Barking: with dub innovator Lee “Scratch” Perry and Thomas Fehlmann
an Orb record, very eclectic. I was really happy with the German side of what we were doing musically, although in Britain they were a bit dismissive. How did it go down in Germany? Not as well as I’d hoped, to be honest…
METALLIC SPHERES FEATURING DAVID GILMOURCOLUMBIA, 2010 Although billed as a momentous mind-meld between The Orb and one of their key inspirations, Paterson and Gilmour never actually met
Pink Floyd were very much aware of us in a positive way, Rick Wright more so than David Gilmour. And I went to school with Guy Pratt, bless him. We put a bit of guitar from Wish You Were Here on the Peel session version of “A Huge Ever Pulsating Brain…” and they gave us permission because Guy asked them. But Metallic Spheres has got nothing whatsoever to do with Guy Pratt. It has got something to do with Mr Glover [ Youth]…
David Gilmour goes to Youth’s studio in Wandsworth and Youth tells me he’s not turning up today, so I don’t bother. I get there the next day and there’s all these photographs of Gilmour wandering around the garden. That’s how sneaky Youth was! [ Gilmour and I] have crossed paths in interviews, but not in the studio. He did some guitar riffs for one or two tunes, but then there were some tunes that he wasn’t even on that became part of the album. This is [ what it’s like] working with Youth, where he gets so many people involved. I’m not being dismissive of it, but I wasn’t the main cog in this project.
THE ORBSERVER IN THE STAR HOUSE FEATURING LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRYCOOKING VINYL, 2012 Another hero corralled, and this time Paterson ensures he captures every moment by mic’ing up the Upsetter as he wanders the fields near his Switzerland home
That was a labour of love. I grew up as a young kid listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry, so to be in the same room as him was like, “Wow!” And for him to actually call me Alex was something else – I’ve got to the pinnacle, I’ve reached my nirvana! Being his DJ at festivals around the world for six years, I got his trust. And his wife was SwissGerman like Thomas, so that was a bit of luck. We arranged for him to turn up at a studio to do what we thought was four tracks. Six days later, we had two albums done, it was insane. It was hard work, but it was also very fulfilling.
The reason why he’s the Upsetter is that he didn’t like me for two days, then he loved me. He loved Thomas, then he didn’t like Thomas. In amongst it all he’d be talking to the animals. Every day there’d be a different outfit: all in yellow with a yellow wig, or all red with a red wig, then he’d go and chase the bulls about in the field. Him just talking was something else. One of the most poignant things was when I was watching the sunset with him, and he was talking about how there’s no racism in shadows.
MOONBUILDING 2703AD
KOMPAKT, 2015 An interplanetary love story underpins The Orb’s most focused LP, though Thomas Fehlmann’s days with the band are numbered
Originally it was going to be an opera. The whole idea was that the Earth and the moon were like Romeo and Juliet, this never-ending love story. We were gonna do it at the Covent Garden Opera House with the Mutoid Waste Company. This was in the 2000s, before the Tories came in and scrapped the idea of anyone having a good time. So they lost the funding and gave us our music back. Moonbuilding was going to be a bit more classical, but we moved it away from that and it became an electronic album. After that, we did Chill Out, World!, which was like an extension of Moonbuilding; I don’t think Thomas and I could have gone any further after that, to be honest.
PRISM COOKING VINYL, 2023 Third album from the Paterson/ Rendell partnership secretes several out-and-out pop bangers amid some classic cosmic wibbling
The fact that we’ve got an album called
Prism coming out on the 50th anniversary of
The Dark Side Of The Moon? It’s a coincidence! Youth has come in and done bass on three reggae tunes, which I’ve tried to keep as authentic as possible – my biggest worry is being a white band trying to sound black. I’d rather that we are The Orb and it transcends colour. But it’s nice to have a big fat heavy bassline. Andy Cain is a lifelong friend who’s been doing amazing music for years, he’s on [ Round One’s 1994 deep house classic] “I’m Your Brother” and he was a session vocalist for a load of Brit bands in the ’90s. He sings on “Tiger”, named after my son. It’s quite soulful and poppy, and Gaudi plays some amazing chords. I thought that should be the single but the label chose “Living In Recycled Times”. I’m wrong and they’re right, because it’s got on the 6 Music Playlist, which The Orb have never done – even if they’ve lopped off all the good bits from the nine-minute album version so it’s just a drumbeat and a vocal…
Prism is released by Cooking Vinyl on April 28