The Liberation of Beth Orton

Beth Orton has just released her finest work in 17 years. Dense, atmospheric and a lot of fun, Kidsticks is a grand and stark departure. If the three albums that preceded it had cast Orton comfortably as a folkie singer-songwriter, this reinvents her as an experimentalist and a risk taker.

Her earliest dalliances with electronica were 20 years ago, when she was largely unknown. To take such a sharp volte-face so deep into her career is remarkable. In short, this is the bravest record she has made. It’s no wonder she sounds excited. Peppered with expletives and long, winding tangents, 40 minutes of higgledy-piggledy conversation reveal an artist who is more enthused about her work than ever.

This was the first time she took a hand in record production, having worked with the likes of Andrew Weatherall, William Orbit and Jim O’Rourke in the past. Orton swapped her acoustic guitar for a keyboard and worked along with Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons in building an album that’s grounded in loops and beats, but which also includes a stellar cast of musicians including Dustin O’Halloran (A Winged Victory For The Sullen), Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) and George Lewis Jr (Twin Shadow). Discussing Kidsticks and the work that went into it, she beams with pride.

“It is really liberating being able to do your own recording,” she says. “Someone said it’s a bit like pulling back the curtain and seeing the Wizard of Oz. 'What the fuck are you doing behind there?' They’re like: ‘It’s really difficult. You can’t come back here…’. Yeah I fucking can, I just did! That’s why we co-produced it. I drove the little motherfucker. I was like, 'I’ve got to do this. I’ve fucking had a baby… I can do this.' One of the reasons I had kids was to make better music, hah. Oh god… shut the fuck up, just shush me…" 

On working with Fuck Buttons' Andrew Hung

Orton has returned to the UK from Los Angeles, were she has spent the past few years living with her husband Sam Amidon – the celebrated folk alchemist – and raising her young children. The collaboration with Hung began as an uncommitted 10-day doodle. He had remixed Mystery, a track from previous record, Sugaring Season, and the pair had vowed to do something again in the future.

After she decamped to California, Orton told him: “Fuck it, come out.” He bought himself a ticket and they spent a week and a half in a garden studio playing with loops and experimenting with sounds. As Orton puts it: “We had these beautiful ten days and it was fun. We got very high and were like, 'Let’s be a band! Yeah, fuck it, let’s do it!'" 

The Skinny spent some time with Hung in Hong Kong the week the first single from the record, Moon, was released. His excitement was palpable and he confessed to being a big fan of Orton’s early work, while the latter albums bypassed him. Perhaps this is why, instead of entrusting her with an acoustic guitar, he handed her a keyboard and taught her how to use Ableton. Whether it was intentional or not, it was something that seems to have greatly inspired Orton and which planted the seeds of a musical rebirth.

When asked what he brings to his musical endeavours, Hung said, cryptically, “emotional intelligence” – an ability to convey emotion in the music; to connect with the listener. “Interesting!” replies Orton when informed of these conversations. “I would say he brought some sweet sounds and he put a keyboard in front of me. In his way, without realising it at all, he empowered me. If that’s an emotional intelligence, he was right on with that.

“I started playing and he was fiddling with sounds and it was just fun, and it continued to be fun. But as the days went by it became more serious and I was thinking, ‘I’ll layer this over that, I can do this and I can do that’ – learning about how the sound affected what I was playing and how what I was playing affected the sound. A very symbiotic situation occurred. After ten days of this we had 26 of these four-bar loops. Andy went back to London, I stayed in LA and started to write for them.”

Orton was conscious, she says, of not becoming “a singer on someone else’s record”. She is proud of her collaborations with The Chemical Brothers and on William Orbit’s Strange Cargo project, but was determined that this would be a vehicle for her own songwriting, and so began to write lyrics to put to the loops they created in LA. The pair continued to correspond and collaborate from afar, but it was Orton’s decision to bring in “the band”. The resulting record is a hybrid of their respective musical geneses. The sum is just as great as the parts.

“At a certain point I thought, 'I want to write songs to this,'” she explains. “I felt if I disengaged I would lose my sense of power in the situation and very quickly become a vocalist on someone else’s record and I wasn’t interested in doing that. I have done it before in my own way. I don’t mean that as a diss… I don’t actually mean The Chemical Brothers – that was wonderful and I’ve loved everything I’ve done. At a certain point I really wanted to hear something done with my melody.”

Having worked with the notoriously controlling and curmudgeonly Jim O’Rourke on Sugaring Season, Orton found this project refreshing. She may never produce anything again, she says, but at least she can tick that box.

On working with O’Rourke, Orton says: “You hand it over, right, you fucking hand it over! He was like, ‘I don’t know why a singer or musician ever puts their name on a record as a producer. Everyone knows they’ve got nothing to do with the fucking production.’ I was like, 'Alright, alright.' He’s hilarious – one of the funniest people I’ve worked with, but you don’t fuck about. I mean, no. Yeah, no. You know what I mean.”

Beth Orton on Kidsticks

Much of the press around Kidsticks has centred on “a return to her roots”, drawing comparisons with the electronics found on Trailer Park and Central Reservation. In reality, the new album sounds nothing like that stellar pair, but the return to electronica renders the parallel easy to make. Orton finds the suggestion reductive. She even shirks away from the suggestion that Kidsticks is an electronic record, saying its density makes it more of a comfortable bedfellow with Sugaring Season than her earlier work.

“People are reducing what ‘roots’ means,” she says. “It’s associations I made with the music I grew up with. Sometimes owning bits of yourself. Personal stories as well. Associations with a life that you live and breathe a bit more. I can’t explain it. It’s like going back to school and people are saying, ‘You’re wearing a stripy jumper, why are you wearing a stripy jumper?’ Shut up, I’ve always worn a stripy jumper at home! Shut up. It’s like, you get famous and… listen to me, poor me!”

Orton frequently has bursts of self-awareness: catching herself on when she feels she’s going overboard, or flying off on a tangent. She is often self-deprecating and seems very honest about her own capability.

“I am a very emotional writer, but never a very clever writer,” she says, in a moment of self-assessment. “I’m not one of those people who can go into a character and say: ‘I am channelling fucking Virginia Woolf,’ or whatever. I wish I could because I am always impressed by people who can do that – but I always think it’s a lie! The song is about yourself but you’re trying to make it more interesting than it is.”

But the residing impression is of an extremely funny and passionate person. Two decades deep into her recording career, Beth Orton is as exuberant about her work as any artist you'd care to mention. It’s impossible not to get caught up in her buzz: it is simply intoxicating.

Where next? Orton will tour with her band which is “fucking great”, but as for the future and a return to LA? “I’ve no idea, let’s not fucking go there.” With an exasperated sigh and exaggerated cockney twang, the comment is, as always, delivered as pure theatre.

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Kidsticks is out now via ANTI-. Beth Orton plays St Luke's, Glasgow on 2 Oct.