'People will see my heart and soul'

William Orbit brought electronica into the mainstream and gave Madonna back her cool. Now he's ditching the synths altogether in favour of an orchestra. Ian Gittins finds out why
William Orbit

Pop music has been good to William Orbit. Two decades at the top of his game as one of dance music's leading producers and remixers has yielded a luxurious three-storey town house two minutes' walk from Marble Arch. When Tony Blair finally shrugs off the cares of office and vacates Downing Street, he will become Orbit's neighbour.

As an electronic music pioneer, Orbit has won a Grammy for producing Madonna's 1998 album Ray of Light, worked on multimillion-selling records by Blur and Melanie C, and remixed Prince, U2 and Seal. He has no need ever to leave his comfort zone again, which makes it all the more bizarre that he is now composing a full orchestral suite to be performed at Manchester International festival in July by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.

Orbit agrees. "It makes no logical sense at all," he says, ruefully. "I'm absolutely compelled to do this, but I'm having to learn a whole new language. It's rather as if I'd decided out of the blue to build my own house from scratch."

He did not arrive at this decision easily. Manchester festival director Alex Poots first worked with Orbit when the techno producer created an evening of electronic music for 15 musicians at the Barbican's Karlheinz Stockhausen-curated Elektronik festival in 2001. Three years ago, he asked Orbit if he would consider writing a symphony-with-electronics for Manchester.

"A few months later, William said that he would do it, but with no electronic element at all," says Poots. "He told me if I could get him an orchestra, he'd compose a symphonic piece. I was surprised but delighted: I never thought he would jettison the element that he is a master of."

Six weeks before the premiere of his piece, called simply Orchestral Suite, Orbit bounds up the stairs of his basement home studio. He looks decidedly unkempt, with a mildly disturbing thousand-yard stare. "I'm sorry, but I've just been up all night composing," he announces, by way of greeting. "I try not to, but I just find that . . . well, look, I'm going to have to wear dark glasses for the photos. I've not been getting much sleep."

A distracted figure clearly fixated by his new project, Orbit begins by expressing doubts about this interview. He doesn't want to discuss the work before completing it, he explains: it is in far too great a state of flux for him to give us a sneak preview. Yet, once he begins to talk about the bizarre challenge he has undertaken, he can't stop.

"The truth is, this has taken hold of me beyond the point that I thought I could be taken hold of by anything," he says. "It's totally blindsided me. It's like when you are a teenager and music is everything to you. As you get older, you don't expect ever to find that feeling again, but right now I've got it."

"I don't want to gush, but composing is taking me to this very profound place, night after night. I'm worried people who like my other work might turn up in Manchester and miss the big beats and bass-lines, but if they want to know what my heart and soul look like, they will see them - because I have put them into this in a way that I never have before."

Orbit's preparation for his new venture has been spectacularly assiduous. He went to 40 Proms last year, and flew to Copenhagen to watch BBC Philharmonic conductor Alexander Shelley at work. "Then he came to one of our BBC Philharmonic workshops," Shelley says, "and sat watching and taking notes with utter fascination."

Orbit admits the major attraction of the Manchester festival offer was the chance to work with hundreds of musicians: "That's a lot of noise to have access to." Yet he has been simultaneously excited and intimidated by the steep learning curve he has navigated in moving from programming dance beats to orchestral composition.

"The same rules apply about form, structure and dynamics, but now I have to explain to more than 100 musicians what I want them to do," he says. "Plus, obviously, I'm aware that the road between pop and orchestral music is littered with wrecks: everybody always quotes Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra. I want to make it very clear that this isn't any kind of fusion. To me, crossover is an odious expression."

Orbit already has classical form. A 2000 album, Pieces in a Modern Style, saw him subtly remixing Vivaldi, Ravel and Beethoven. Dutch DJ Ferry Corsten even enjoyed a major UK chart hit with a thumping trance remix of Orbit's take on Barber's Adagio for Strings. The snobbish response of the classical world didn't surprise Orbit: "It's an immigration thing. Pop musicians are the immigrants, and they don't want us coming in."

Not that Orbit hasn't experienced self-doubt while composing Orchestral Suite. He recalls a train journey north last year, accompanied by the entire BBC Philharmonic, for the first Manchester rehearsal, when he was both gratified and terrified to see the players intensely studying his first-draft score. His nerves truly kicked in at the rehearsal proper.

"The orchestra asked Alexander to tell them the story, by which they meant the theme of the piece, and he didn't have one because I hadn't given him one," he says. "I still haven't. It's still morphing. The music is tonal and it has strong imagery, but it doesn't yet have an overriding dramatic theme.


So what compelled Orbit to take this high-wire walk? He is at a loss to explain, beyond recalling composing rudimentary symphonies in his head as a child when his parents played classical records at their dinner parties. "Then I fell in love with drums and beats and riffs, and for 20 years it didn't even occur to me to do anything orchestral."

Yet his tone implies there may be no way back to pop. "When I am remixing records, I get no engagement with other musicians," he complains. "I am isolated and it drives me nuts. I stay up night after night, then I send my work away in the mail and don't even get an acknowledgment. It hurts.

"Composing this suite is just as solitary, but the paradox is that then I am suddenly around hundreds of musicians considering my music, playing it and suggesting improvements. There is nothing like the liquidity of a fantastic orchestra playing real instruments. I am completely addicted."

Two weeks after meeting Orbit, I put in a request to hear some of his suite, only to be told it is not yet ready for external playback. Ever the perfectionist, Orbit is determined not to sabotage or undersell a work that he gloomily expects will "be pulled apart by the classical world. That's just how it works, isn't it?"

Asked to describe the top-secret suite, Shelley talks of "elements of ambient minimalism - not Steve Reich, but there is an influence". By contrast, the general manager of the BBC Philharmonic, Richard Wigley, suggests, semi-jokingly: "William will hate me saying this, but the organisers should give a free joint to everyone who comes to the concert. He is taking us to a very beautiful place."

Whatever reception Orchestral Suite receives, it's unlikely that Orbit will be remixing any more U2 or Sugababes singles in the near future. "Composing is all I want to do now," he says. "I feel like I was born to do it. Even if it took me 10 years to write my next piece, and I could do nothing else, I would adjust my lifestyle and I would do it".

· The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra perform William Orbit's Orchestral Suite at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester on July 8. The concert will be recorded for broadcast on Radio 3.