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Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll on the legacy of the ‘Green’ and ‘Brown’ albums

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What’s 30-odd years between friends? Pioneering dance act Orbital recently re-released their seminal Green album, featuring a number of rare and unreleased tracks, as well as classics such as Chime and Belfast. 

The re-release came as the duo – Paul and Phil Hartnoll – hit the road for a special series of dates, in which the Green album, originally released in 1991, as well as the follow-up Brown album, released in 1993, are being played in full for the first time, in two separate sets. 

Taking in venues in Exeter, Southampton, Birmingham, London, Nottingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Manchester, the tour culminates in Dublin’s Vicar Street on Sunday 5 May, before the brothers prepare for a set at Glastonbury Festival in June, marking 30 years since one of their most celebrated performances at the Worthy Farm festival. 


909originals caught up with Paul Hartnoll to talk about reviving Green and Brown for a new generation, how he prepared for the tour, and what comes next.

Hi Paul, thanks for talking to us. You have a few shows from the Green/Brown tour under your belt now, and obviously this has been hyped for a few months. What has the reaction been like? 

It’s been brilliant, and I’ve enjoyed doing it, because it’s quite different to playing the things you feel you want to play, like tracks from your new album – all the greatest hits. To be fair a lot of those greatest hits are already on those two albums from back in the day. But structuring it the way it is and playing all these tracks that I’ve never played live before, it’s good brain challenge fun.

I’m still deciding how to play them. I’ve got the rough template – I listened to the albums a couple of times but tried not to listen to them too much, because I don’t want to be caught just playing them as they are on the album.

I’m playing them to a modern audience who remember the album, so you’ve got to give them an impression of it, but also to suit our needs at the moment. Playing it live in Birmingham on a Friday is different to listening to it on a Tuesday at home 30 years ago, you know what I mean? 

The arrangement is suited to each venue and so far, there’s been different twists and turns in certain tracks. It’s interesting – those kind of trancier tracks I don’t tend to write much any more, things like Walk Now and Remind, really have been good fun to play, because it’s like ‘okay, you’ve got five sequences what are you gonna do with them? Let’s get inventive!’ 

It’s all about the layering and bringing it down, and how small can I make it, and then explode it back up again. I keep thinking I’m going to stop playing the track, and I go, ‘Yeah, but it’d be really good if I brought the kick back in now’. And it’s like, off we go. Another round of the track. It’s cat and mouse. 

You’ve been quite faithful to the running order of the albums. I remember when Primal Scream did the Screamadelica tour, they kicked that off with a gig in Kensington Olympia and they mixed it up a bit. They didn’t play the exact running order because some of the bigger tracks are in the middle of the album and they didn’t want to, you know, end on a low point. Obviously you’ve thrown the likes of Macro Head and Torpedo Town in there, but you resisted the temptation to play around a bit, a few bits from Green, a few from Brown. 

I’ve kept the ambiance of the whole thing exactly in the right order, and also I think I’d like to say that 22-year-old Paul had a good idea by putting all the singles at the end of the albums. 

But I can tell you why I did it – I didn’t have much money back then, and it was always like, I want to give people value for money. So if we’ve already released it as a single, why put it on the album? And then Pete Tong just sighs, and goes, ‘you’ve got to put the single on the album’. 

So we’re like ‘okay, we’re going to shove them at the end.‘ That means the Green album ends with Chime, Midnight and Belfast. That’s the three singles.

But Midnight wasn’t as popular as the other two. So what do you do? How do you rectify that? Well, I’ve thrown loads of new drums at it to try and beef it up and make it something slightly different. Again, that’s good fun because I’m finding it’s a really lovely bridge between Chime and Belfast. Every night it just kind of throws a different shape. 

Obviously the Green Album Deluxe Edition has tracks like LC1 on it, and Belfast/Wasted, and the Rhyme and Reason mix of Satan. Are you bringing these elements in as well?

No, we don’t have the time. I mean, we’re already starting at 7.45 and finishing at 11. So I don’t think anyone could take any more Orbital than that.

There are some tracks that you’d never played live – I’d imagine a good portion of the Green album has probably never been played live. 

That’s right. The Moebius was never played live, for example. Weirdly, at one point or another, quite a lot of it had been played, but that’s so far away in time, it may as well have never been played. 

I’ll tell you what, I’ve been really enjoying Desert Storm, which is my least favourite track on the album, but it’s fast becoming one of my favourite tracks to play live, which is really weird. 

That’s always been a guilty pleasure for me, actually, because it has that almost Balearic-style chug to it. In terms of tracks like that, what has been the process in terms of getting them fit for purpose for Orbital circa 2024?

The key thing is, it’s a jam. I’m jamming with the arrangement. That’s the key to modernising anything, you can bring things in and out. I really think the arrangement is the thing that makes it more modern.

In some tracks, I thought was going to have to change the drums and things like that. My first port of call was to re-create it faithfully and then decide whether to change the drums. Now, in Desert Storm, I’ve got big, chunky drums. That is what I was trying to do back then, but didn’t achieve it.

It’s funny, it’s been like working with 22-year-old Paul in the studio. With some tracks, like The Moebius, I went, ‘Well done, Paul, that’s a really good piece of work. I’m not going to do anything to that, I love your work’. With Desert Storm, I was checking it and going, ‘I can see what you were trying to do there, young man. Let me help you finish it properly’. It was like a dialogue with myself.

Orbital in 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre


When rediscovering those old tracks, or reviving tracks that you haven’t looked at for 30 years, it must rekindle lots of memories – as in ‘oh, that was the time this happened, or that happened’?

I had put all these little text notes in C -Lab Creator. When going through tracks, I would notice every now and then that the note box was active and I’d check it. It’s these little technical notes – you know ‘sequence 3 is etc etc’.

It was really bizarre, reading these little messages that I’d written for a future version of me. And there I was reading them, going ‘thanks, that’s useful’.

There must be bits that you listen back to in that whole process and you go, ‘Oh Christ, what did I do there? Why did I release that?’ I’m sure you have cringe-worthy bits as well as stand-out bits. 

I don’t know, I’m quite stoic about it – the past is a solid mass. You cannot change it, so there’s no point regretting it. Just use it as something to learn from and move forward. I did wonder whether there’d be moments where I didn’t want to play this or that track any more.

I think the only track that I think is in a funny position – but I’ve left it there and it seems to be working – is Monday. You’ve got all this trancey stuff, and then Monday comes in, and it’s like a pallet cleanser. It’s like a sorbet, everything’s really soft in Monday. It’s slow, it’s Detroit-y type house music, so it takes everything right down.

But that works beautifully, because then you go into Halcyon, which is very blissed out. So you come from this jet stream of all this mad trancey, acid stuff, and go straight down into Monday for a little breather and then off into Halcyon. It’s been working great. 

So the segue that you made all those years ago – looking back now, you can see why you put the tracks together that way?

Yeah, exactly. 

That’s fascinating. One of the things about Green and Brown, and maybe why they’ve stood the test of time so well, is that they’re as suitable for listening at home as they are for getting in the mood to go out. At the time they were made, people were making dance albums that thundered along at 100 miles an hour, but with Orbital, you didn’t do that. Was that always part of the plan?

Well, I had a massive collection of electronic albums to listen to at home before I made my album. They weren’t strictly dance music – things like Official Version by Front 242, any Kraftwerk album, anything by Tangerine Dream. Those were the albums that were my inspiration. Anything by Cabaret Voltaire.

I wanted to make an album like those people, but obviously I had my own kind of slant on it, and was also sucking in and embracing the whole house music culture.


When we spoke before, you were telling me about how you were putting together most of the Green album in your parents’ house in Sevenoaks, under the stairs mainly. Obviously the transition from that to playing live must have been a huge step at the time – I would imagine there were lots of car crash moments with those early gigs?

They were crazy. But to me, it was always that there was no option – that’s what you did. You’re in a band, you play live. It was a different time back then. Nowadays, lots of people make music and choose to just DJ, which is fine. I’m not saying anything against that. But for me, if I’m making records, I’m going to play live. 

Those early gigs were funny, because in many cases we were playing live at venues run by very enthusiastic people who didn’t know how to put a gig on. Until we got an agent and started doing proper, rock-type gigs, we were playing in nightclubs.

So, often you’d get to the venue, and there’d be no wedges or monitors, nothing to hear the music through. Or, you’d get people on ecstasy wandering up and trying to play your keyboard.

You’d turn up somewhere, you’d press go, you’d turn on the drum machine and you go, ‘shit, there’s no power for the drum machine’. You look on the floor and some wag has unplugged it. ‘Oh for god’s sake’. There was all of that kind of thing to contend with.

But by and large, it was really good fun and that’s how we met lots of people. We met all the people from Pure, we met David Holmes, we met Eddie Richards. The only time we got to do real, rock-type gigs was when we started supporting The Shamen. We used to do quite a lot of gigs with them.

That’s how we met Meat Beat Manifesto, doing a big rave with them. We got on so well that we ended up remixing each other, and then they invited us to do a proper tour in America. That was our first time on the road with a tour bus, which was just fantastic.

Setting up the equipment back then must have been a chore – you’re just a two-man operation, after all?

Yeah, we were basically setting up a studio on stage – it was crazy. I mean, we’re still doing it now. But now, we pay a very good backline technician to help us, to set it up, and take it down. That’s just fabulous. [laughs]

There’s an 18-month gap, or thereabouts, between Green and Brown, and listening back to the two of them, I have always thought that Brown was more accomplished. I think the mastering is better, it has a more fulsome sound.

I haven’t A-B tested them, to be honest. I listened to Green with the mastering engineer, and we thought it sounded pretty good – he said, ‘ok, I’ll just give it a little tinker’.

We’re not going to change the original recordings, because the mastering on the original is part of the sound of the album. So let’s not spoil that. Let’s just tweak it where necessary to bring it up to a more modern feel, I guess. 

Do you think that by the time you got to Brown that you had matured as producers, and as musicians? Ok, it’s only 18 months – but looking back, was Green kind of like your ‘first day at school’, whereas with Brown, it was more ‘ok, we’re into the real deal here’?

I’ve never been that hard on my previous projects. I love them all for their place in time. But I think Green was a ‘best of’, as all first albums are – it sums up the few years that led to the point where it came out.

Whereas Brown was fresh off the press, in a way – it covers the period from when Green was released up to its own release. So it’s more on the money as to where we were in our heads. 

Obviously the biggest tracks from Brown – Lush, Impact and Halcyon – haven’t left your live set in the 30 years or so since you recorded them. They’ve been a constant.

Yeah – that’s not bad for what people normally refer to as the ‘difficult second album’.

Halcyon has had lots of amendments over the years of course – Bon Jovi, Belinda Carlisle, The Spice Girls…

I’ve axed all of that for this tour. I’ve gone back to doing it like it is on the album. Whereas Lush is like a wild man in the forest – I still let that run riot. I was going to pare that back, but then I decided against it. 

With Impact, it has been pared back to sound more like it is on the album. And there’s no Greta Thunberg, because she wasn’t even born then. Although she’s needed now, admittedly – I might pick one gig and throw her back in. 

Obviously there were the Lush remixes as well – Lush 3.3 (Underworld), Lush 3.5 (CJ Bolland) and so forth – have you brought elements of those into this tour?

Well, Lush (Euro Tunnel Disaster ’94) has always been segued into the second part of Lush. It’s an expansion of it, which came out of adding things to Lush in a live environment, like during sound checks. So we still have bits of that within it, but it’s our own remix of our own track, so I feel that the gloves are off on that level. 

The one good aspect of dance music and dance music fans is that they’re very accepting of change and development. So, for example, it would be weird if Primal Scream did Screamadelica as a drum and bass album, you know? People would be like ‘what the fuck, that’s not what I bought a ticket for?’

Whereas if we throw in a bit of variation on the ending of Lush, as long as you get all the key parts in, and give people what you think is the essence of the track, you can mess with it beyond that, because all you’re doing is giving them more, not less, you know?

I’ve always wondered about the name of that Euro Tunnel Disaster remix. I don’t remember there being a Euro Tunnel Disaster. Was there one?

No, there wasn’t. That was a prediction of mine –  I was wrong. I kind of envisaged it as one of those terrible films from the 70s, like Airport and The Towering Inferno. It would be a film about the Euro Tunnel Disaster, and that’s why it was subtitled ’94’, because it came out before then – 1994 was still in the future when I named it.

On the back of this tour, people are already asking about a Snivilisation/InSides tour – is that something you are considering?

Well, if we did, we wouldn’t join those two albums together. 

Green and Brown felt like they went together – we weren’t going to do it like this, the original idea was to do a support slot of earlier singles and B-sides. But after we started programming the Green album I just thought, ‘what am I doing?’ If we were going to do a whole other set, why don’t we just do the Brown album? 

Because then, rather than playing stuff that people don’t really know, you’re raising the bar even further, because people love the Brown album. So it would be silly not to do that. And besides, they felt like a good pairing. 

Whereas Snivilisation, I feel, sits on its own. And it’s same with In Sides as well. If I was doing them, I’d want to explore them individually, I think. 

I guess you had those other EPs around at the time, like Times Fly or Mutations, which you could throw into the mix as well?

That could happen. Or even some of the stuff that I was thinking before, like doing Analogue Test 90 or LC1, things like that.

You were just announced for Beyond the Pale Festival here in Ireland – the second time you’ve played it in three years. I think it’s a fantastic festival – you must think so as well?

Yeah – I’m looking forward to that. 

Ireland has always had a special place in your heart, hasn’t it – for yourself and Phil?

Yeah, that does seem to be the case, and it’s fabulous, because my wife is Irish, from Dublin, so it’s nice to be ‘big in the old country’, you know? It has always been great. My first experience of Ireland was playing for David Holmes in Belfast, and it’s never stopped being fabulous ever since then.

Are there plans to release a live album of the Green and Brown tour?

I was just hatching a plan about that, but it’s only a plan at the minute. But yeah, you will be hearing it, I’m pretty sure.

I wanted to do a few shows first before I made a decision about that. And I’m looking forward to listening to the recording of the last couple of nights. So I’m thinking, well, if I’m thinking that, other people must be looking forward to it, too. 

Tracks like Walk Now have taken on a new life of their own while still being very familiar, so it’s a very different version. So, I think a live album will appear at some point, but there won’t be any crowd noise, or all that annoying ambience. It’ll be a proper desk recording. It’ll be live but you won’t hear the crowd. 

Okay. And there’s obviously more Green and Brown tour dates to follow, as the year goes on?

I don’t know – unless there’s a demand for it. If people want it, we can do more. We might head into Europe a bit with it, or we might head into America with it. But as for the UK, we’re done… for now. That doesn’t mean to say it’s the last one.

With the current tour, we just couldn’t get Belfast in there because of the way the days of the week landed. You know what it’s like, when you book a tour, people often say, ‘Why aren’t you playing here?’ It just didn’t work out. 

There wasn’t a venue, there wasn’t a suitable day – and unfortunately Belfast got left out this time. I know they were peeved about this, we’ve got a lot of complaints from our fans in Belfast – ‘Why aren’t you playing Belfast!?’ But it just works like that sometimes. 

There’ll be a couple of bus loads of them coming down the M1 next weekend, I guess. Thanks Paul for chatting to us. The remastered and expanded Green album can be purchased/streamed here.

Read More: “I pressed this button and it went ‘ding ding’, and then this button made it go ‘whoosh’. I didn’t really know what I was doing.” Orbital discuss the days before Orbital

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