Beth Orton: ‘This whole record is about enquiring without coming to any conclusion’

The scene is a North London gastropub overlooking Hampstead Heath, the kind of place where chips are cooked three ways and salads contain melon. Beth Orton lives nearby. A casual observer seeing her sitting at a table with a salad and a bowl of the triplicated chips might presume the comfortable life of a singer-songwriter who made her name in the days when albums sold well enough to bankroll a home in one of North London’s nicer spots. But the casual observer would be wrong.

Orton, 51, has been making music since the 1990s. Back then she was associated with a form of music known as “folktronica” (or, even more punningly, “strum ‘n’ bass”). It combined acoustic guitars and folkie singing with electronic beats, a morning-after balm for frazzled clubbers. Blessed with an unusual but beguiling vocal timbre, a blend of lingering haze and piercing clarity, she was labelled the “comedown queen”. Her solo album Trailer Park came out in 1996 and was nominated for two Brit awards. She won one for its follow-up Central Reservation in 2000. The path was set for a long and fruitful recording career.

Her new album Weather Alive is her eighth. It is a powerful piece of work, up there with Orton’s finest. Opening with a track about new beginnings, its songs have an immersive, open-ended quality, like a reverie or waking dream. “I feel like this whole record is about enquiring, without coming to any conclusion,” she says. “I had a sense of the unconscious and the conscious working at the same time.”

The music strives for a form of comfort, or to be comforting — but does not itself come from a comfortable place. Dropped by her former record label while making it, Orton completed Weather Alive under conditions of financial stress. She also faced the after-effects of a neurological disorder that had up-ended her life.

“Basically in 2014 I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy,” she says. The condition caused seizures and memory problems that left Orton feeling disoriented and exhausted. She and her husband, the US singer-songwriter Sam Amidon, were living in Los Angeles at the time of her diagnosis with their son and Orton’s daughter from a previous relationship. In 2015, they moved to London, where Orton spent part of her childhood and much of her young adulthood (she also grew up in the east English county, Norfolk).

She is cautious about discussing her illness, which is treatable by medication. Having spoken about suffering ill-health before, including the chronic digestive ailment Crohn’s disease, she is reluctant to be pigeonholed as an emblem of sickness, as though croaking out spindly consumptive songs rather than the warmly sung and richly textured ones on Weather Alive. The one-time “comedown queen” is familiar with the reductive force of labelling. But the fact remains that her new album has been inspired by her experiences of being unwell.

Its genesis lies in a piano she acquired when she moved into her North London home. Trained on the guitar — her teacher was the 1970s folk-rock musician Bert Jansch — she found that the piano’s keys opened up new musical spaces for her. It also enabled her to address some of the neurological side-effects of her seizures. “The piano evoked memories, it had a way of resonating,” she says.

Initially she worked alone in the shed in her garden. “It was like I was almost in my own little band. It was really fun,” she says. She approached Tom Skinner, drummer with jazz band Sons of Kemet, to play on the songs; he brought the bassist Tom Herbert with him. Orton sent some preliminary recordings to the record label that she was signed to, a modern classical subsidiary of a major label. Soon afterwards, it dropped her from its roster.

“That was kind of devastating,” she recalls. “Because by now I’d been through such a long process, and I believed that something in me was in that work. I didn’t want to just throw it away.”

It was as if life kept pushing me into a corner and going: Go on, then, go on

She put the rest of her advance into funding the recordings and took a loan out. “It was as if life kept pushing me into a corner and going: Go on, then, go on.” She accepted the challenge. For the first time in her career, she produced her songs on her own. She also co-engineered them, aided by the first female recording engineer with whom she had ever worked, Francine Perry.

Other musicians were recruited, including US multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and UK jazz saxophonist Alabaster dePlume. The music took shape, closer to the free-associative flow of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks than the more structured craft of the traditional singer-songwriter. The resulting record has been taken on by the indie label Partisan.

In the song “Friday Night”, she sings about dreaming of Marcel Proust while lying in her bed — himself a bed-bound writer whose writing was dominated by themes of memory and convalescence. Something of the convalescent’s sensibility lies in Orton’s new songs, that oddly tilted sense of being suspended between illness and health. It relates to the seizures that she suffered, which left her in what is called a postictal state.

“It was a strange sense of being underwater, at a distance from everyone and everything. I was writing from that place,” she explains. “It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re off school and it’s a sunny day or a Saturday and you’re unwell in bed and you see your friends outside playing football and you can’t go out.”

Her “very sensory” album, in her words, moves beyond that frame of mind. “As it came alive, it was like: Woah, I’m in it now,” she says. “I’m not any longer looking at everything from a distance, I’m now inside. I felt immersed suddenly, immersed in my own experience.” She has taken a risk, plunged in — and made a breakthrough.

‘Weather Alive’ is released on September 23 by Partisan Records. Beth Orton tours the UK from October 7: bethortonofficial.com

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