Basically, Alby exists in a state of squalor on chocolate and drugs, and is on the run from hit men sent by the Milk Marketing Board. He’s paranoid, brilliant, dysfunctional, and inhabits a hyperreal and instantly recognisable 1980s South London. So, where did he come from?
“When you’re writing your first book you pour in a lot of things you’ve been growing up with, storing away,” says Millar, “the same as people recording their first album. The book contains some teenage angst, which I was still holding onto into my twenties. Having said that, Alby Starvation’s angst isn’t really teenage, though it’s not exactly mature either!
“I can still remember specific things which were influencing me at the time. The two main literary influence were Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast Of Champions, and Marvel comics. I particularly liked that Breakfast Of Champions was written in short sections. As for Marvel comics, I’d been a fan of them for a long time. These days, I’ve moved on to Manga.
“Also, there was The Sex Pistols. Alby Starvation came out in 1987, but I wrote it in 1984. In 1984 I was still very influenced by the punk aesthetic of trusting in your own talent. At home and at school I’d not been encouraged to be creative in any way, and would not have become a writer without the punk encouragement… Milk, Sulphate And Alby Starvation wasn’t my first attempt. I’d practiced by writing two novels before that. Neither of these were much good. I knew they weren’t good enough, and didn’t ever show them to anyone, but when I wrote Alby Starvation, I was confident I’d come up with something worthwhile.”
So why the Milk Marketing Board? “I’ve suffered from most of my life from irritable bowel syndrome in various forms. Milk is one of those foods that can cause digestive problems, which did at the time make me suspicious of it. So my health doubts about milk made the Milk Marketing Board a good target!” As for Alby being Millar himself, “He’s a comically exaggerated version. I deliberately exaggerated my own fears, paranoias. He was living in the same place as I was, and living among the same people. I placed him firmly in my world. Brixton then was not fashionable in any way, it was just a place people ended up if they were too poor to live anywhere else.”
After Alby Starvation came Lux The Poet, featuring the insanely vain and impossibly beautiful Lux (unless impossibly beautiful was simply Lux’s own assessment of himself). Millar’s firm on this. “I’m definitely not Lux,” he says. “Lux is a reverse image of Alby, particularly with his confidence. I admire people with confidence, but at Lux’s age, I had none at all.” Which leads neatly to Thraxas, the hard-drinking, libidinous, glutinous and over-confident hero of the novels written by Millar’s alter-ego Martin Scott (the first of which won a World Fantasy Award).
“I admire Thraxas for his hearty appetites. I have a troubled relationship with food generally, and also I can’t drink much alcohol. So I like the way Thraxas can out-eat and out-drink everybody. I like his bravery too. He’s Falstaffian, with his appetite, and his bragging… I wrote the first for something to do, really, during one of these long periods when I’d finished a book, and was waiting for it to be published.
“I originally planned on Thraxas being rather darker, a sort of fantasy-noir, but it didn’t turn out like that, partly because Thraxas and his friend Makri turned into something of a comedy double act. I try to keep the detective element going anyway as Thraxas is an investigator. I am a fan of Chandler and Hammett, although my knowledge of modern detective fiction is limited. Mind you, my knowledge of everything contemporary is limited. People email asking if the series will continue. So I’m now reviving Thraxas after a long gap. I’ve written a new book, Thraxas And The Ice Dragon, and I’m publishing it myself, and all the others, as ebooks.”
There is a laconic, almost impressive dourness to Millar’s worldview.
“I never thought Fourth Estate were any good at promoting me,” he says. “I thought it strangely incompetent of them never to find a US publisher for The Good Fairies Of New York, for instance. I’d been grateful to them for publishing me in the first place, particularly as it took my agent more than three years to find a publisher for Alby Starvation, but they were never that great. How leaving them impacted on my book sales I can’t say. There was a period when my writing career completely ground to a halt. I was out of print, and couldn’t find a publisher. This was frustrating, particularly as I had great faith in the book I’d just written, Lonely Werewolf Girl. Still, having overcome that, those books are doing well, and the third will be published in 2013, The Anxiety Of Kalix The Werewolf (a title inspired by The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of Martin’s Manga favourites).
“I wouldn’t say I’ve had fantastic luck in the world of publishing, but on the other hand, I’ve made my living from my writing for a long time, so I’m not complaining… I like writing, and I’m not really capable of doing much else.”
A comment to resonate with writers everywhere.
The Orb: Behind the Ultraworld
- Phil Meadley -
In space, there are no molecules to carry sound, so meteors collide, suns explode and orbiting space stations let off the occasional readjustment thruster in silence. But if space did have a sound, then the sound of a synthesizer oscillating, modulating and reshaping sound waves would come pretty damn close.
There’s always been something oddly remote and otherworldly about electronic music, as typified by Brian Eno’s various ambient works or Kraftwerk and Gary Numan’s angular robotic, arpeggiated rhythms. And with the advent of more affordable technology the electronic movement started to gather pace by the late 80s. Suddenly, you didn’t need to be a millionaire music producer to own an analogue sampler, or need a converted barn to house a modular synth. Electronic music exploded into the 90s, along with cosmic ideas fuelled by a generation whose youthful eyes stared wide-eyed at flickering black-and-white images of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Part of this generation were childhood friends Martin Glover (aka Youth) and Alex Paterson, who, without the aid of NASA training, found another way to journey into space, by forming pioneering ambient house collective The Orb.
During the late 70s punk explosion, Youth became bass player for industrial rockers Killing Joke. He left an increasingly acrimonious ship a few years later to form dub funk pop group Brilliant (which later included Orb and KLF member Jimmy Cauty). The band recorded one album in 1986 before disbanding, which in turn led to Youth and ex-Killing Joke roadie Alex Paterson forming their own label, Wau! Mr Modo. Around the same time Paterson (now known as Dr Alex Paterson) and Jimmy Cauty began DJing ambient and dub sets across London under The Orb moniker. When they decided to make their own music, Youth was present but not in the frontline due to contractual reasons. He remembers that at the time they “read a lot of Furry Freak Brothers comics, smoked a lot of dope, believed in aliens, and had a lot of conspiracy theories.”
“Space was something that our generation was brought up on,” recalls Paterson, clutching an original quarter-inch tape of the Apollo Moon landings. “We’d almost forgotten about it, but it was a childhood fantasy and The Orb brought all that back.”
“There was something very appealing about all that 50s space stuff,” says Youth, “especially things like the Russians sending Laika [the dog that became the first animal to orbit the Earth on 3 November 1957] into space, and the way they depicted the space race in their artwork.”
“The Soviets gave all their dogs names, whilst the Americans only gave their dogs numbers… unless they survived…” interjects Paterson. “There’s a television documentary from 2005 called Space Race, which is about [Sergei] Korolev [the leading Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer during the 50s and 60s] and his counterpart, [the German-American scientist] Wernher von Braun. They were trying to get into space but both were more interested in ballistic missiles. Korolev discovered this energy field that was hydrogen based and much more powerful than any other energy field in existence. But the Russians fell behind in the space race when there was a major leak in one of the f
uel tanks at a research base, and the explosion killed 30-40 of their top scientists.”
Paterson is referring to the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, which occurred after Chief Marshall Mitrofan Nedelin gave orders to use improper shutdown and control procedures on an experimental R-16 rocket. The missile’s second stage engine fired straight into the full propellant tanks, still attached to the first stage engine. The resulting explosion killed between 90 and 150 members of the Soviet military and technical elite. Nedelin himself was vaporised and was only identified from his war medals. The incident remained an official secret until 1989.
Conspiracy theories provide much of the conceptual backdrop for the first two Orb albums, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (1991) and U.F.Orb (which reached number one in the UK album chart in 1992). “Do you ever wonder why they never went back to the Moon?” Paterson enquires. “Well it’s all about the Van Allen radiation belt. There’s a very good DVD about it called A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon, and another called For All Mankind. Those were films I would’ve got samples from for the first two albums; all based on ufology. There were tracks such as Majestic named after the Majestic 12 [a supposed secret committee of scientists, military leaders and government officials formed by President Harry S Truman to investigate the recovery of a UFO north of Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947] and Close Encounters on U.F.Orb. And of course Blue Room [which reached number eight in the UK singles chart in June 1992 and remains the longest single ever to reach the charts at 39 minutes 57 seconds], which is a reference to a hanger at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio where they housed all the alien artifacts.”
The success of Blue Room spawned an appearance on Top Of The Pops, where Paterson and Kris Weston (aka producer Thrash – Cauty had left to form The KLF by then) sat playing a game of space-age chess in front of a video projection of the single. “We were dressed in pseudo-space outfits and I had Fluff under one arm, and Thrash had Shark Sheep under his arm. They were our pets on tour, toy sheep… He cheated by the way. We never did finish that game…”
Paterson remains unconvinced that men landed on the Moon, but Youth takes a more conventional view. “I like the Kubrick thing [a conspiracy theory that suggests the Apollo 11 Moon landing was scripted by Arthur C Clarke, directed by Stanley Kubrick and shot in a studio in Hollywood], but I remember going to an exhibition of NASA photos from the Apollo missions at the Hayward [gallery] a few years ago, and there were tens of thousands of pictures. You can’t fake that shit man. There are too many people involved. The Russians would have to have been in on it as well. Also, recently the Chinese took some high-resolution photos of the Moon, and you can see the footprints of the astronauts.
“I did an album with Uri Geller once, and at the end of the session he gave me this crystal and said that Neil Armstrong had taken it with him to the Moon, so I want to believe,” he continues hopefully.
“Well I’m still open to it...” Paterson mutters quietly in reply.
“Seeing the Apollo Missions at the age of 10 or 11, we all thought that by 1980 we’d be going to Mars and living on the Moon,” Youth says. “But by the mid-80s we realised that maybe we could go to the stars in other ways. And with the advent of psychedelics and MDMA (ecstasy), suddenly all of those aspirations became more of a shamanic thing. They assisted the inner journey. But there was also a kind of ironic humour to it in that we were re-approaching it in the context of ambient and house music.”
The band’s humour extended to its use of samples such as a rooster crowing at the start of Little Fluffy Clouds, and the apparently stoned (she later claimed that she had a cold) singer Rickie Lee Jones recalling childhood memories of an expansive Arizona skyline. The track also features samples from avant-garde composer Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, and Ennio Morricone’s The Man With The Harmonica.
There were also tongue-in-cheek track titles such as Back Side Of The Moon, and the 1989 single A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld, which garnered critical acclaim via an early John Peel Session. The title was in fact lifted from Blake’s 7 via a BBC sound effects compilation track entitled The Core, A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain Which Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld.
“Straight after the Peel sessions, Paul Oakenfold said to us: ‘Okay, we want you to take what you’re doing down to Heaven [the legendary London club where he was resident DJ] and give yourself a chill-out room.’ That was the first ever chill-out room in a club, and it was directly because of Peel, God bless him. He saw the potential in us more than anyone else.”
At the time Paterson was consuming a heady mix of mind-altering literature from science-fiction writers such as Philip K Dick, Robert A Heinlein, plus the philosophical existentialist musings of Colin Wilson, Brad Steiger and leading ufologist Timothy Good. The influence of the film Blade Runner based on Dick’s story Do Andoids Dream Of Electric Sheep? even extended to the use of a detuned saxophone sample from the movie in their remix of Primal Scream’s track Higher Than The Sun. Science fiction samples were also lifted from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and the 1980 Flash Gordon movie for the track Earth (Gaia).
“At the time I wanted to believe,” he says. “There was no such thing as The X-Files then. U.F.Orb was the precursor to all that.”
Both claim to have seen UFOs. Youth says he saw five LED-type lights whizzing around on a boat trip across the Solent when he was 14, and Paterson saw a ball of light appear out of nowhere and hover 30 metres in front of him in a valley in northern Italy when he was 23.
“Later on when I started going to Goa and taking psychedelics, I experienced some very strange phenomena that could easily have been attributed to UFOs or weird super nature,” says Youth. “I think taking psychedelics in a jungle or on a beautiful beach looking at the stars with a big sound rig and some strong Californian LSD made you realise that alien life was an entirely plausible reality. Okay, we haven’t actually shaken hands with them, but we know it’s going on, we just don’t know what it is yet.”
There’s an almost prog-rock feel to The Orb’s debut double album, with concept-driven tracks such as Spanish Castles In Space lasting 15 minutes. “I had done an album with Jimmy called Space, but we fell out and he took my samples out and redid it all himself,” says Paterson. “The titles were all named after planets from our solar system, except for the Earth, which he left out. So I decided that after Little Fluffy Clouds we would go to Earth [on Earth (Gaia)] and then go off on an adventure to the Ultraworld where you’d discover the Outlands, and you’d see a Perpetual Dawn, and be amongst the stars watching Spanish Castles In Space.”
The length of the tracks was also due to Youth’s clubbing experiences. “One of the big penny-dropping moments for me was seeing an Italian DJ called Loran. He’d take all the vocals out of tunes and weave them in and out of other tracks to create a kind of hypnotic intensity. All great art has that intensity, whether it’s a painting or a book. As an artist you’re trying to attain that connection with audience or listener. So what we tried to do was take out all the fluffy bits and add weird psychedelic or space samples over the top. I recognised that in the right setting you only needed the slightest nudge of a sample about space, and that would send your consciousness right out into the stars.”
Another influence that can be keenly felt on the early Orb albums is that of krautrock, certainly in terms of the repetitive rhythmical techniques that the likes of Neu! and Tangerine Dream employed. This dates back to their days with Killing Joke, as Youth explains: “We went on tour to Germany with Killing Joke in the late 70s and got stranded in this promoter’s flat for a few days because he’d gone bust. He left us with a bong, a load of hash, and what seemed like a complete collection of krautrock albums. We could see the industrial flares of Frankfurt factories in the distance, and listening to the likes of Cluster with Eno, and Neu! just made total sense. There was a complete synergy between time, space and music.”
“We did our third Killing Joke album, Revelations, with Conny Plank (the German producer who recorded Cluster, Can, Neu! and Moebius & Plank),” adds Youth. “He was the only producer that we all agreed that we’d like to work with. Meeting him and Holger [Czukay] from Can was a big influence.”
In the late 80s, a new techno sound was emanating out of Detroit via producers such as Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson. In the UK, electronic acts such as 808 State would make regular forays into the charts, and acid house had its first dedicated London club night, Shoom. Youth and Paterson’s proto-acid house releases, discovered by DJ Andrew Weatherall who lived in the flat above them, were a key part of the soundtrack to what became known as the Second Summer of Love (1988-89).
These influences in turn all helped sow the sonic seeds for a new style of space-influenced electronica in the 1990s. Youth set up a psychedelic trance label, Dragonfly Records. Early releases by acts such as Man With No Name and Pleiadians were heavily influenced by science fiction. SF’s astral influence spread rapidly as electronic music cross-pollinated, and kids once again turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Its influence can still be heard today.
Youth is still playing and recording with Killing Joke. As a producer and musician, he has worked with the likes of The Verve, U2 and Paul McCartney. Paterson still records and tours with The Orb. It’s The Orb’s 25th anniversary in 2013.
Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco Page 7
