'Beth Orton’s debut album, Trailer Park, originally released on Heavenly Recordings in 1996, will be re-issued through Sony Music on March 9th. The re-mastered album is packaged with a bonus disc containing thirteen non–album tracks from 1996 through to 1998 including b-sides, live tracks, instrumentals, rarities and two tracks featuring Chicago soul legend Terry Callier.
Mysterious and magical, Trailer Park skittered into the riotous, rooted, all-lads-together world of Britain in the mid-1990s like an unusually purposeful will-o’-the-wisp. Released on Heavenly Recordings – at the time less a label, more a way of life – Beth Orton’s first album was born out of going out and staying in, of love, late nights and mornings after.
Trailer Park referenced Rickie Lee Jones, Bobbie Gentry, Joni Mitchell; the girl groups of the early 60s, the twisted pop of the late 60s. Honoured with a trio of BRIT and Mercury Award nominations, including a BRIT win for “Best British Female”, there were those who deemed Trailer Park the perfect post-club comedown album; but it was so much more.
Trailer Park is a collection of stories, a moment in time, a humble offering with far-reaching effects, a musical experiment gone right, a small jewel that glitters differently as you turn it in your hand. Even today, it’s still open enough to let your own moods and desires take the songs where you want them to go. Beth Orton’s evocative song-writing and yearning, hopeful voice gives the album warmth as well as ache: the cracks in her voice revealing more of the hurt running through these songs than the words ever can.
Beth is an instinctive songwriter. She doesn’t approach a song like it’s an essay, knowing exactly what she wants to say. Instead, she creates something new, catches a mood, reduces it to an essence, evokes rather than reports.
Some songs were written in one swift swoop; others were written over a period of time in various places. She Cries Your Name grew in Marrakesh, Essouira, and a North London studio with William Orbit. (Orbit was the first person to discover Beth's distinctive voice, when she toured a play around Russia in 1990. After seeing the dress rehearsal in London, he was intrigued enough by the girl turning Rimbaud poems into blues songs to ask her to come and work on his Strange Cargo projects).
Don’t Need A Reason was written post-Glastonbury. Through it, Beth was lifted from the mud of that weekend - and her illusions about an abusive relationship - to a place of redemption.
With each song she wrote, she felt freer and more liberated, until, finally, she left behind the confines of Galaxy Of Emptiness for the healing of Touch Me With Your Love. Someone’s Daughter is Beth giving voice to the idea that every person has been the beloved child of someone else - and therefore has the right to be loved, cherished and respected, no matter what. And that by falling in love we become loved, as though someone’s child all over again.
Sugar Boy speaks for itself. A song born of the original blues song of the same name, it started, then stopped, then started again, until Beth and Andrew Innes of Primal Scream swirled it to its quietly defiant finish.
Beth first heard The Ronettes’ Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine with Jeff Barrett who signed her to Heavenly Recordings. This song (about devotional love lost) evoked her loss and grief at her mother’s death a few years earlier. Hearing it gave expression to feelings that, at the time, Beth could only access through writing her own love songs. She ran home and learnt Sunshine there and then, breathing her own experience into the song, stripping it back to its barest bones to reveal the vulnerability beneath the Phil Spector production.
To bring this same raw quality to her own material (and obsessed, as she was, by the The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier and anything and everything by Nick Drake), she went to work assembling the right musicians. Folk was the music that came most naturally to Beth, writing songs on her acoustic guitar. She wanted to capture the purity of its traditional sound. Having grown up around British folk musicians, she often wondered why UK folk was not revered in the same way as the roots music of America.
She also wanted to stay true to her other roots: her love of going out and dancing, to Northern soul, hip-hop, dub or reggae. Why couldn’t all these elements live happily with one another? She found great support and inspiration from Jeff Barrett in this quest. He introduced her to an even more diverse spectrum of music from all eras, every genre and emotion going. An adventure!
She started, first things first, by sitting and singing the songs solo, sharing the stage in a London Soho pub with her best friend Tasha Lee at their Acoustically Heavenly night. The pair would sing their hearts out on stage; on cue, grown men would cry. At Acoustically Heavenly, emotions ran high; fights regularly broke out, men regularly broke down. All that was missing was the sawdust and chicken wire. It was here that Beth met Andrew Weatherall. Though he was interested in working with her as producer, she had already set her sights on Victor Van Vugt, long-time sound engineer and producer for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. He was one of the first people to hear Beth’s demos when they were just voice and guitar sung into a tape recorder mic. She liked the idea of someone who understood how a live band should sound and, with that in mind, she started to piece a band together for Van Vugt to record and for Weatherall to later mix.
Enter Ted Barnes on guitars, mandolin and bouzouki, brought by bass player Ali Friend, whom Beth had worked with in Red Snapper. Both became key elements in these songs’ arrangements. Rounding out the band were drummer Wildcat Will, a friend from Beth’s London nights out; and Sean Read on keyboards, another old friend from Norfolk and a member of Heavenly’s much-loved The Rockingbirds. These players brought not just music, but their own atmosphere to Beth’s vignettes.
Still, it was Beth’s voice, her songs that tied together all these disparate elements. With all the optimism of a novice from a small town, she decided that as long as she stayed true to herself, all would turn out just fine. The outcome: psychedelic beats, swooning strings and dark electronic waves, alongside clear, resonant, acoustic instruments heard as they had not been in a long time, stripped and bare, free from overblown production. Beautifully produced by Victor Van Vugt, they’re still as vital as if you were in the room as they played. Andrew Weatherall added his own magic with his remixes of Touch Me With Your Love, Tangent and Galaxy of Emptiness, spinning the musicians into an alchemic mix, a new noise from pure sounds.
Today, everywhere we look, there are female singer-songwriters confidently staking their claim amongst pop’s boy wonders. Folk is a thriving, youthful musical genre, no longer the preserve of elderly, jumpered males. So it’s appropriate that this is Trailer Park’s Legacy edition, because the album’s legacy is all around us. Beth herself sees it as a door into another world, one that she went through and never looked back. But she left that door open, and many others have followed her through.
For Beth, writing and recording songs is the best feeling in the world. The equivalent of true love, she calls it. It’s time for us to fall in love all over again.
Orton has released three albums since Trailer Park: Central Reservation (Arista, 1999), Daybreaker (Astralwerks, 2002) and Comfort of Strangers (2006). Her latest is expected this year.
TRAILER PARK by BETH ORTON
(originally issued September 1996, as Heavenly 17)
CD One – Selections: 1. She Cries Your Name • 2. Tangent • 3. Don’t Need A Reason • 4. Live As You Dream • 5. Sugar Boy • 6. Touch Me With Your Love • 7. Whenever • 8. How Far • 9. Someone’s Daughter • 10. I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine • 11. Galaxy Of Emptiness.
CD Two – Selections: 1. Safety (A) • 2. It’s Not The Spotlight (A) • 3. Galaxy Of Emptiness (live at Shepherds Bush Empire, 26/11/1996) (B) • 4. Pedestal (B) • 5. Touch Me With Your Love (instrumental) (C) • 6. It’s This I Am Find (D) • 7. Bullet (E) • 8. Best Bit (early version) (E) • 9. Best Bit (F) • 10. Skimming Stone (F) • 11. Dolphins (feat. Terry Callier) (F) • 12. Lean On Me (feat. Terry Callier) (F) • 13. I Love How You Love Me (G).
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Wed, 28 Jan 2009
BETH ORTON
TRAILER PARK- Legacy Edition
MARCH 9th 2009
Key:
A – Tracks 1-2 from B-side “She Cries Your Name” single, 1996.
B – Tracks 3-4 from B-side “Touch Me With Your Love” single, January 1997.
C – Track 5 from B-side “Touch Me With Your Love” vinyl 10-inch, 1997.
D – Track 6 from B-side “Someone’s Daughter,” March 1997.
E – Tracks 7-8 from B-side “She Cries Your Name” (re-release), June 1997.
F – Tracks 9-12 from Best Bits EP, December 1997.
G – Track 13 from Mojo soundtrack album, July 1998.
Note: All tracks on CD One and CD Two are 2008 re-mastered versions.