Electronic music pioneers join forces for first time in Wales

Jude Rogers

Opening the boundary-pushing Cardiff Music City Festival a week tonight will be two acts whose ambitions and drive haven’t dimmed over the decades. One of them shot to fame bringing a punk icon to the rave generation, transformed the way dance music was heard in cinema and on TV, and bagged one of the biggest indie frontmen of our times for their recent LP.

The other made British techno a festival mainstay and this summer had the might to bring an Oscar-winning actress and a Spice Girl on stage with them. Forget the nostalgic bands of the 1990s – Leftfield and Orbital pointed to the future back then, and still do now.

“And I’m really excited about bringing Orbital to Cardiff with us because the last gig we had there was absolutely b***dy awesome,” says Neil Barnes, chief architect of Leftfield (his band last played in 2023 at the Cardiff University Great Hall: “the audience was beyond”). Barnes credits the city as having “great enthusiasm and energy”, and to enjoy that with Orbital, who’ve been around, like them, since the British house music explosion, will be special. “I’ve known them for years, they’re very lovely. It’s mad to think we’ve not done this together before.”

The stories of both acts crackle with gutsy spirit and determination. Leftfield formed in London in 1989, after Barnes says, with a laugh, that he “worked his way up into the industry” – from being a cleaner at legendary London record shop Honest Jon’s to earning enough money behind the counter to get a bank loan for a sampler. Equipment becoming ing cheaper and more accessible gave him and original Leftfield partner, Paul Daley, a licence to let their creativity surge. Their first single, 1990’s Not Forgotten, was made on a simple MIDI sequencer, but its energy and beats made it a hugely influential British track.

“It was primitive but exciting,” Barnes says. “And everything felt new. We were so excited about being in control, not being told what to do, and wanting to make our music successful, but we had nothing, no money and nobody backing us. Everything we generated came from us. The best stuff works that way.”

Orbital were ploughing a similar furrow in Sevenoaks, Kent. Paul Hartnoll had decided he wanted to make music at “ten or eleven”, after hearing The Beat’s version of Tears Of A Clown on the chart rundown. “I was in the bath when I heard it,” he says. “I went into that bath still thinking about Action Men and Airfix toy soldiers, but the time I got out, I was thinking, do I need to get a guitar or a saxophone? What do I do? It was like a calling.”

A decade later, Orbital, his band with his younger brother Phil, were in the top 20 themselves, and on Top of the Pops. Their 1989 debut single, the much-sampled club classic Chime, got to number 17, a song originally recorded in their dad’s makeshift home office in an understairs cupboard. Its b-side was Deeper, which used samples of a male voice from a relaxation record; they approached Tilda Swinton to redo it to open their Glastonbury set back in June. “And I thought, oh god, she’ll be too busy to do it, but then she said she loved the idea.”

She asked to perform it live. It became one of two guest performances for Orbital that night that went viral.

The other was with Mel C, wearing similar head torches to the ones the brothers have made their trademark, doing a hard-house version of Wannabe that the brothers renamed “Spicy”. The result was a clash of different worlds, but it worked brilliantly. “What I’ve realised over the years is that I’m an absurdist,” Hartnoll says, smiling. “I love Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and the more absurd something is, the more surreal, the happier I am.”

It’s one of many collaborations they’ve done over the years full of cheek and wit. They’ve performed their cover of the Dr Who theme with then-Timelord Mat Smith, built Belinda Carlisle and Bon Jovi samples into their songs, and more recently worked with Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson (on Dirty Rat) and the Medieval Baebes (on Ringa Ringa: The Old Pandemic Folk Song) for their 2023 album, Optical Delusion.

Another guest artist, Sex Pistol John Lydon, similarly skyrocketed Leftfield’s impact in the mid-1990s – although Neil, who knew him through a friend, had to “kidnap” him, he says, to record 1995’s Open Up. “He tried to get out of doing it, because, you know, he’s nervous, but thankfully he came and he did it!” Reggae singer Earl Sixteen and Curve’s Toni Halliday also helped Leftfield’s debut album, Leftism, become a critical and commercial success. Eventually selling 220,000 copies, its follow-up, 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth, got to number one, featured Phat Planet, the track which soundtracked the Guinness advert, Surfer, featuring quotes from Moby Dick and horses riding from the waves. (Surfer has been voted the greatest advert of all time in many polls since 2000, driven by Leftfield’s unmistakably heavy, propulsive rhythms.)

Leftfield and Orbital were lightning rods for British house and techno from the start of their careers, and continue to be, aiming high with their ideas and performances as they make albums and tour. Leftfield’s 2023 album, This Is What We Do, was made after Neil’s recovery from cancer, and features Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten, now a no. 1 artist and festival headliner himself, on Full Way Round. “Me and Adam [Wren, who joined in 2010] were just blown watching him build up that track. It was fantastic.”

These days, Paul loves “the fun” of working with new people too, but also loves live improvisation, which Orbital have always excelled at. “You get the chance to twist things every night, play them in new arrangements, jam with the structures, use synths to rejig the sounds.” He says to imagine to race – he loves having the parts of a track lined up at the beginning of a set, deciding which one’s going where at what time and when it finishes, based on his and Phil’s interactions with the audience. “Because as soon as you stand on a stage with a couple of 1,000 people in front of you, everything changes.”

And so this will come to pass at the Utilita Arena this Friday. Paul loves meeting and talking to different people on tour, thinking of new ways to make music Neil’s advice to those who want to follow Leftfield’s footsteps sounds different, but isn’t when you turn up its volume. “Don’t listen to anyone.” He laughs. “By which I mean don’t listen if anyone tells you anything has to be done a certain way. Do it your way. Do everything your own way. And be happy – it’s good to break the rules.”

Leftfield and Orbital play together at Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on Friday, 27 September. Tickets available HERE

To find out more about the Cardiff Music City Festival click HERE