Beth Orton
17-18 Jan ,
Around Town,
Blues,
Book Early,
Folk,
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Sydney Festival
Critics' choice
The 90s folktronica pioneer comes our way for Sydney Festival
First published on . Updated on 2 Dec 2011.
UK singer/songwriter Beth Orton is one of several musical highlights on this year’s Sydney Festival bill, not least of all because of her six-year absence from the limelight. Her two shows in the city are central to a small tour of the country, and will be a world-exclusive airing of her new material. We speak with Beth from Portland, Oregon, where she is gleefully busy in the studio, putting the finishing touches on her greatly anticipated new album – which is due not a moment too soon.
“I’m really happy to be asked to come back to Australia again. I’ve taken a significant step away from doing music professionally, so doing my first foray back into things in Australia is pretty special,” she beams.
Beth was last seen on our shores at the Sydney Festival in 2006, just prior to releasing her last album, Comfort Of Strangers. Shortly after this her unofficial hiatus began, and whilst her fans have had to endure a prolonged wait, it appears that their patience will have been a virtue once she returns.
“I got pregnant pretty much as soon as I released [the album], so once I’d had my daughter I stepped out of the scene for a while,” she explains, “But this time has been one of the most prolific and productive times of my whole music career. I have ended up making more music than I did before.”
Whilst motherhood was always going to result in a career break for Beth, was it always her intention to be away for so long?
“Not really, no. I was waiting for the right feeling, and until that came I didn’t really want to venture forth. I did find having a child all encompassing but I didn’t find it to be the death of creativity, in fact I found it to be the re-birth. I felt much more inspired being outside of the industry rather than inside of it. I did make me reassess what I was doing and what it is that really matters to me,” she reflects.
“Having a child stopped me in my tracks for a while, but it didn’t change me irrevocably. It made me hungrier for the essential nature of what I do. I love writing songs, I love singing them, and just recently, I’ve enjoyed recording them as well. It’s been wonderful to step outside of it all. I feel like I’ve waited a long time to write this record and stand on my own two feet.”
Whilst she is obviously no stranger to playing solo, Beth’s forthcoming shows will see her without the type of backing band who have often accompanied her on tour in the past. Given that she was chosen to play these dates, this wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d have wanted to do so, but Beth will instead take to the stage on her own and play acoustically. What was the reasoning for this decision?
“One of the things I did whilst I was away was work with [the now sadly deceased folk musician] Bert Jansch a lot. As soon as I got pregnant I started working with him and I started to play much more solo acoustic. The only gigs I’ve been doing over the last few years have been very low key and always on my own, but I hadn’t realised the effect it had had on my playing until going into the studio recently,” she explains.
“Whilst I am recording with other musicians, I think that a lot of what I do now is going to be based around me and a guitar. I’ve realised that I’ve learnt much more than I thought I had from working with Bert and how that’s influenced my writing now, and I’m doing a lot of these new songs on this tour. Before I started to record my intention was to do as much as I could solo acoustic, and whilst I did end up working with an amazing drummer and bass player, it’s still at the core of what I’m doing right now.”
And how will this affect the performance of the back catalogue?
“I’ve arranged my old songs so that they now fit just me, and I think what’s really interesting is that people actually really get to hear the song - I’ve stripped away everything that isn’t necessary. Personally, I love hearing it when other people do it and I really enjoy performing it this way myself. I also feel it’s a really lovely introduction to the new songs.”
Some artists get sulky with it comes to playing their most well known tracks, but thankfully, Beth has no such pretence.
“I don’t hold back on the old favourites. It’s really hard to know what to choose but at the end of the day there are certain songs that people are going to want to hear and I don’t have any qualms in playing them," she declares. "There’ll definitely be a selection from all the records and a selection of the new songs, so it’ll be a pretty well rounded set list.”
Words by Stuart Holmes
