“They just seem to keep popping up, don’t they?”
For many people, myself included, no finer example of the Orb’s work exists than their UK number one album U.F.Orb and it is certainly true to say that it remains one of the most enduring, dense and nostalgic albums in their canon. But the Orb were never a band to labour under one formula for very long, partially a product of the ever changing line-up and partly a concerted effort on the part of founder Alex Paterson to deliberately overturn, surprise, even shock both fans and critics alike. Thus U.F.Orb is yet another singular entity, a mere six tracks (and no I don’t really count “Sticky End” as a track given that it’s only fifty seconds of squelching noises and segues directly in from “Majestic” anyway) representing them at the height of their power and influence.
Indeed the unique flavour of each Orb album makes being a fan something of a challenge, and their later album releases were often a source of controversy, derision and confusion. Even this reviewer isn’t immune to such prejudices. Like much of the public and critics at the time, Pomme Fritz had me gawping in disbelief, confusion and even irritation at the time of its release, whilst the unalloyed genius that permeates every last second of Orbus Terrarum sailed completely over my head too. Furthermore, I really couldn’t stand the majority of Orblivion when it was released, believing it to be the beginning of the end for the band. And if anything, U.F.Orb is to blame for this. It became such an important part of many Orb followers’ lives that what they really wanted was more; more of this please. Now!
Since listening to the radio was generally the only time one would ever hear the work of the Orb in advance of an album or single’s actual release in the dusty days before internet leaks and website preview samples, I would regularly tune in once again to John Peel’s frighteningly eclectic radio shows until early in the morning, longing for more news of another Orb release. In the meantime I had been busy scouting out as much old and collectible additional Orb material as I could: singles, EP’s, Peel Sessions etc.
Finally one night, John decided to change my life yet again by playing their new single “Blue Room.” And we’re not talking about the radio edit or even the album version here, but the full blown forty minute epic, albeit broken into two parts on the 12″ vinyl promo format he presumably had available to him. I was convinced that I had found my musical nirvana. Never had I been left in such anticipation of a single or an album release. After a wait that seemed to go on forever, the two-part box-set was announced in Melody Maker and the NME. For weeks I would listen to nothing else (save for the occasional play of Adventures…), and Paterson and Weston even appeared on UK TV chart show Top of the Pops, arriving on stage in space suits, and then simply sitting and playing chess in front of a monitor displaying their psychedelic video.
Then it was finally announced officially, including some pant-wettingly exiciting news about sealed deluxe vinyl formats. It was clear that special arrangements would need to be made for this auspicious occasion and I can still vividly recall travelling to London with friends on the day of release so that I could get to a “Chain With No Name” record store to buy copies of the exclusive limited edition double vinyl LP that came sealed in a blue (green for the US) PVC cover with bonus album “the Orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld: patterns and textures”. To my surprise the album had shot straight to number one in the UK album charts amid a frenzy of press coverage and on arriving at HMV Oxford Street we were greeted by the sight of a massive, twinkling model of the album cover’s U.F.Orb star that literally filled the front window. Multiple formats of the album duly purchased, we returned home and the train journey seemed to take forever.
As soon as one hears the chittering of crickets and the soft foghorn emerging from the ether in the opening seconds of “O.O.B.E” (I love how this song should be called oh-oh-bee-ee or indeed “Out of Body Experience” and yet you just can’t help calling it oobe because it sounds better!) there’s really no escape from U.F.Orbs guile. As close to Adventures… as U.F.Orb ever sounds again, “O.O.B.E” sounds like a bridge between two eras: the wispy, panoramic ambience of that former album is here in abundance amongst a wealth of samples (referencing the writings of Sir Karl Popper). The unlikely confluence of worryingly “new age” pan pipes and flutes that flutter across the piece (fortunately not straying into dubious territory), rhythmic drummings, exotic bird calls and most oddly the sounds of snooker balls knocking together somehow manage to gel in a genuinely outlandish experience.
One of the joys of a good Orb album are the “That’s where it’s from!” sample moments, (who on earth knows where that “I want blood! Hahahahaha!” exclamation comes from), but few were quite as buried or bizarre as the moment in the album’s title track, where you can hear strains of Woody Allen’s 70’s slapstick sci-fi comedy Sleeper, specifically the moment wgere an extremely disoriented Miles Monroe finds himself revived from a hundred years of suspended animation in a futuristic laboratory to the sound of alarms, and then tries to eat a white surgical glove. The track begins by drenching the listener with glittering stardust and cascades of water as a characteristically mysterious synth swirl enters the fray along with black ops helicopters and echoing vocal samples before the album’s first slamming bass line emerges from the chaos.
I need to pay a quick visit to The Blue Room…
Then we come to “Blue Room,” the only single to be released from the album. I’ll admit I have never found the version that appears on the album to be substantial or complete enough to bother with, and will frequently either skip the track completely or replace it in some playlist or other with the full 39’58” version of the track. “Blue Room” is in many ways one of the ultimate expressions of the Orb’s genius, released in this epic form as a two fingered salute to the newly introduced regulation that a single would no longer be chart eligible if it exceeded forty minutes in length. It seems that we in Britain didn’t deserve any more than this (and how dare we have the gall to expect otherwise) and the beginning of the slippery slope that would herald a series of additional and revised rules so complicated that it reduced the chart eligible CD single to a limp-wristed two-track affair that effectively killed the singles market completely.
“Blue Room” is the template for the entire album really, a summation of all that it was about, referring to an alleged above top-secret room somewhere in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that was said to house salvaged alien technology and relics. The full version features the sort of extended but beautifully crafted opening build-up that most ambient works would kill for. The more you listen to this full version of “Blue Room” the more it becomes obvious that the full running time is one hundred percent necessary. Nothing is over-extended here, nothing laboured or self-indulgent, this is almost an album in it’s own right. Samples abound once again, often in a much more subtle and roundly-integrated way than on Adventures… We get alarming air-raid sirens mixed with the calming sounds of the sea crashing on the shore, NASA radio communications, babies crying, Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to JFK, Thomas the tank engine creepily saying goodbye, The Clangers, “Launch ship in Orbit Fischerman!!”, “Good! Now I”ll activate it”s weapons, hahahahahahaha!,” church bells… the list goes on.
Another of the Orb’s great pounding beats kicks in along with the beguiling accompaniment of rhythmic bubbling, and then collaborator Jah Wobble’s first and most magnificent bass line underscores the whole thing. It is simply sublime. We even have a vocal component here too, as a female vocalist softly breathes a repeated “Ah-ooh-wah-ooh-wah-oooh-waaah-ooh-wah-waaah” at us. The distant glissando guitar work of collaborator Steve Hillage can be heard in what is effectively the second part of the epic, demarcated my Jah Wobble’s second shuddering bass line, and the piece begins to fragment until it finally dissolves into the ether ending in a sample that would later kick-off their Orbus Terrarum album, a final goodbye to this era of the Orb.
The album cuts off at this point, and all of a sudden we’re listening to journalist and comedian Victor Lewis-Smith making a crank call to an oblivious security guard at the BBC asking him to pass on a message to Haile Selassie. “Towers of Dub” was not strictly speaking a new track, having appeared in different incarnations on both the Orb In Dub EP and in a Mad Professor version on the Blue Room single, but the album version is easily one of the best (and strangest) versions available. At the time I was unaware that Woody Allen’s Sleeper had been the inspiration for the band’s name, so the hysterical repeated “Woof! Woof! Woof! Hello, I’m Rags!” was another revelation when I saw the film for the first time not long after acquiring the album. This version is quite beautiful as the delicate chiming of synth bells coil themselves around a thundering bass riff, Max Parney’s harmonica improvisations, scouring, reverberating fx and skanking dub.
“Close Encounters” has always been my personal favourite on U.F.Orb. So simple yet so utterly compelling, this is the much-needed turbo-boost that builds up the album’s momentum and mystery once more. A massive bass-drone, the whorl of mysterious engines and alien whispering, the endless ringing of an unanswered telephone, cascading keys and arpeggiated melodies create a relentless energy that is impossible not to get caught up in. When you hear this track its hard to imagine that this album is now nearly eighteen years old. Its closing two and a half minutes are a serene eastern journey that can easily hypnotise or lull to sleep and unprepared listener.
In case that has happened we’re instructed quite loudly to “Wake up!” in the opening seconds of “Majestic” and the mood shifts dramatically once more. Named after the Majestic 12 committee whose alleged purpose was to investigate UFO activity, “Majestic”‘s cheerful optimism, sparkling melodies, rainbow colours and light-hearted samples have always confused me. On an album that explores the mysterious and unexplained in a humorous yet consonantly dark and arcane manner, here you have a bouncy, up-beat and trance-like celebration of it, but without the album losing any of it’s cohesion, the dub vibe that colours the rest of the album having been woven into the mix. It’s a brilliant move as the album reaches its “Sticky End” becasue it leaves you with a feeling of elation as it sinks into a swamp of bubbling, farting, squelching goo.
This was the second Orb album to receive the Anniversary Special Edition treatment and comes packaged again in a deluxe digipak with a booklet containing exclusive artwork and the first essay by Kris Needs (a huge improvement on the tedious and frequently inaccurate liner notes featured in the booklet for Adventures…). What we end up with is arguably one of the weakest bonus packages in the re-issue series. While there may not be the wealth of additional material from this period that there was from the Adventures… days, there’s an awful lot of really great stuff that could have been included on this special edition that is sadly missing. Perhaps this is a testament to the strength of the original material on U.F.Orb that the tracks on the bonus disc simply seem less than essential.
The alternate version of “O.O.B.E” mixed by Andy Hughes presented here is both overly similar and inferior. The album version simply does everything that this mix does, and it does it better with greater subtlety and finesse. It would have been nicer if the disc included a version closer to that heard on the Peel Session with all the additional melodies and samples that came with it. Probably the most worthy inclusion is the “Towers of Dub (Ambient Mix)” previously only available on the ‘Orb In Dub’ EP. Featuring two of the longest samples ever to appear on an Orb record it represents a kind of bridge between Adventures… and U.F.Orb both in terms of its style and the fact that versions of it appear both in the Adventures… and U.F.Orb years.
The less said about the “Blue Room (Ambient & Mark Angelos)” mix the better, whilst “Majestic (Mix 1)” simply goes overboard with the reuse of samples to the point where it becomes annoying. Perhaps the “Milwall mix” would have been a better choice. “Close Encounters (Ambient Mix 1)” on the other hand is a more thoughtful, if not overly different, ambient take on the track with tribal drums oscillating in the background replacing the more conventional beats and rhythms of the original.
Ah, “Assassin.” Now this was an oddity wasn’t it? Looking back on it now “Assassin” is a clear indicator of the radically different direction The Orb was about to take with their next releases. It doesn’t bear many similarities to the rest of the U.F.Orb material and indeed at that time sounded like nothing else on earth. The great shame of it all is that the “Oasis of Rhythms” mix has been usurped here by the good but frankly inferior “Chocolate Hills of Bohol.” It’s a nice version, but it doesn’t have the insistent drive and character of the original or even the amazing “Another Live Version” mixes.
This deluxe edition does have one unforgivable failing, however. Two words: “Blue Room.” The version presented on U.F.Orb is a hefty seventeen minutes in length, but it simply doesn’t cut the mustard. Effectively lopping off the first half of the original 39’58” version, this “Blue Room” omits whole chunks of wonderful, atmospheric build-up. The Adventures… deluxe edition contained three discs so surely it was not inconceivable that the same could have been true for this edition too? It’s almost criminal that the original, full-length version of Blue Room has not been re-mastered and included in the set as it represents the Orb at their zenith; an unequalled masterpiece.
All in all, some very strange choices have been made with the extra tracks on the second disc in this set. One can understand the dilemma. Do you include mixes that have genuinely not been available before (or were extremely hard to get hold of even when they were) to please fans and completists, or do you include the “best of the rest” that was available at the time to form a fully rounded package of great material to please everyone else? Given that this set also remasters the tracks, one would have preferred the latter but what we got was the former and it ends up being rather unsatisfactory for both parties.
U.F.Orb remains one of The Orb’s greatest and most affecting works, a concept album free from pretension and repetition that was so accessible that it saw them at the height of their commercial success. For many of those who purchased it on its original release, it simply became one of the most important albums they would ever own. It sounds wonderful on this remastered package, which is justification enough to purchase it. It’s just a shame about the lacklustre extras.
Join me at the dinner table next time as we tuck into a rather greasy plate of Pomme Fritz. [Listen & Purchase]
