From: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org (trailer-park-digest) To: trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Subject: trailer-park-digest V2 #208 Reply-To: trailer-park@smoe.org Sender: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-trailer-park-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk trailer-park-digest Thursday, November 4 1999 Volume 02 : Number 208 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Beth in The Times ["Chris Beckwith" ] Beth in Top Magazine ["Chris Beckwith" ] yay [*octagonal* ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 18:08:11 -0500 From: "Chris Beckwith" Subject: Beth in The Times November 1, 1999 Beth Orton may not be a great singer but, says Nigel Williamson, her voice captivates Feeling the music A vocal technician would probably tell you that Beth Orton can't sing. Her pitch is uncertain, her tone erratic and she breathes in all the wrong places. Yet as two Mercury Music Prize nominations in three years and this sell-out tour testify, there is also a richly emotional quality about her voice that irresistibly draws in listeners of radically different temperament. Her fans range from folkies to ravers and her records sound equally at home on Radio 1 or 2. Audiences on her British tour have ranged from 16 to 60, as varied a mix of concertgoers as you will find anywhere. Gangly and awkward, Orton is still recognisable as the painfully shy performer whose early gigs were such a trial for artist and audience alike. But cleverly, instead of trying to overcome her fear, she has turned it into a stage prop, ringing her hands, giggling, trailing away in mid-sentence and shouting "omigod" when the lights were dimmed at an inappropriate moment. You can't tell any more how much of it is real and how much is part of the act. But it has everybody totally on her side. In this Northampton gig, she was perturbed to be playing in a seated theatre ("bit intimidating, innit, you all sitting there," she said at one point) but such venues suit perfectly her style of rock'n'roll chamber music. Her band included a string trio of Sebastian Steinberg on double bass, Howard Gott on violin and Sara Watson on cello. They created envelopingly warm textures assisted by Sean Read's keyboards and Ted Barnes on guitars while Matty Johnson's quietly understated drums proved that less can often mean more. She played nine of the dozen songs from Central Reservation and six from her debut, Trailer Park, and their gentle introspection and pastoral landscapes added to the chamber quality. But beginning with three songs of almost identical pace, mood and register was a mistake and it was only on the more urgent Stolen Car that the mood picked up. It is the first track on Central Reservation and would have made a better opener. The poignant Pass In Time (about the death of her mother) went without the atmospheric vibraphone of the recorded version but the string trio made up for it, building wave upon wave of ebbing and flowing sound. The one new song, Thinking About Tomorrow, rocked as vigorously as anything all night, while Feel To Believe, the first encore and the only song performed solo, was delivered with a wide-eyed sense of wonderment. In short, a triumph of emotion over technique. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 19:18:21 -0500 From: "Chris Beckwith" Subject: Beth in Top Magazine BETH ORTON by Nick Duerden De-centralised It's been a fraught few weeks for both Beth Orton and TOP magazine. The former has been travelling America promoting her second album, Central Reservation, while the latter has been trailing her - largely without success. First, it was Los Angeles where the sun was high and the living was easy, although the distinctly earthy East Anglian found the disarming smiles of Californians to be as false as they were wide. "Believe me, it was fucking weird," she says in a voice that blends a sultry Norfolk twang with bizarre cockney-isms. "It really freaked me out, but I must admit that I'm really quite drawn to it. I love the roads over there, y'know? The buildings, the mad people, the horizon. It's a fucking incredible place." She thinks awhile. "I must have a deep-rooted attraction to it. I wonder why that is?" Then, three thousand air miles east, and with a distinct dip in the temperature, we found ourselves in New York where, quite frankly, nothing was easy, least of all the living. And now, a week later, we're all back in London, Orton revelling in the familiarity of home and at last allowing herself to relax. Give or take an occasional lazy afternoon when she sparks up a spliff, lies back and stares at the sky, Orton has difficulty relaxing. "I never thought I'd get so far with my music," she says, eyes wide and incredulous. "It's hugely gratifying, of course, but it's also hard work, really very stressful at times. "If Central Reservation gleans the crossover success it deserves - and it's an absolutely beautiful record, deserving of reverential worship - then how, one wonders, will she deal with the accompanying pressures? "People have this strange image of me," she says, growing heated. "They think I'm really fragile. Well, bollocks to that! I handle stress perfectly well. It's my body that doesn't handle it too well, but let's not get onto that because it's boring." Boring? "Oh yes, believe me," she says, sneering. "Illness is really fucking boring. "Until she opens her mouth, Orton appears willowy of frame and sullen of complexion, with the face of a woman who looks like she understands heartache, and a voice that practically confirms it. She sings exquisitely, her every velvety utterance shot through with the kind of heavy ache no amount of ointment could ease. Yet her music is anything but depressing; conversely, it's stunning and uplifting in a way very few of her peers could ever hope to match. First emerging back in 1996, after an earlier collaboration with producer William Orbit informed her of her latent talent, she released Trailer Park, which went on to sell over 300,000 copies. Taking the essence of folk and slipping it under a duvet of clubby ambience (it featured a collaboration with The Chemical Brothers), she quickly became labelled The Comedown Queen, a tag she may not be entirely happy with, but one that fits her like a glove nevertheless "That's bollocks as well," she says between almighty yawns, jetlag having not quite taken its leave of her. "Let's talk about something else." Meeting Beth Orton, you realize two things about her that you were previously unaware of. Firstly, she's far taller than you'd expected - almost six feet. (In basketball, you guess, she'd excel.). And secondly, she's disarmingly funny, her humour dry, wry, unfailingly sardonic. She has a great temper, too. Ask a silly question, and you'll soon feel her scorn. When she played alongside Sarah McLachlan and Alison Moyet at the Royal Albert Hall's Lilith Fair concert recently, her in-song banter was the only highlight of a very dull evening. And in New York last week, when she played on television before a live studio audience, she sang during the rehearsal, "Nothing could be finer than to be in my vagina in the morning," apropos of nothing more than to glean a laugh from the stilted crowd. Instead, however, the stilted crowd looked rather shocked. For one who, in song, elicits such bliss by simply dropping an octave, Beth Orton isn't actually the carefree minstrel she at first seems. Instead, she's something of a troubled soul, although she's thoroughly sick of talking about it and would rather we didn't. For the record, however, here's a brief history lesson. When she was just eleven, her father died. A few years later, she lost her mother - her greatest influence - to breast cancer. Suffering what she feared was a chronic depression, she decamped to Thailand, became a nun, and meditated for 14 hours a day. Then, when she was first approached by record companies, keen to sign an obviously talented young artist, she panicked so much that she went blind for five days. When, a year later, she learned of her Mercury nomination for Trailer Park, she screamed with such excitement, she gave herself a migraine that lasted for four days. And on top of all this, she suffers from Crohn's Disease - the illness to which she earlier referred - a chronic condition that attacks the alimentary canal. "My life right now," she says, "is pretty much off the ground, all over the place. It's incredible, all these people saying nice things about me." And here she lapses into a thick Norfolk brogue, and starts shouting. "IT'S FUCKING MAD, IT IS! REALLY FUCKING EXCITING! WAYYEEE!" Then, dropping to a whisper, she adds, "That was a Norfolk accent, in case you were wondering." And then she loses herself to another almighty yawn. "Sorry about this, but I'm absolutely knackered," she says, then stares at your correspondent right between the eyes, looking woefully confused. "Sorry, did you say you were from Top Of The Pops magazine?" No, TOP magazine. If it were a TOTP interview, then we'd be contractually obliged to ask you the colour of your socks. Beth Orton starts laughing loudly. "Well, that's easy, that one," she says, her voice raising towards a scream again. "They're Arran-coloured. Obviously." Why obviously? "Because I'm a bloody hippy, of course!" she says. Of course. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Nov 1999 17:29:48 +0900 From: *octagonal* Subject: yay Heard today, Beth Orton is coming to Australia for the Big Day Out. mmm... 'honey, i love you, but bite me!' dharma. @@ @@ @@ Peter Fiebig - occy@terra.net.au - UIN 3596528 ------------------------------ End of trailer-park-digest V2 #208 **********************************