Captain’s Log,
Star date: 05/10/2022
These are the voyages of the starship Dust & Grooves.
Our mission: to seek out strange new worlds of speech and sound with Alex Paterson of the Orb.
Alex Paterson formed the Orb in 1988 with Jimmy Cauty, releasing several singles on the Wau Mr Modo label before parting ways, as Cauty continued his career with The KLF alongside Bill Drummond. Alex has piloted the good ship Orb for the last 35 years through a succession of labels and collaborators, most notably Kris ‘Thrash’ Weston, Thomas Fehlmann, and currently, Michael Rendell. Originally pioneering the ‘ambient house’ and chill out resurgence of the early-1990s, the Orb navigated between bass-shaking dub, pounding techno and all points in between—featuring guests such as Lee Perry, David Gilmore, and Roger Eno along the way.
Residing in Battersea for many years, Alex settled in the South London suburb of West Norwood over a decade ago and set up a streaming radio station, the West Norwood Broadcasting Company (WNBC) using old friend Michael Johnson’s nearby Book & Record Bar as a base. Most weeks he can be found there, DJing in some capacity for a variety of shows like the monthly New Moon sessions, the regular Thursday show alongside Michael and George Holt, or the Sunday Cakelab excursions. Dust & Grooves thought this would make the ideal venue to meet and go through some of Alex’s collection, some of which is sequestered around the building.
Our first task was to descend into the heaving basement of the shop, off limits to the public, to rifle and retrieve several boxes that hadn’t seen the light of day for some time. The first port of call was a tight nook under the stairs where several boxes and bags nestled nearly out of reach necessitating some Twister-like moves to extract. Pulling out one particular metal flight case from under a pile of others, Alex quickly checked the contents before passing it out to us as we formed a short chain gang to lift it to safety from its hidden corner. Heading next door into the main basement, rows of tightly packed shelving in a grid-like formation filled the room with just enough space for a person to squeeze through, each packed with LPs or 45s. Likewise, books were everywhere, piled high in boxes, lining more shelves, or balanced precariously in teetering piles up to eye level. No surface was wasted, only a narrow trail on the floor between the jungle jumble of audio and literature is untouched. At the far wall lay an undefined space where flight-cased turntables jostled with more record shelving and unidentified, forgotten obscurities. Alex pulled vinyl from every crevice, delighting in rediscovering previously lost releases that had made their way down there over the years.
We lug the boxes up an equally cramped staircase, trying not to dislodge any of the towering piles of LPs and books lining the stairwell, stacked on each ascending step. One small snag could disturb the vinyl burial ground, causing a media avalanche to cascade down below. Once on ground level we park ourselves in an unobtrusive corner of the shop and prepare to open the box of delights, coffee machine hissing away in the far corner as the owner, Michael, serves beverages to punters wandering in and out, largely unaware of the treasure being unearthed nearby.
“I’ve got a load of records, I'm terrible, I’ve got a lock-up full of records as well, which I'm too frightened to go down to.”
Where are we, Alex? And what were we looking for in the basement earlier?
We’re in the Book and Record Bar in West Norwood, South London, looking at some records of mine. We’ve gone on a discovery. I’ve just pulled out my old tour box that I used to have lots of samples in for when we used to play things live off vinyl. I’ve got a load of records, I’m terrible, I’ve got a lock-up full of records as well, which I’m too frightened to go down to. [Looking through a bag of records in one corner] Little things, like still-sealed U.F.Orbs… a Zulu Warriors Warrior Dub, which came out on Wau Mr Modo back in the late-1980s. “Assassin”, “Blue Room” part one and two…
So what’s in front of you at the moment? Is this just a general bag of bits?
Sample boxes, I’m just looking at the stickers, “Narita cargo hold – security checked”, it’s not an understatement when I say it’s been everywhere.
How long have you had this stuff down there?
Ten years.
And do you just keep adding, or does it come and go?
It comes and goes. This is actually quite a nice little revelation, that I’ve got loads of good records down there, which I didn’t think I didn’t have, but some of them do actually end up down there when they should be upstairs. These are good to talk about as well, and I’ve got some acetates. So, we got one box here, got the other one over there; we’ll have a bit of a field day.
What do you take out (to DJ with) now? CDs?
Mainly, yeah, CDs and memory sticks. Memory sticks I’m trying really hard not to be doing, I’ve done memory stick gigs, and they’re really terrible. You get really bored.
Could you give us a bit of context for this first box, Alex?
From looking at it, I’d stick my head out and say ’92 which is thirty years ago, at the very least. I did have a box of records that I used to take down to Land of Oz [legendary late ’80s chill out club], every Monday night and play six turntables and do an ambient thing. The box of records has been with me ever since I was a DJ, but this box itself is really one of the first boxes I took out on an old Orb tour. The proof is in the fact that we’ve just pulled this out from under the stairs, and it’s been down there for ten years. Prior to that, I probably wouldn’t have opened this up since maybe 2004 latest, during the Bicycles and Tricycles tour. It’s traveled, it’s been around the world—I can tell you that now and you can see with the stickers, it’s got USA, Japan, and it’s even got stickers on its bum, you don’t see that very often.
So this is a bit like opening the Orb Ark of the Covenant?
Yeah, well… let’s get on with it…
1 Comment
Trackback: My Homepage