MUSIC INTERVIEW: Alex Paterson, The Orb

He is the king of prog rock guitar, they are ambient house pioneers whose music has regularly been compared to Pink Floyd.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about the new collaboration between David Gilmour and The Orb is that it's the first time that they have worked together.




The record is called Metallic Spheres, an epic symphony of guitar improvisation, beats, samples and dreamlike electronica, that's finally coming out, after some delay, this month.




Orb mainstay Alex Paterson explains the album began life as a Gilmour solo project to raise the profile of Gary McKinnon, the 44-year-old Scottish computer hacker fighting extradition to the USA on charges of illegally breaking into more than 90 computer networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defence and the US Air Force.




McKinnon's lawyers contest that he has Asperger's syndrome and should not face a court in Virginia.




The guitarist had in mind a version of the Graham Nash song Chicago; his producer, Martin 'Youth' Glover had other ideas and telephoned his old friend Paterson asking him if he'd like to be involved.




"Mr Youth can be a bit of a space cake when he wants to be," jokes Paterson. "For some reason (David Gilmour) says he was turning up then he wasn't. Whoops, that's The Orb going on again. That was just the beginning of it."




Eventually Gilmour did begin jamming in the studio on his lap steel and electric guitar. Youth added bass and keyboards and Paterson took the results away to manipulate.




"We were supplied with so many guitar parts, we thought let's try some different beats with different guitar parts," says Paterson. "With some restructuring we thought, 'We've got a bit of an album going on'."




For a while the record was only 40 minutes long, "like an old-school vinyl album", then Youth and Paterson decided to expand it, adding string parts and drumming.




"It ended up as 10 pieces of music which we put together as two," says Paterson. "It becomes symphonic in its arrangements."




Spontaneity was key.




"We wanted to change people's perspective of The Orb, we're not just a techno band or a dance band," says Paterson. "Well, we were. but in the ambient world we're very established and well liked too.




"We were doing gigs with Kraftwerk a few years ago and Karl (Bartos, Kraftwerk's longtime percussionist) said, 'We wanted to come and see you play'."




(Bartos also wanted a photograph with The Orb but when he saw the shot he quipped "There are no little fluffy clouds in the photo. We have to go outside.")


Gilmour was less certain. "It took a lot of persuading for David to release the album, to be brutally honest," says Paterson. "We took him by surprise, we caught him unawares."




Still, relent he did, though not without insisting that the samples used on the record were well concealed and strictly above-board.


"It's a much more organic album for that reason," admits Paterson. "Youth has done a supreme job on it. He has taken it and polished it and made the whole thing sound more organic.




"It took a year to get the go-ahead," he confides. "Up to a month ago we did not know if it was going to come out. That's rock'n'roll.


"It's making me feel like a spring chicken working with Gilmour," quips 50-year-old Paterson about a collaborator 14 years his senior.




The finished project is very much "a dream come true for Youth", says Paterson, though he himself is not perhaps the avid Pink Floyd obsessive that some might imagine. "I love some of the albums," he says. "Meddle and Echoes 10 out of 10, Wish You Were Here I like. Dark Side of the Moon is overplayed."




Paterson is more a fan of German electronic music. "Neu! – what the hell was that?" he says. "Eno was doing stuff with Cluster. (Cluster engineer] Conny Plank was the producer for a Killing Joke album. As their roadie I got to hang out with him and set stuff up. That was a bit of a grounding for me, seeing 'this is where Eno got his ideas from' which was unbeknown to me at the time."




It was three things that got Paterson into ambient music 30 years ago. "The Rhr in Germany, Music For Films by Brian Eno and a tab of acid. I can't really explain it any better than that.




"We were stuck in a block of flats after a gig in Essen. Killing Joke had just signed to EG (Brian Eno's record label]. I was riflng through somebody's records for what to put on. I found this record on the EG label and wondered 'What this?' It was Music For Films. I put it on and stood outside on the balcony watching all these furnaces pouring molten lead into the sky. It's like the ICI works in Middlesbrough. There's something beautiful about it, but you know it's not good."




All being well there will now be "three or four big gigs" to accompany the release of Metallic Spheres in London, Los Angeles and Ibiza. "London will be after Christmas," says Paterson. "There's going to be some holographic imagery. I'm working with people in so many different centres at the moment."