The Orb – Live 93 – Released November 22nd 1993 (Island Records)
With the release of the new Orb album Prism, I reckon there’s no better time to rewind 30 years to the first ever Orb album I ever bought, Orb Live 93.
It’s difficult to put into words how much I love The Orb, but it wasn’t always that way.
The Prodigy and Altern 8 were my two favourite groups at the time, but The Orb made no sense to me.
They weren’t rave, they weren’t techno, they sure as hell weren’t hardcore and they just seemed like they were weird for the sake of being weird. So I couldn’t understand why all older, much cooler kids spoke so highly of them.
Blue Room and Assassin I found too slow and overly repetitive since I hadn’t yet developed the right mindset.
Little Fluffy Clouds was the first track of theirs that made me take notice and forced me to reappraise them. Plus, I was vaguely aware there was a KLF connection which also worked in their favour.
Eventually, I was caught in a peer pressure pincer movement between my cousin and my oldest friend (or at least the guy who’s put up with my bullshit the longest) and was corralled into buying the Orb Live album on double cassette.
I pretended it was my idea because I was a fan, but that was a lie. It was quite a lot of pocket money in those days but I rationalised it because I was convinced that if I bought an Orb tape it’d make me look cool.
I then brought the tape home and subjected myself to 140 minutes of pure ambient insanity.
Orb Live 93 blew my mind in two directions at once – on the one hand, I was mesmerised, but on the other, I had the sense that I’d been thrown into the deep end and had finally met my musical match. (I imagine my expression that first time was not unlike that of Patterson’s pet sheep on the album cover.)
It’s hilarious now when I look back on it, but this was the first album that ever truly challenged me, while at the same time laying the foundations for a lifetime love of experimental electronica and dub.
But back then I didn’t have a clue.
I was still a squeaky-voiced teen at this point with no musical context whatsoever. I’d never listened to any dub before, barely knew any reggae, had no idea what ambient was, or prog rock and Pink Floyd was just some band for smelly hippies who sang some shit about bricks.
The other thing about the Orb; although we all pretended to “get it”, we didn’t. We didn’t even know if we were meant to take it seriously or not.
Did they really believe in all this mystical wank or were they just taking the piss, surely they’re taking the piss, right?
Being a teenager means having lots of spots and no spine, so our opinion of The Orb would fluctuate from declaring them geniuses to calling them pretentious space cadets, depending on whose company we were in.
As time went by, we found ourselves spending more time with the former and less with the latter. This pattern has continued long into what I might call, for lack of a better word, adulthood.
Nowadays, with streaming and whatnot, if teenagers don’t like something first time around they just skip to the next thing and the algorithm ensures they never hear it again.
But back then if you bought an album you had a financial obligation to get your money’s worth so even if you hated the album first time around, you would force yourself to listen to it over and over.
I guess it’s like arranged marriages – you learn to love them.
Listening to The Orb on my stereo raised way too many eyebrows so instead I’d listen to them late at night with earphones on.
Lying up awake in the dark, absorbing ambient textures under the duvet in a semi-dreamlike state… suddenly The Orb started making more sense and I would drift off to sleep forming new neural pathways which have held in place all through my adult life.
It’s kind of like when Homer Simpson got those subliminal tapes that improved his vocabulary. But instead I’d wake up every morning feeling weirder, and I was already a fucking weirdo to begin with.
Dr Patterson’s Subliminal Tape Club
Side one, track one, Plateau – jungle sounds, chants, synths and the usual new age samples, typical Orb fare really but at the time I’d heard nothing quite like it. I was intrigued.
Honestly, I found it hard to take it all in, this was an album that taught me to concentrate more on what I was listening to, rather than simply reacting to it. Every new listen revealed new layers of sound, new percussive textures, and gradually trained me to hone more in on the bass.
O.O.B.E. was another mindfuck full of wibbly wobbly synthesisers and what sounded like a game of pool. Perhaps I didn’t like this one initially because I’ve always been shit at pool and never enjoyed playing it. So I couldn’t understand why somebody was playing a game of pool in the middle of a track, I still haven’t a clue now.
But the player clacks away anyway, break after break, shot after shot and gradually the track starts to take some semblance of a shape. Which is actually quite difficult when there’s a game of pool going on, especially when you have the cue jutting out at awkward angles.
A steady bass kick emerges, more vocal samples, more pool shots, more hippy bollocks and lots of random cocks… wait roosters, let’s say roosters sounds more respectable, pool shots and roosters, here’s some random guy clearing his throat… My young teenybopper brain was way beyond confused by this point but I’d gotten this far and was determined to see the album through.
Little Fluffy Clouds live in Tokyo – I always loved this song, it’s become one of my all-time favourites but this version was pure insanity the first time I heard it. I’m waiting to hear what was, up until then, the only Orb track I liked but instead, some gobshite has a morphine drip inside him.
There’s some Yank faith healer scumbag blathering on, talking pure shite, “Where are those doctors!?”
I don’t care, I don’t want doctors, where are my little fluffy fucking clouds? I’m thinking… wait, wait…here they are… layering different sounds on top of each other… after 5 minutes the beat finally kicks in along with that fantastic bassline and we’re off… wow I love this tune!
Hands down one of their best as I’m certain you agree, well most people agree anyway.
This live version is a perfect example example of how the live elements really come into their own, the bass, the live drumming, the additional percussion and all the samples just being properly dubbed out swaddled in layers of reverb and delay. Planting the seeds of my future musical enjoyment…
At the time Star 6 & 7 8 9 felt like I’d just been jumped by a roving gang of xylophones. My brain fought back as best it could but realised it was powerless so just allowed itself to beamed away to whatever tropical planet The Orb were using as their starbase at the time.
This is still a gorgeous track, even now it has an otherworldly glow to it. It tinkles along for about ten minutes before we’re interrupted by a phone call from Haille Selassie stuck in a drainpipe.
Towers of Dub would eventually become one of my fav Orb tracks as well as a running gag with a mate of mine about Haile Selassie being on the phone. (Long story.)
At the time, though, I was just wary of playing it too loud because the neighbour’s dog would start barking.
Again, to reiterate, when I first listened to this album I was still quite young, hadn’t smoked a single spliff yet and no absolutely no idea who Haille Sellasie was.
I also had no idea what dub was but it was a word I was encountering with increasing frequency and that appeared to have mystical connotations. No internet in those days, you couldn’t just type “What is dub?” into Google.
But thanks to The Orb I felt confident I was being exposed to enormous, monolithic towers of the stuff.
I didn’t start listening to reggae until maybe a year or so later. So listening to Tower of Dub at the time was the equivalent of starting on level one and warping ahead to the end-of-game boss before I even knew the rules of the game or what the controls were.
…Head nodding… the drums are doing all weird things. It’s like they’re changing shape constantly… how do they do that? I had no idea, but I know I wanted to know. Is this dub? This must be what dub is. Yeah, this is dub… has to be, big fuck-off towers of it…
More dogs… lots of dogs and harmonicas, they must have something to do with dub too because there’s tons of the fuckers. Woof-woof-woof-woof… now there’s a poor dog stuck in a drainpipe too.
Must be Haille Selassie’s dog.
Listening back again now my head is nodding with a smirk of satisfaction. Again this is classic Orb and being now familiar with the original version I can appreciate fully how amazing this version is with all the live percussion and bass – and it’s definitely dub.
I’ve come a long way, it must be said.
Now Blue Room, this was a tune I’d had mixed feelings about at the time too.
The whole “awa-a-wah-wahs” kinda got on my tits initially. I was more focused on them than the baseline, gradually I learned to focus on the bassline… always the bassline.
Keep in mind I’d only just graduated from Top of the Pops by this point and had rapidly transitioned from Technotronic to Thunderdome III, via Hit The Decks tapes, The Prodigy and Altern 8, so I initially found it all a bit repetitive and slow.
Plus I couldn’t understand why they were using all these weird sounds – what the fuck, were those power drills? Food blenders? Fuck knows.
Bluurp! Bluurp!
Bam-chicka-bam!
Bluurp! Bluurp!
Bam-chicka-bam!
“The music was fantastic”, in retrospect it was, but I hadn’t quite matured enough to appreciate it…
I did love the bassline though… I learned to love it more and more with each listen.
Also the trippy slide guitars and all those other Floydian slips. At some point, once again listening late at night, under the covers my feet tapping along to the beat I realised, “Hey I really like this now.”
And as a young teenager you weren’t meant to U-turn on things you had originally said were shite, such behaviour was impermissible… “but you said The Orb were shite!”
Bluurp! Bluurp!
Bam-chicka-bam!
Bluurp! Bluurp!
Bam-chicka-bam!
Again this is another example of how the Orb pulled my brain in two directions at once, there was a cynical side that didn’t want to let it in, and the rebellious side that just kept telling me to surrender totally to the crazy.
So U-turn I most certainly did, to the point where I now think Blue Room has one of the funkiest bounciest basslines ever recorded.
Blue Room also had lots and lots of drainpipe going on, something I would later learn was called a flanger, an effect I would go on to use and abuse to a huge degree in my earliest productions and it’s all Alex Patterson’s fault.
Actually, let’s face facts, a lot of the bad decisions I’ve made in life and the bad habits I’ve developed over the years can all be traced back to Alex Patterson – who knows what a successful young go-getter I might have been had I never bought this album?
What is this? I never heard any music like this in my life before and if I ever have I don’t know where I heard it
Side two starts with Valley live at Glastonbury, more synth wibbles, more Jamaican phone calls, plus tweety birds, hippy sitars and general sampler mayhem before a big fat bassline comes in, chunky percussion starts rattling about, all overlain with smooth pads and other exotic sounds swirling about – here we go again. What’s going on? Haven’t got a clue.
Perpetual Dawn was another track that grew on me gradually, I’d heard it on the radio and each time I liked it more and more. The radio version is about as accessible as The Orb got in those days whereas the Live 93 version, recorded in Copenhagen, is pure dubbed-out bliss.
I came back to this one again and again and it’s another track that unwittingly helped to nurture my eventual love of all things dub and reggae-related.
I imagine most people listened to reggae first, maybe get into Bob Marley and go from there, eventually discovering dub but I had it all arse backwards and started The Orb, first thing day one.
Assassin – now as I said I never liked this song when it came out, but then I was still teeny bopper age and my musical pallet still had too many sugar receptors.
This version sounds very different to the original, it’s pretty much unrecognisable actually and feels like it’s an intro to a track that never properly begins, so instead we blunder about for a while in a dub stupor before we get to Outlands live in Glastonbury.
This features Arabic-sounding chanting, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech and a tasty bass groove.
Young kiddie me really liked this one, grown-up me thinks it’s held up well and the drums and low end on this sound enormous.
Spanish Castles In Space… what were they doing in space? Shouldn’t they be in Spain? That’s where Spanish castles normally were, surely? And if it’s about Spanish castles why’s there a Russian guy talking? So many things about The Orb made no sense.
And that’s when they also drop the marijuana bomb – this is a typical example of the kind of moment when my mother would walk into the room and give me a quizzical look trying to figure out what the hell I was listening to and whether or not I was on drugs.
All the more reason to listen to this on earphones, which I did a lot when I bought this tape. And since Spanish Castles is easily the most chilled track on the whole album, I’d often fall asleep to this track with my earphones on.
I guess if subliminal tapes really worked I’d be fluent in Russian by now, for all the good that’d do me.
The album finishes with a track that was too long to remember the name of so we just ended up calling it “the brain who ate the universe.”
Its official title, “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (Loving U)” is quite a mouthful tbh.
Now I’ve been all over this world but never been to the Ultraworld, though after 30+ years I can only imagine the state that poor pulsating brain’s in now.
Later my mate and I would adopt this track title as a multipurpose phrase that could be used for a variety of applications, for example, one might wake up having “a huge ever-growing pulsating hangover that rules from the centre of the Guinnessverse.”
Now full disclosure, I’ve always loved the arpeggio of this track, it’s infectious, but I continue to have mixed feelings about this track since I absolutely fucking DETEST Loving You by Minnie Ripperton.
Not that I mind Minnie herself (and I love me a bitta Rotary Connection) it’s just I really hate that particular song and more specifically that high note – you know the one – which always causes me to clench my fists and grind my teeth every time I hear it. Serious fingernails on a blackboard stuff.
The live version of …Brain goes on for over 18 minutes, eventually introducing a surprisingly swift techno beat and bassline underneath it all, but on the top, it’s still full-on star-spangled sampler-jamming chaos – there’s Little Fluffy roosters and jets and UF.Orb helicopters flying overhead, and at some point, the bongos come in and that’s when this track really starts to let loose.
The album then finishes off with a cheesy organ rendition of I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside and I’m left wondering what the hell did I just listen to… all I know is I feel the urge to listen to it again.
Where Are Those Doctors?
Orb Live 93 was like the Ludovico Technique in reverse – a form of high-intensity brainwashing using evocative music, subliminal voices and vivid imagery that served to enhance my levels of mental derangement and permanently preclude me from ever becoming a normal, productive member of society.
But it also stoked a love of eccentric weirdos, exotic soundscapes and the restorative powers of dub.
Initially, this album was too much for my young brain. But the more I listened to it the more sense it made.
At first, there were just too many things being thrown at me to deal with, but turns out I was being inoculated against all the mental pathogens of the 21st century.
Being able to deal with layers upon layers of offensive noises, prattling voices and relentless bewildering craziness before my voice had properly broken turned out to be invaluable survival training.
Later, as I became more rebellious, smoking hash and inhaling aerosols, the Orb painted new colours in my mind, lending their music a whole new perspective.
Listening back to it now it just sounds like The Orb, a group I’ve been listening to for over three decades. But when I remember how I felt back then, my tender young brain tentatively attempting to machete its way through this dense sonic jungle in search of meaning, I do wonder, was I always destined to live with my head in the fluffy clouds or was there another path? What would have happened if I hadn’t bought this album and saved my pocket money instead?
But it’s too late to change that now, I’ve gone too far down the path and this poor pulsating brain might not be the sharpest, but at least it knows what dub is.
Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to take my medication – where are those doctors?