Orange &green
Orange founder Cliff Cooper recalls the comings and goings of his bustling West End music shop during the late 60s, when Fleetwood Mac ascended to global stardom – and took his amps along for the ride…
What was the Orange shop like in the early days? “I opened our shop on New Compton Street in 1968, and I built a studio underneath. We were sort of long-haired hippie types [laughs], which was conducive to what was happening back then in London. Guys like Marc Bolan, Eric Clapton and Paul Kossoff would sit in the shop chatting and jamming all day long. It was part of the whole thing that was happening. They’d come in, take a guitar off the wall and plug in. It was all happening back then.”
What kind of gear did you sell? “When I first started, nobody would supply us, so we had to deal in secondhand equipment, which made us popular, because none of those guys would be seen dead with a brand-new shiny guitar! They liked the older, more beaten-up guitars and we had things like ’59 Les Pauls on the wall – I wish I had even one of them now. Gibson Les Pauls weren’t worth a lot of money in those days, and they weren’t everybody’s cup of tea to begin with. The Les Paul was a heavy guitar and a lot of people would go for something else, like a 335, especially blues guitarists. Peter definitely was one of the first to popularise the Les Paul for his kind of blues.”
Did you see Peter Green gigging locally? “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac were one of my favourite acts. I used to go and see them everywhere. I loved them. Peter Green was an incredible guitarist. You could see he felt every note that he played. I saw him in large pubs and small halls. There were so many little clubs in London where big bands would play. You’d get these famous bands who wanted to play these little clubs, because it was the in-thing to do. A lot of careers were launched in those clubs. Magazine writers would always hang out there and a buzz would go around if they were really good.”
Was Peter a regular in the Orange shop? “In those days, Peter used to live fairly near to the shop; he used to come in and hang out and play guitar. If he was sat in the shop and somebody wanted to sit down and play, he’d sit down and play with them. He’d talk to people, but he would never talk a lot. He was very quiet – a man of few words, you might say, but he could really talk with his guitar. I got the impression he was always thinking. Obviously, music was his life and he was always looking and listening for sounds.
“If he liked something, he wouldn’t always say, ‘I love it!’ He’d just say, ‘Yeah, that’s all right.’ And ,‘That’s okay.’ When we started making Orange equipment, I said, ‘Would you like to try it?’ so he tried it and said, ‘Yeah, I like it, Cliff.’ He never really talked that much, but with regards to music, he really knew what he was doing. He was a great guitarist. He was a natural and he had his own style.”
How did you go about designing the gear for Fleetwood Mac’s backline? “Mat Mathias [of Matamp] was alive then and in the very early days he used to build our amplifiers. Peter liked sustain, but he also liked a clean sound. He didn’t
“Peter used to live fairly near to the [Orange] shop; he used to come in and
hang out and play guitar… He was a man of few words, but he could really talk with his guitar”– Cliff Cooper
want it too distorted. Marshall had a fairly distorted sound, because the output transformer, I believe, was a mismatch. You can get more sustain with distortion, but we worked hard to get a sound that he wanted. We got it right and he loved the sound of it. Eventually, we built him a set of OR200 amps and speakers. Boy, those amps were loud! I don’t think there was a louder amp around. They were 200 watts each. And, of course, there were the OA Reverb units. They were one of Mat’s designs. He worked with Keith Emerson on that spring reverb unit using Hammond springs. We modified it slightly to make it sound sweeter.”
To your knowledge, did Peter ever record using Orange equipment? “They recorded Albatross just down the road from our shop at the CBS studios. Mike Vernon produced it. I don’t know whether the reverb came from the Orange reverb unit or the desk, but I’m almost certain they used an Orange amp, because I remember we sent one over to CBS studios when Fleetwood Mac were in there. I wasn’t there at the recording, so I can’t say for sure, but it sounds like it to me.”
Is it fair to say Fleetwood Mac were responsible for popularising Orange amps, initially? “Fleetwood Mac were really the first band to ever use Orange equipment. We were lucky. When Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac took our gear to America, it launched us in the States, and soon after Stevie Wonder used Orange to record Superstition [in 1972]. That launched us all over the world.
“We’d kitted the Fleetwood Mac band out with a complete set of equipment, but their management hadn’t paid us for it, and I was living from hand to mouth back then. They’d had a No 1 with Albatross and they were just about to go to the States when their management said, ‘If you would like us to take the Orange gear with us’ – rather than hire other amp brands out there
– ‘then can you cover the cost of the air freight?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, because I’ve got bills to pay.’
“In the end, it came down to us spinning a coin. They said, ‘If we win, you let us off the price of the gear. If you win, you just pay for the air freight.’ We spun the coin and I lost, so I let them off the cost of the equipment. I was almost in tears walking home, and the truth is I had to resort to cleaning cars to pay the wages. But, as it turned out, the air freight ended up being about three times the cost of the gear! If I’d have won the toss, I’d have been bankrupt!” https://orangeamps.com
“Fleetwood Mac were really the first band to ever use Orange equipment. When they took our gear to America, it launched us in the States”– Cliff Cooper