Hard early years Orton's inspiration

By JULIA OAKLEY

If, at the Big Day Out, you need a respite from all that testosteronefuelled noise, get lost for a while in the spacy trance beats and smoky, languid voice of Beth Orton.

She's been variously described as "a bummed-out angel in the badlands of love" and the Comedown Queen, but her music offers much more than the perfect chill-out soundscape - "You know, for going out and gettin' off your head, then comin' home and puttin' on Bef Orton," she laughs.

Orton's airy, neo-folk vocals - sung in a voice located somewhere between Marianne Faithfull, Wrecking Ball-era Emmylou Harris and Rickie-Lee Jones - drift over haunting trip-hop melodies that float and linger, seeping under your skin while you're not really listening.

"What I love about music is how it can get to you, it gets under all your defences," says Orton.

But she's no trippy hippie chick, spaced out on good vibes. At 180cm and with a style straight off the streets of north London, Orton, aged 29, is every inch an urbanite who's been to hell and back. She hit the bottle at 11 when her father died, and soon became a teenage alcoholic and chronic truant diagnosed with "school phobia."

Longing to be an actress, she eventually enrolled at the famous Anna Scher stage school - until tragedy struck again. Orton nursed her mother through a losing battle with breast cancer. She died when Orton was 19 and soon afterwards Orton headed to Thailand, where she spent three months meditating in a Buddhist monastery to try to make sense of it all.

Looking back, Orton has described that time, which resulted in the song Best Bit, as having liberated her creativity and likened it to "going mad and coming out of madness and being saner." She acknowledges that much of her inspiration has come from death and illness.

Returning home, Orton hit the club scene, where she met dance remixer William Orbit (who produced Madonna's career-reviving Ray of Light), who would be her collaborator and, for a time, lover.

Obsessed with her voice, Orbit encouraged Orton first to sing and later to pitch her songs to record companies.

Her first recording was a cover of John Martyn's Don't Wanna Know About Evil. She was then asked by dance-club buddies the Chemical Brothers to lend her hungover vocals to Where Do I Begin on their album, Dig Your Own Hole.

Her big lucky break came with signing a deal with small British indie label Heavenly, but by then the stress of her losses and her chemically enhanced, dance-scene lifestyle had taken their toll - Orton went blind temporarily before recording her impressive, if uneven, debut album, Trailer Park.

Released in 1996, it sold 300,000 copies worldwide and Orton followed up early last year with the more assured Central Reservation, a landmark album likely to influence singers, songwriters and producers for years to come.

Produced by Victor Van Vught (Nick Cave, Tindersticks) and Mazzy Star's David Roback, it featured Ben Harper, Everything but the Girl's Ben Watt, New Orleans keyboardist Dr John, and one of Orton's heroes, American folk legend Terry Callier, whom she rescued from an IT career in Chicago.

"It was incredible working with him," she says. "He's all from the heart and he's not ashamed of it."

Although she has suffered more than most, and her health is fragile due to Crohn's disease, an incurable form of irritable bowel syndrome, Orton celebrates life.

"I'm not such a sad case ... God, there's loads of people worse off than me," she insists.

She has not just survived her losses but kept her sense of humour, and her songs express both life's magic and its misery with a compelling mix of raw eloquence and equanimity.

Orton's genius for evoking emotional truths in her melodies as much as in her lyrics has attracted phone-calls from the likes of Beck, who not only wants to write songs with her but has asked Orton to open his forthcoming tour of Europe and the United States.

Meanwhile, the lanky Londoner - who once ran a catering business called Fat Beth's Lunchbox - is looking forward to partying in this part of the world at the Big Day Out. Her songs may seem like daydreams, but they will soothe you and set you thinking ... even if you can't remember exactly what about.