How Beth Orton Ditched Her Fears And Embraced Her Sound

The last time Beth Orton performed at the Sydney Opera House - where she will play for Vivid LIVE - it was in 2005, as part of the Leonard Cohen tribute show Came So Far For Beauty. "I was stepping on stage with Nick Cave and Emmylou Harris, and the entire atmosphere was on the stage," the 45-year-old recounts. "It was extraordinary to be playing such a beautiful venue, but there was such a charged feeling among the performers. That's my most strong memory of being in Australia."

In January, Orton forged another vivid musical memory: she and her husband, American folkie Sam Amidon, went to the Jaipur Literature Festival, where they collaborated with local Rajasthani musicians. "We got picked up at the airport in Delhi, driven for five hours, that's real proper being-somewhere-else; every sight, every sound, every smell is heightened," she says. "And, then, meeting the band, spending two days rehearsing with them; I'm singing with them, they're singing with me, but we don't speak the same language - it was just a lot of smiles, and nods, and facial expressions - and it doesn't really come together until we're on stage."

"I'm going to try and sing like you, you're going to try and sing like me, and we'll meet somewhere in the middle."

In such collaboration, Orton leans on advice that the late folk-soul legend Terry Callier offered her when they first sung together on a cover on her 1997 EP Best Bit: "I'm going to try and sing like you, you're going to try and sing like me, and we'll meet somewhere in the middle." "I didn't know what he was talking about!" Orton laughs in recollection. "I just sort of nodded 'okay', I was so such a beginner. But then we did it, and our voices did meet. And I've used that idea, in my mind, so many times since. It's this sense of joining these two voices and making this third sound. I do that when I sing with my husband, and I've done it in the years since."

When younger, Orton struggled with timidity when collaborating, but of recent she's "embraced" the fact she's a novice, and grown "more unafraid". This played out on her most recent LP,  Kidsticks (2016), which she made with Andy Hung of Fuck Buttons. The album was seen as being Orton's 'return' to electronic sound, 20 years after her breakout Trailer Park, but she didn't see it that way.

"I don't see it as circling back at all," Orton says. "I see it as a big step forward. Or sideways, or up, or down. It's not a return to the past. I don't think I've ever made a record like it. It was more experimental than anything I'd ever made. I didn't set out to make it thinking I'd try something I'd done before, it was more the opposite, to try something I never had... I felt freer, less careful. What this new record created in me was the sense that I can do what the fuck I want, right now, quite frankly. It's not to prove anything, it's not an ego thing, it's just more interesting that way."