Perfect Circle

Across nine studio albums, Orbital have remained at the forefront of dance music trends. On their new compilation, 30 Something, the Hartnoll brothers trace a three-decade path as electronica trailblazers in typically inventive - and re-inventive - style. Younger sibling Paul takes Lois Wilson on a trip through their long-playing history.

- Lois Wilson

With their debut single, Chime, Orbital – brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll – grasped the utopian possibilities of the M25 rave scene. Recorded in their parents’ living room on four-track while Paul’s mates sat on the sofa waiting to go to the pub, it was first released in December 1989 on pirate DJ Jazzy M’s Oh’Zone label. “He was a friend of a friend,” Paul Hartnoll explains from his Hove studio. “And he was the don, so I took the cassette to his record shop. He played it and all the deejays put their hands up to buy it. After he put it out, such was the buzz around it, we were plunged into the middle of a bidding war. We couldn’t believe it.”

They soon signed to Pete Tong’s FFRR label and the single, reissued in March 1990, hit the UK Top 20 and led to a Top Of The Pops appearance. Their anti-Poll Tax T-shirts revealed a socio-political stance that would continue; later work made antimilitary and anti-Brexit statements and referenced the Grenfell Tower fire and the migrant crisis. Since 2019, live performances of their track Impact (The Earth Is Burning) have included a sampled speech from environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

Their refusal to mime on Top Of The Pops resulted in a lifetime ban. “We looked like berks,” Paul says, “just standing there playing with the on/off switches.” The ban was subsequently lifted: seven years later they were back performing Satan Live, one of a further 13 hit singles they’ve notched up in their 33-year career, one that has seen them split twice, once in 2004, and again in 2014. In that time the group have also remixed numerous acts including Madonna, Kraftwerk, EMF, Queen Latifah and The Shamen, and scored films including 1997’s