On the new Blur album, 13, we find our hero, Damon Albarn work-shopping his grief over the end of a relationship, and the once fey indie-kid guitarist, Graham Coxon slowly but irrevocably morphing into Todd Rundgren (which is not half as bad as it sounds). It's not that we weren't prepared for such lo-fi-jinks after the "artiness" of the band's last album, it's just that it's difficult to square with their cheeky cock-ernee, jellied eels image of the middle of the decade - not to mention the Damon Albarn quote that when he heard Kurt Cobain was dead, he "clapped his hands" in glee, because it meant, for him at least, that American grunge was dead.
It's one thing torching your Smash Hits fan-base but quite another to want to be taken as seriously as bands like XTC or Wire. And if all this sudden and radical mid-career turnabout in musical direction reminds you of another time and another place, you need only think back to what Brian Eno contributed to U2's sound - it's just that in Blur's case, their Eno is called William Orbit.
The last five Blur albums were produced by Stephen Street (The Smiths etc), and apart from the egregious The Great Escape, he did a darn good job - particularly on what remains the band's best ever album, Modern Life Is Rubbish (which, for many, presaged the arrival of Britpop, but you'll find on closer inspection that it was Suede's debut album that did that trick). The news that Orbit got the gig on 13 had many Blurites in a tizzy, thinking that the band were going to do an Achtung Baby and go dance, but there was little fear of that after it was revealed that Orbit was not going to write or play on the album - the first time he hasn't done so on an album he's produced, curiously enough.
Probably best known as the man who got the best album ever out of Madonna, Ray Of Light, for which he picked up a Grammy production award, Orbit is now one of the biggest and most influential producers in modern music. Besides Madonna and Blur, he's also produced Sting, Peter Gabriel, The Shamen, The Cure and Prince. He's quite unique in that he manages to combine working with the most mainstream AOR acts around with some seriously "underground" acts.
His real name is William Wainright, and he first got involved with the music game via his own avant-garde 1980s group, Torch Song, who released two albums, Wild Thing and Exhibit A - both of which are now slightly collectable on the back of his recent success. Going out on his own, he released three Eno-esque albums (Strange Cargo 1, 11 and 111) between 1988 and 1993 that were trip-hoppy/ambient-style affairs, although he himself is not one for labels: "Whatever you do, don't call the music ambient," he says, "it's like people calling the music I do `dub' - it's not. I just happen to be fascinated with reverb and echo. To me, ambient is a term used by people who feel they have to apologise for the fact that their music's not obtrusive and up front."
When it came to working on the Blur album, Orbit freaked the band out a bit because of his working methods - which involved leaving the DAT tape running for hours on end while the band ad-libbed. He even recorded the band's tea breaks and would pull up any of the engineers who weren't as scrupulous in their recording methods: "There was a big punishment for any technician who didn't have a DAT running when there was something going on," he says. "Like the song Caramel for instance, it's such a huge soundscape with Graham Coxon's guitars and a lot happened when he wasn't concentrating."
Modestly enough, Orbit says he did worry about replacing someone of the calibre of Stephen Street, and that he had to "resist the temptation at times to wonder what he'd do in a situation. There was a learning curve. I'd never done a total production before and been totally there at their service. That's the classic role of the producer, to get the kind of art and energy they've got and transfer it to people through the hi-fi. It was a very different project which I guess sends out a message that I can deliver."
Indeed. Now what's the bets on William Orbit producing the next U2 album? You heard it here first, pop pickers.
13 by Blur is released on the Food/EMI label.
