‘Ray of Light made me, and I didn’t know what I was doing’: William Orbit on Madonna, being sectioned and resurrection

William Orbit is an electronic musician living a jazz life. ‘I like to make it up as I go along,’ he says. ‘It’s one long improv session.’ For most of his 65 years, the music skipped along well enough. In the late Nineties, Orbit was the man with lightning at his fingertips. He co-produced (and co-wrote) Madonna’s best album, Ray of Light, followed in 1999 by Blur’s best album, 13. He created big hits for big movies, including The Beach, which featured his song ‘Pure Shores’. Recorded by All Saints, it became the second most successful British single of 2000.

Orbit worked with U2 and made more records with Madonna, but the tune he was improvising became increasingly jagged and discordant until, for a spell, the music stopped completely. His new album, The Painter, is his first in almost a decade following a period blighted by drug issues and a mental health breakdown.

Success was part of the problem. Orbit had grown accustomed to being on the margins. Born in London in 1956, in the Eighties and Nineties, with synth group Torch Song and then Bassomatic, he was at the vanguard of electronic music without becoming either very successful or remotely famous. Suddenly, in his early forties, he was both.

‘I certainly wasn’t used to it or acclimatised to it,’ says Orbit, who is candid and charming company. ‘Previously, there had been this slow burn, because I’d never really fitted into any prevailing trend. When Madonna happened, it was suddenly a wholly different thing. We had an album that was getting critically enjoyed and was commercially successful. It outperformed expectations multiple times. So that’s great, but...’

Nonetheless, he liked working with Madonna. ‘Most of the time, it’s very musical,’ he says. ‘You’re making a record, and that’s her core skill set. She loves it and she’s very good at it, as am I. She’s very funny, she likes to take the piss, but it’s very hard work around the clock. The heat is on, because you’re always late with Madonna. She will make sure she has her shtick completely down before she even walks into a session. The few times where she’s been ten minutes late or misremembered a line are so rare that she’d be the first to apologise. She likes structure. She doesn’t do spontaneity by choice, but when she does it is explosive. I always encourage that. I love people to surprise themselves. I want artists at the end of a take to burst into giggles.’

Orbit’s aim as a producer is ‘curated serendipity. You have to have this doublethink going on all the time, to be spontaneous but also ploddingly methodical. If you have that you’re good to go. I think that applies to all the arts.’

Post-Madonna, 16 million record sales to the good, the world beat a path to his door. It phased him. ‘Ray of Light made me, and I didn’t know what I was doing,’ he says. ‘I blundered through the whole period. I got lots of money, which I blew.’ All of it? ‘All of it! Money is not a major motivator for me, it’s down the list. I could have leveraged my profile to do pretty much anything and I just didn’t, and I can’t really get to the bottom of why.’

Orbit traces a ‘slow decline from 2000 all the way to 2020. It was a downward curve. I think it’s partly that I was running with the wrong crowd, but that’s on me. All I know is that I blew it.’ His last album, Orbit Symphonic, was self-released in 2014. By that point, ‘I was pretty disengaged. I wasn’t really paying attention.’ Neither was anyone else, which stung.

‘It wasn’t about status but it was about appreciation,’ he says. ‘I could feel that I was facing a wall of profound indifference, and so the confidence and respect in one’s own abilities declined in direct relation to where I felt like I couldn’t get anyone to give me the time of day. I was still working on music but it didn’t go anywhere. Many blind ends. It really got me. I did lose my confidence, to the point where I couldn’t even look at my equipment.’

Five years ago, Orbit moved back to the UK from California. Finally, after almost forty years working at the sharp end of the music industry, he got himself a serious drug habit. Prior to then, following a phase of typical teenage experimentation, his relationship with drugs was essentially ‘non-existent’.

‘I’ve been addicted to nicotine, on and off. I’ve been addicted to chocolate. I’ve struggled to not booze – but I’m the non-drug guy. If a plate of coke was going round the room, I just passed it across. But something happened and I got into it. Within short measure I was consuming a fair amount. It was perfectly fun to start with but coupled with some emotional trauma and deep frustration about the fact I felt I was washed up as a musician, it took me to a pretty bad place. A perfect storm of bad shit happened. Life can do that.’

The result was one psychotic episode, then another, which ended with Orbit being sectioned in March 2020. Locked up at the start of lockdown. ‘I’m quite an empirical person, I like to figure out how things work, but it’s not always possible,’ he says. ‘That was also frustrating. I didn’t understand what the problem was. Now I do. I didn’t realise that one can have a choice in one’s destiny. You can’t influence certain circumstances in your life, and there are certain things you can’t have, but there’s an awful lot you can make happen. It seems to have worked in my case, but I don’t want to sound smug.’

In restored good health, Orbit’s creative drive returned. The Painter, his first album for eight years, is the result of ‘12, 13 months of totally obsessive work.’ Making it, he felt reconnected to the person he was 25 years ago, pre-Madonna. ‘That was the last time I was on fire,’ he says. ‘Often you look back on these golden periods in your life and ruefully reflect, Oh, I’ll never have that again. And yet I kind of am, albeit I’m a bit older and more realistic.’

It’s a lovely record: club music for the bedroom, thoughtful and calm, with a number of guest vocalists including Polly Scattergood, Beth Orton and Kate Melua. ‘I wanted something that was reassuring; summery, vivid and colourful.’

Given what happened before, is he worried about The Painter being too successful? ‘It’s niche, but I want to have the biggest niche!’ he says. ‘I’m a bit ambitious for this. It’s not the money or the fame, not that I have a problem with those, but I want people to hear it. I don’t think, realistically, I’m ever going to have that kind of success again, but if I did, I would enjoy it and not just waste it. I look at young musicians now having their moment, and I want to take them aside and say, “Are you enjoying this? Really? Because you can have that, too.”’

Things are looking up. ‘I’m having the summertime of my life,’ he says, and I believe him. Orbit has got an Italian passport and gets the keys to his new place in Venice next week. ‘I get to be part of the EU again, living in the city of profound nuance and colour. No cars. You either walk or you take the boat. How good is that?’ He smiles. ‘It was all done on an impulse, like my whole life.’