Orbital's '30 Something' Is the Perfect Template For How Every Greatest Hits Collection Should Be

A retrospective for the UK electronic duo that celebrates the past while looking to the future

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For the almost two years that I’ve been sending you Check This Out!, I have never featured a greatest hits record. Why? Because I don’t think a “best of” usually gives the listener the entire picture needed to consider an artist’s career. I’m not saying they’re necessarily a bad thing, as I often still boot up the “essentials” playlist for someone I’m not familiar with to get a general overview, but taking in a band’s discography by album is a much better way of exploring how those radio hits came along by understanding the rest of the catalog.

Today this changes because of Orbital’s 30 Something, the slightly tardy celebration of the highly influential UK fraternal electronic duo. Phil and Paul Hartnoll released their first single, “Chime,” in 1989, having recorded it on their father’s tape deck under the staircase like a coupla club-going Harry Potters. The single was an immediate success, and Orbital dominated the 90’s UK house and electronic scene. Their first two records, self-titled and often referred to as “The Green Album” and “The Brown Album,” are electronic music landmarks, but Orbital’s Glastonbury performance in 1994 gained them worldwide fame. For any artist that had notoriety in the nineties, there was only one logical next step - to get them on a bunch of movie soundtrack compilations.

Though it’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed anything Danny Boyle touches (get outta here with that Sex Pistols tv show), I have his soundtracks to thank for getting me into electronic music. While I was full-on into Britpop in the late-90’s, Boyle’s Trainspotting soundtrack opened a whole new world. The inclusion of Blur naturally drew me in, and having Iggy Pop, New Order, Pulp, and Lou Reed most certainly helped. Still, it was Leftfield’s “A Final Hit” and Underworld’s absolute classic, “Born Slippy .NUXX,” that changed how I understood music. Sure, the film’s storyline involving junkies rolling through life in Edinburgh squalor was heavy for a teenager, but so were those damn beats.

When it came time for Boyle’s highly anticipated follow-up, The Beach may be a very uneven movie, but the soundtrack is another banger. Featuring more Leftfield, New Order, and Blur, it also included Moby’s inescapable “Porcelain,” DJ Shadow’s Unkle project featuring The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, and a Sugar Ray cover of Brian Eno and John Cale’s “Spinning Away,” but we don’t need to talk about that. This time though, Orbital’s “Beached,” a collaboration with The Beach’s score composer, Angelo Badalamenti, is what drew me in. Combine these with the Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole and Daft Punk‘s Homework, and I was all in on UK house music.

You can probably thank the pandemic for the delayed celebration of Orbital’s thirtieth birthday, but 30 Something is well worth the wait. The Hartnoll brothers laid the groundwork for the career-spanning narrative by kicking off the compilation with three enormous previously unreleased songs. “Smiley” uses a news clip to set the stage for the beginnings of acid house in which producers held massive warehouse parties in secret locations. The particular party featured on “Smiley” was attended by Paul Hartnoll, ending in a violent cop raid before segueing into the stomping triumphant synth horns of “Acid Horse.” The third unreleased track, “Where Is It Going?” is a remix of a track from 2012’s Wonky, with the new version easily outpacing the earlier studio version with its galactic majesty. Originally performed for the 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony, this particular version includes a sample of Stephen Hawking asking us to “transform our perceptions.”

For the next compilation phase, Orbital performs some of their staples, now updated to sound closer to their modern live counterparts. “Impact (The Earth Is Burning)” gets its natural title update with “Impact (30 Years Later and the Earth Is Still Burning Mix),” and even that first single, “Chime,” sounds fresh with its updated sonics. Their biggest hit, “Halcyon and On and On,” is updated as just “Halcyon,” with additional details and textures that longtime fans will appreciate without taking it too far away from the original.

The rest of the record acts as a gaze into the future, as Orbital includes some of the most cutting-edge names in electronica for remixes. Sure, this compilation may focus heavily on their first few records, and there are many versions of the same songs on here, but that is the beauty of electronic music - these songs can sound completely different from one to the next based on who is remixing them. My highlights from the remixes are “The Girl with the Sun in Her Head” by Floex, “Impact” by the fantastic John Tejada, “Halcyon & On” by Check This Out! favorite Jon Hopkins, who leans into more atmosphere and lets the beat amble a bit, and Joris Voorn’s pulsing stab at “The Box.”

For the endless ways a song can be remixed, look no further than “Belfast,” which appears on this compilation five times. Originally recorded as an ambient track featuring a 909 drum machine and sampled vocals from “O Euchari,” a 12th-century work by Hildegard von Bingen, the song could have been a throwaway and not made it past the demo stage had it not been for David Holmes. A DJ, club runner, and hairdresser based in Belfast, Holmes asked Orbital to play at the Belfast School of Art. Left behind was a tape featuring the then untitled song, and Holmes and his friends pushed Orbital to release it. “Belfast” has lived many lives, from the demo tape to its official release on III EP and the new mix featured here. But take any of the remixes here, whether ANNA’s techno or ambient mixes, a lo-fi pulser by Yotto, or even one by David Holmes who rescued this beauty, and they all demonstrate the need to have so many remixes.

So while the rest of the public argues over who “brought back house music,” whether Beyoncé’s latest or The New York Times claiming it’s Drake, which is the worst take, do yourself a favor and return to the genre’s roots. No one made house music at an accessible level better than Orbital, and it’s about time we celebrate how massively influential their career has been.

And for the record, house music never went anywhere.

30 Something is available now on Orbital Recordings Ltd.

Any memories of 90’s house music? Let’s hear ‘em!