Poetic Orton in Tassie
Beth Orton says making music is like cooking: you taste it, leave it for a minute, then come back later to see if it needs seasoning.
If anyone has mastered the formula, it would surely be the stalwart English musician, once known as a pioneer of a genre then dubbed “folktronica” – and famed for her classics such as She Cries Your Name.
While the industry has changed massively since Orton first attracted international acclaim in the 1990s, the softly spoken singer-songwriter with the haunting, poetic lyrics seems to have maintained a connection to her roots.
Orton is currently en route to Hobart, to perform in Tasmania for the first time in her 30-year career, with audiences to be treated to her eighth album, Weather Alive.
Speaking to the Mercury, she said she’d heard a lot about Tasmania.
“I’ve heard you’ve got an amazing museum – and on an island, which sounds really intriguing,” she said.
“I’ve heard it’s culturally quite an interesting area, an interesting part of Australia. I’m excited to come for sure.”
She said Weather Alive, which she produced herself, was a “deep record” that had a “lot of depth” and took a long time to write.
“It’s like a cooking analogy,” she said. “If you were cooking, you keep tasting it, and then you’d need to leave it for a minute, and then you come back to it. It’s slow cooking – so I just add a bit, hang on, tweak that, until it tastes right.”
Orton has collaborated with some of the world’s most incredible artists – from the Chemical Brothers to Sinead O’Connor, Patti Smith and Nick Cave.
She said these types of experiences had always come about “very naturally”.
“Every collaboration I’ve ever done has been born of a friendship on the whole, or something very spontaneous.”
Orton’s music has retained its rawness and realness over the decades, but she’s mindful of the role that technology has played in creating her sound.
“Technology helped me make this record. So that’s funny, isn’t it, that it’s got such an organic sound,” she said.
But she’s also aware of the troubles of contemporary life, “addictive” social media platforms, and invasive technologies.
“I think what I’ve learned to do is just switch off. I don’t watch telly very much, I try to keep off social media as much as possible. I have a thing that I’m lucky that I wasn’t more successful, so in a funny way I got to exist under the radar of the modern day,” she said.
“You saw how people were – the more successful they got, the more kind of twisted their lives seemed to get.
“I made sure I never got successful enough to have that issue, but I seem to have been able to keep working and doing what I love, which I think is kind of rare now.”
Beth Orton will perform at the Odeon on Friday at 7.30pm.