What goes around comes around...
BY the very nature of their relationship Orbital would never completely split up.
But, after five years away, Paul and Phil Hartnoll couldn't let another summer festival season pass by without getting involved – although as father to four-year-old twins, Paul has additional motivation.
"I'm going on tour to get some rest," he says from home in Brighton, having taken his offspring swimming.
"I could never understand it when people used to say that before."
The kids were also a reason Orbital called time in 2004.
But an offer from The Big Chill festival was too good an opportunity to miss to revive operations for an act that took dance music beyond DJing via canny visuals and improvisation.
"After 15 years of one band and you've got a family you don't want to go off on tour as much – and we seemed to draw the same conclusion," Paul says of the hiatus.
"I did not feel we were saying much creatively at that time. So we said 'let's stop while it's still good' and after a couple of years I was really pleased we had.
"We went away and thought that would be the end of it – 'that was good, enjoyed that'.
"But after a while I started to miss playing live.
"We know the people who run Big Chill and like that festival so it was a nice invite to get. We agreed it was a good time to do it.
"People have not stopped asking us to play live. We got requests from foreign countries and would say 'We don't exist!'
"We waited for it to go away but if anything it got worse – people seem to want us to do it!
"It is one thing to miss it yourself but we were being spurred on by other people. We could not believe it.
"Now what started as Big Chill and a couple of others in other countries has ended up with a summer full of gigs."
Throw in the 20th anniversary of the dance pioneers and a new record – Orbital 20 compiles crowd pleasers such as Chime, Satan and The Box as well as reworkings, live versions and mixes – and there's even more reason to go on manoeuvres, which have grown to include the huge Global Gathering, Rock Ness and Get Loaded as well as the tour that has them at Sheffield's O2 Academy on September 23.
"Twenty years of house, that makes you aware of it. I'm reminded it all spurred me on," Paul says while struggling to put the telly on for his boys.
"We've put a lot of effort in to update the set. We've got a different feel – what we want out of the songs.
"It's a 'greatest hits and favourite tunes and older ones we missed' thing.
"We spent three weeks in December fiddling about. January and February I was doing a film score and then spent another three months fiddling with the live set.
"I could not do something half heartedly; it is all or nothing.
"We are not writing new stuff – people don't want that at the moment, but we've got to do this in a way we enjoy it."
Five years is a long time in music – even longer in dance – and it is a very different ball game out there right now, so did Paul soak up many newer bands during his hiatus, the likes of Justice and beat maestros Pendulum in particular?
"You cannot watch everything all the time," he says. "I listen to music across the board but electronically I had half an eye on Pete Tong's show, and half an eye on the '80s revivalists.
"I'm an '80s kind of guy and liked the Sheffield and Manchester industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire and New Order. It's hard to know who we have influenced – Simian Mobile Disco, maybe. I heard him say he liked us, and I can hear that."
While rock music is supposed to be able to endure better than most genres some dance seems to have shrugged off fads to last.
"I could probably write a small book about this rubbish. Anything dance based – people always want to dance.
"Anyway, pop music youth culture is in its infancy; we've had 60 years of it. You can fit the entire history of pop culture on an iPod.
"I used to have to trawl through record shops. People follow another path now but they have still got to find things in a massive sea of 60 years.
"And people are open to diversity. It's like an iPod on shuffle. There's no NME war between genres – people will not settle for that.
"Pendulum sounds like drum and bass or full-on Black Sabbath."
So, at 41, Paul's not bothered about the age thing, not least as Orbital's 1994 Glastonbury performance remains one of Q magazines '50 best gigs of all time'.
"There was a period when I was young. But you get better with age and with your instruments.
"It takes 15 years to build up a massive repertoire like ours – one crowd favourite after another – and that's a great place to be."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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