for the first time. The Orb brought them into the electronic world and then they started buying other electronic records – that was quite an achievement in itself.
Ultraworld was released as the controversy over the use of sampling in music was reaching fever-pitch. You had some legal problems with some of the samples on the album at the time, but there must be stuff on there that no-one has ever spotted?
Yeah, for sure. Still no-one knows where the Lee 'Scratch' Perry sample is on Little Fluffy Clouds – and I'm not going to tell anyone.
So at this stage, if someone does guess correctly, you'll just have to neither confirm nor deny it in order to keep the mystery going – and keep the lawyers at bay?
You've gotta lie – but it'll be the way my eyes look that might give it away! No, that's always been the fun side of it because primarily all our records are made up of samples anyhow. With a lot of tunes that we use to make demos, we take the samples out and re-create them for the final version – but, sometimes we might not.
How did you persuade Paul Cook to play with you at the London gig?
Youth is actually producing his daughter's new album and I've helped co-write a tune with her as well. It's the Orb's extended family – all our kids are getting older and some of them are getting musical as well.
So The Orb could conceivably go on forever down the generations?
That was one of the ideas Youth and I had in the very early days, that The Orb should be a family thing – once we go, the kids should carry on with it. But who knows? It's a happy dream.
You did the Ultraworld show in Dublin last month – are you looking forward to coming back to Belfast with it?
Oh absolutely. We've been true to our word in The Orb, we've been coming over to Belfast since the early 1990s and never stopped – apart when people didn't want to book us. I personally love the place and the Giant's Causeway too. Oh man, it's amazing! I've been to the stones many times – I actually watched the sun come up on mid-summer's morning there once after a really good party in Belfast.
If you're reading this, Shep, hello – I'll see you when I get there!
How's the rest of the year shaping up for The Orb?
We've got some more European gigs in March and then we're doing COW in its entirety at the Royal Albert Hall in London. After that I think we'll be dropping the whole of Ultraworld once we do this special thing on the Thursday night at Glastonbury.
I've been given a whole stage to curate while people are camping up, so I'm going to be doing a semi-ambient evening – and I've got Steve and Miquette promising me they're going to do the whole of Rainbow Dome Music (Hillage's seminal 1979 ambient solo album) to start the whole thing off, which will be pretty damn fantastic.
We'll do Ultraworld one last time as part of that – unless we can go and play it in Japan, because they haven't heard it there yet.
So you're happy to draw the line there then?
I think so, because we'll have ticked all the boxes – including coming over to play Belfast again.
Any chance of a similar anniversary tour for the U.F.Orb LP?
Nah, I don't think so – we'd have to do them all then!
:: The Orb, tonight, The Limelight, Belfast, doors 10pm. Tickets £15 from Ticketmaster outlets.
