A dose of Electronica for a Tuesday night – Orbital, recorded July 2nd at the 1999 Roskilde Music Festival and recorded by Danish Radio.
Throughout their career, Orbital have sometimes incorporated political and environmental commentary into their music. Early single Choice samples a speech against militarization from Crucifix’s “Annihilation”. The track “Forever” on Snivilisation samples a speech by Graham Crowden from the 1982 Lindsay Anderson film Britannia Hospital, in which he lambasts humankind; and “You Lot” on the Blue Album included a confrontational, partially vocoded sample of Christopher Eccleston playing the second coming of Jesus Christ in the TV two-part series The Second Coming written by Russell T Davies.
Although only the phrase “New Age Travellers” from John Major’s 1992 Conservative Party conference speech is retained in the 1995 single release of Sad But New, Orbital first unveiled the track including a fuller version of the speech in March 1995 as part of a live broadcast on BBC Radio 1 “Interactive Radio Night”, and as a response to the newly passed Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
The track “The Girl with the Sun in Her Head” from In Sides was recorded in a studio powered only by Greenpeace’s mobile solar power generator, CYRUS. On the same album, “Dŵr Budr”, Welsh for “dirty water”, was inspired by the Sea Empress oil spill which took place just off the southern coast of Wales in February 1996. The album as whole is a concept album on that theme, for example the track “P.E.T.R.O.L”.
The video for 2018 single “P.H.U.K” (off Monsters Exist) features photography taken from British news services, with loose references to Brexit, the London fatberg, the Grenfell Tower fire, moped crime, and the 2010s migrant crisis, among other current events, and the title “Please Help United Kingdom” reappearing. Although not strictly political, the track “There Will Come a Time” (also featured on Monsters Exist) includes a spoken passage by the physicist Brian Cox, where he addresses the future of an expanding universe and the inevitable demise of the Earth, and urges mankind to care for the planet and maintain a peaceful existence while the Earth is still our home.
Starting in 2019, live performances of the track “Impact (The Earth Is Burning)” have included a sampled speech from Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, declaring “Our house is on fire. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”
Paul Hartnoll described his intentions behind Orbital’s sociopolitical messages as “quite ambiguous. Rather than making social comments, I suppose what we’re doing is trying to put a score to the times we live in. I’d like to think that some of these are universal issues – the earth is still burning, even today, the world isn’t fixed, and governments are still fucking idiots. I’m not saying I could do any better, but they could. With our music, we’re saying ‘go on then, sort it out!'”
Further evidence Music motivates.
