Gig Review: What The Fuck Happened To Beth Orton’s Voice? And Why Was It Still Such a Great Gig?

Bringing gig reviews back, one show at a time. And calling out the fact that Beth Orton, on a cold Sunday in Wellington, has a ruined voice, but it’s still somewhat glorious in a whole new way.

Beth Orton

St James Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, April 20

---

I was excited that Beth Orton was returning to New Zealand. She was last here over a decade ago, and I last saw her back in the year 2000 when we used to have things called The Big Day Out. Anyway, as you’ll read above or in that link there, she was originally due to play here in November last year, but the shows were postponed until April 2024 due to touring exhaustion.

Something devastating — and more than just ‘life’ — has taken ravage on Beth Orton’s voice. It was there all through her most recent album, the brilliant Weather Alive released in 2022, the bedrock for this show. If you hadn’t heard the record ahead of the show you were potentially in for a shock. She does not sound at all like the lilting ‘folktronica’ artist that captured our attention in the late 1990s with two brilliant albums under her own name and a string of cameos and collaborations with the likes of Chemical Brothers, William Orbit, and Andrew Weatherall. Back then she was both part of the trance/dance scene and the comedown from it; a secret ingredient of the rave and the antidote. She was Britpop adjacent, timing-wise, and she was a catalyst for the comedown and chill out compilations that went from charming and insightful to twee and cloying rather quickly (the compilations that is, not Orton).

But to hear her on stage at 53 is not to hear the sweet coo of those must-have 90s albums. It’s to hear a cracked chanteuse that is like Marianne Faithfull at 90. It was, for some in the audience, utterly jarring.

The opening brace, also the opening pair of songs from Weather Alive (its title track, and a song called Friday Nights) was delivered with Orton behind the piano, her voice a strangled rag, its drips barely making it into the bucket of sound. But thankfully also disguised as just another texture in a beautiful sound being created by an amazing band.

I say all of this at the top, because I fucking loved this show! I think Weather Alive is a better, and more important musical statement than either Trailer Park or Central Reservation (which I loved at the time, and still dig now) and I think it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room: Orton can’t really sing anymore. And there’s a bravery attached to her even stepping up to take her music to audiences in this way.

The song selection was exquisite, but classics from the 90s were re-arranged, stepped down, and those Tim Buckley-ish flavours removed. Sometimes, now, there were arrangements that bordered on the mid-90s Joni Mitchell, but mostly it was the endearing inclusion of tunes like Pass In Time, and She Cries Your Name and Central Reservation, many of them suggesting little more than a passing resemblance to the originals. But to age in public is the curse of so many performance professions, and so to stand stoic, albeit still shy and struggling to conjure ‘correct’ banter, is a huge thing. There was something stubborn and real about Orton just being there and delivering. There was something enormously fragile — to the point of wobbly and worrying — about the actual delivery. But it was also assured, and not a one-off, not the result of road-rust or more tiredness. This is who she is now and this is how she sounds, and the proof is sprinkled all over her finest record in an age, if not ever. And so it was here in faithful recreations of the new material, and in the heavy climb of just trying to get near the old songs as if presenting a living version of Before and After photos.

The real reason the show worked was the care and craft of the band in support.

Orton has been touring with three amazing multi-instrumentalists, including Australian guitarist James Gilligan (bass and violin also), and synth, sax and flute player Jesse Chandler (also piano and backing vocals). Chandler performs under the name Pneumatic Tubes, and was also previously a member of Mercury Rev and currently in the band Midlake. But the MVP of the night was drummer/percussionist Ben Sloan (also piano). To say he ‘played’ the drums is a bit like suggesting that Bruce Lee was a martial artist, that Picasso was a painter, or that Serena Williams was ‘quite good’ at tennis. He played with his heart, and soul and mind, as much as he did with his limbs. He played with brushes, sticks, multi-rods and mallets, often switching between several different options within a single song. He played along to loops, and then broke out on his own in double-time accents of the groove, with precision speed and a softness of touch that meant he was both the dynamic anchor and, visually, one to watch. A finer grasp of dynamics could not be found. His complete musicality so obvious, so compelling. And in a thrilling, but never too dominant way, he was basically the saviour of the show.

Orton’s opening three songs from Weather Alive, set a somber tone, and her band sat in so perfectly beneath each track. They were the sympathetic set of arms to cradle the new arrangements of the old classics, they were her complete and utter safety net.

But out front on acoustic guitar, or to the side on piano, Orton was indeed giving it her all. It’s just that her ‘all’ has been reduced to a pitchy, wobbly vocal mess. And yet there was no explanation for this. Go to Google and no one will tell you anything, beyond some brief mention of ‘health issues’, beyond the six year gap in recordings, beyond the euphemistic explanation that her latest album was ‘self-produced’, beyond the years piling up as they do for all, including most in her audience; there, in some sense, since the late 90s for this artist. And there again to hear this version.

Read other reviews and you’ll hear the kind use of the word ‘raspy’, but rasp is the domain of Bonnie Tyler. And what we heard here was a different sort of heartache. A total switch in her art.

I loved the show. Was one of the first on my feet to applaud both singer and band. And was furious to hear some moron next to me calling out for “something we can dance to” and curious as to why guitars might even need to be tuned between songs. But hey, that’s live gigs, that’s uneducated audiences, and that’s the breaks.

I truly believe Beth Orton was somehow mesmeric on stage, but I can’t just tell you her voice was ‘raspy’ or that it had any ‘extra’ rasp this time. There was nothing ‘extra’ about it, or added to it at all. This wasn an artist truly diminished. She no longer cries any names. She whispers them in a cracked-coo. One that is twig-like and could so easily break. But I fucking loved such vulnerability. And I thought, perhaps thanks to the brilliance of the band, that this show was sometimes quite close to exquisite.