Live at the Albert Hall
The Times, 15 May 1996
If space aliens had beamed down into this venerable mothership of a venue, they could hardly have appeared more out of place than Orbital.
This is, after all, the wilfully, faceless electronic duo whose distaste for the rock world is legendary. Even in the wake of Orbital's two triumphant headline sets at Glastonbury and their most successful album yet, In Sides, entering the charts at No. 5 last month, a dance act playing an opulent all-seater concert hall smacks of grand folly.
But in many ways this event is the natural culmination of six years of work by Paul and Phil Hartnoll. Their crusade to steer techno music away from the hedonistic euphoria of acid house towards political and environmental content has earned them a wide following. Now, with the symphonic, soundtrack-tinged feel of In Sides, Orbital seem estranged from the dance sub-culture which originally nurtured them. Consequently this felt more like some lavish orchestral soirée than a pop concert.
But all that changed when the brothers appeared on stage. Beneath giant film screens flickering with poetic Jarman-esque imagery, and framed by blazing searchlights, they huddled behind a stack of keyboards to unleash 20-minute epics like Out There Somewhere and The Girl With The Sun In Her Head.
This is deadly seriousmusic, with deeply human emotions stirring beneath its glacial techno surface. Semi-improvising each tune from hundreds of pre-programmed sequences, the Hartnolls retain an element of raw spontenaity lacking in most electronic acts. They also create space for haunting, atmospheric like The Box the duo's recent hit single, whose stark beats and sampled dulcimer refrain recall classic film scenes by John Barry and Lalo Schifrin.
The emotional charge, coupled with their willingless to embrace classical and cinematic influences, is undoubtedly the key to Orbital's appeal outside dance circles. And yet crafted subtelty takes a back seat, with booming percussion accentuated over melody, strobe lights and smoke machines coaxing the youthful crowd to their feet for almost the entire two-hour performance.
So here, it seems, is Orbital's secret. For all their anti-star principles and anti-rock rhetoric, their grasp of showmanship is second to none. They remain unafraid to fall back on crowd-pleasing tricks like multimedia stage effects, or dropping droll Belinda Carlisle samples into the warm electronic contours of Halcyon, just as they did at Glastonbury.
Ultimately, Orbital play progressive music with a pop heart. And for an Albert Hall packed with partisan revellers, there's nothing alien about that.
Stephen Dalton- This review originally appeared in The Times on 15 May 1996.
- The Times is published daily in the UK.
