Extra Curricular Activity

Having originally split in ‘04, brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll reunited to play some gigs in ‘09, and eventually found themselves working on new material to include in the live shows, which in turn led to the creation of Wonky.

“It was actually like working on our first two albums, really carefree,” muses Phil. “We were aware that we didn’t want to get caught up in what made us stop in the first place, which was not feeling it really. We did a bit of a plan actually – a visual representation of how we wanted the album to go. It started off like a big bang, an explosion, and then it went into an area where we were trying to capture a certain sense of beauty I suppose. It was just something we could turn to in the studio, because we have that fear of being uninspired.
“Take a track like ‘Stringy Acid’. On the diagram that was represented by a place where you fell into a time-warp. So you’d go back into time, revamp that track and then as we were coming out of the time-warp, we revamped ‘Satan’, which was a track that’s always had huge relevance live. So the diagram sort of followed that general direction. We didn’t follow it to the letter, but it provided plenty of ideas.”
Orbital released a string of acclaimed albums throughout the early to mid-’90s, and perhaps none was more glowingly reviewed than 1996’s In Sides. One of its finest tracks was the eerie ‘The Box’, accompanied by a stunning stop-motion video starring Tilda Swinton, these days best known for appearing in films like The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and The Chronicles Of Narnia series.
“I think the director knew her from film school or somewhere,” recalls Phil. “She was fantastic when she did her thing, so good. We did meet her, and it was all stop-animation, so it took ages to film. She was moving millimetre by millimetre. We went to the shoot and met her in the middle of the night, she’s great. The video totally suited that track, it’s one of my favourite ones that we’ve ever done.”
Orbital spent quite a bit of time in the film world in the ‘90s, as they also reworked the theme for the big screen version of The Saint, which afforded them the opportunity to meet the star of the original TV series, Roger Moore.
“It wasn’t a very good film, but it was good fun,” Phil notes. “I loved the original, and then when we were making the video for our track we got Roger Moore involved. He was fantastic. We were filming in the East End of London and there were all these people complaining about us blocking off the streets. Then Roger Moore arrives and goes and chats them all up – they loved it. You just saw jaws dropping all over the place!”
Orbital, of course, took their name from London’s orbital motorway, the M25, near which many raves were held in the early days of acid house. Given that the Hartnolls actually played many of these events, I wonder what was there most unusual experience when they were part of the scene?
“The most bizarre one was when we played at a rave on top of a swimming-pool,” remembers Phil. “There were stairs at the side of the pool and a platform on top of that, which was were the organiser wanted us to set up. Then a storm started and the lightning was striking these pylons nearby – and there we were on top of this metal tower! I turned to my brother and said, ‘I think we’ve got to get off here!’”