When Beth Orton first played in New Zealand at the 2000 Big Day Out, she was the odd woman out. She possibly possessed the only acoustic guitar in the entire venue, on a day headlined by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails and the Chemical Brothers, the UK electronic duo who had helped introduce her voice to the world on their first two albums.
Orton played in the afternoon on one of the smaller stages to maybe 100 of us in a set that was all elfin smile, delicate songs, and yearning voice. She looked mildly amused being the sweet folky lull before the 90s rock storm. Her early albums of “folktronica” had got her labelled “the comedown queen” – morning-after music after a big night out.
“I was really nervous when I played there,” she says of that tour from her home in London. It followed the breakthrough of albums Trailer Park and Central Reservation. No, she doesn’t remember anything much from that first excursion but “I might have photographic evidence”. Nor does she remember her second foray, a 2013 solo tour when she played in churches on both sides of the Tasman.
And plans for a third time have had to deal with the challenge of ongoing health matters, which meant a postponement from late last year. Orton has lived with the digestive system ailment Crohn’s disease for much of her adult life, and in recent decades has suffered complex partial seizures, a form of epilepsy. She is reportedly managing both, though politely skips to the next question – “it’s just one of those things” – when the Listener asks after her health.
Granted, it’s something that was much discussed at the time of the 2022 release of Weather Alive, her eighth album and one of her best. It’s one with its own triumph-over-adversity tale. After beginning it, Orton was dropped from her label and borrowed money to complete it. Once released, it ended up on many a best-of-the-year list. After its predecessor, Orton had said she thought that musically she had done her dash.
“It’s hard when you make music when you’re not the success that the people who you work with want or need you to be in order for them to want to work with you. And there’s no way of coming out of that without feeling like a bit of a failure.
“But I think what happened was, I found peace with that in myself. That’s fine, I can still make music and that became this real turning point for me.
“Once I had that realisation, these songs started to kind of flow and then I went in and made this record and people really sort of sat up … Okay, yes, again, I didn’t sell gazillions of records, but I know there’s a place for beloved music.”
Weather Alive was mostly written on an old piano in the garden shed of the London home she shares with American musician husband Sam Amidon, and their two teenage children. It sounds deeper, dreamier and far less domestic than that, backed by a band that turn it into something that has distant echoes of Van Morrison or Joni Mitchell’s folk-jazzier excursions.
But it’s still personal, even when it’s borrowing titles from other songs, like Forever Young by Bob Dylan and You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory, the signature song by solo New York Doll Johnny Thunders, which she shortens to Arms Around a Memory. The former was a “bit of a lazy title”, says Orton. But the latter referenced the track that her brother Rupert, a musician and promoter, introduced her to at a pivotal point in their lives.
“Arms Around a Memory was a very deliberate choice. A lot of the songs that I write give a nod and a wink to times and places in my life. [Thunders’ song] was a song my brother played me when I was little and our mama died. [My] song is about having my own daughter and choosing to have her because if I didn’t have her, she would have just been a memory. So, it’s about choosing her – and that’s not about me becoming pro-life or having some political discussion. But it was a huge decision to bring her into the world, and when I made it, I had a lot of repercussions in my life. Having kids is not easy but I think that’s part of what’s made me a deeper songwriter, in a way – not that I want to say that about myself.
“The thing is, when I had my daughter, I was fearful of losing touch with being a creative person, and actually, I think it’s made me more of a creative person because it’s given me a life way richer than I could have had otherwise, because it’s been so fucking hard.”
Predictably, the shows also include some of the early songs the then-fancy-free 29-year-old performed here in 2000. She likes to revisit her younger work. “It’s interesting to rediscover who I was when I wrote those songs and honour the good-heartedness of them.
“They came from a very sincere place … they were the heart of a young girl just singing out. They’re just honest, they’re off the cuff and to revisit them and honour that, it’s lovely.”
Beth Orton plays at the Powerstation, Auckland, on April 20 and the St James, Wellington, on April 21.