by Curt K.

It’s been eight years since you’ve released an album, Blue in 2004, now eight years later you’ve got Wonky coming out, welcome back and I loved it… but why such a long hiatus between releases?
Phil Hartnoll : Well thank you, very much! Well we said we thought that that was the end it was the end of us, it was a culmination of things, with a lot of things going on, personally, creatively. We thought we came up against a brick wall. And we started questioning everything. I think if you took the last two Orbital albums of that period, that you’d get one good one out of it, you know what I mean. And it was like I wasn’t comfortable releasing stuff that I wasn’t into. I mean you’re forever changing in your music, nothing ever finished, but when you have to commit it to a record, we just weren’t feeling it, we kinda lost our mojo. We sort of lost our connection with each other. We could of continued and done it cus of our position, but it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t right and when we said we were splitting up we kinda meant it. And we thought that was it, and we’re never going to go back to that again, because you never wanna visit a dark cloud as dark as that again. And that was it we were gonna do a few farewell gigs and that was it, that was the end of it.

I went off and did some DJ gigs and got back into DJing and thought right I’ve got to get my mojo back, get my feedback and what a better thing to do than to really feel and search for the music and it was really the best thing for me. I did a lil project in Brighton called Long-range, and that was really enjoyable. Working with some fantastic musicians. And Paul always had this ambition with working with an orchestra and string arrangements, and he could only do that on his own. So he went of and did that, we went and did our own things, so it was like five years of things on our own separate. But the Big Chill approached us to do a reunion gig. Enough time had been spent away, and I had gotten my mojo back, in our own ways and had no master plan of getting back together or  putting together and album or anything like that. I was very skeptical about that, we have no new music and do people really want that. But let’s try, we felt nothing ventured nothing gained, and the warmth and welcome we got back from the audience blew my mind to be honest, and was really encouraging. That one reunion gig turned into two years of touring festivals, and after one year and half we came to a point and we can’t just be doing just this anymore, we need some new music, or we stop it and that’s it and we really mean it. Or we need to inject some new music into the live set and create some new tracks to put into the live set cus that what it all about. What gaps do we need to fill in. We started to write again and we started to write again live, all the enjoyment of working together live, moved us into writing live and back into the studio and thought about, let’s write some new material. Cus we’re in a different time period now. It was fun again being back with my brother again. It was like when we first started. There was no record company restraints on you anymore cus there weren’t any new albums. We were more focused on the live set, we love playing live, and we wanna perpetuate that and we need to write some new material. And maybe the way of doing that was the old fashioned way of getting out an old LP and get it out there and then play those tracks live and what we did and it was really positive and really good.

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