Beth Orton is an English singer-songwriter known for her unique style of mixing folk music with electronic elements. At 19, Orton was invited to a party by an actress she was in a play with – a party thrown by producer William Orbit, who immediately became ‘obsessed’ with her. The two dated, and Orbit insisted she work with him – even flying to Thailand, when she’d became a Buddhist nun after her mother died, to convince her to return to the UK.

Their 1993 song “Water From A Vine Leaf” was a minor UK hit. The same year, the two also released “Don’t Wanna Know ‘bout Evil” under the name Spill – a song that later appeared on Superpinkymandy, a collection of downtempo electronic songs produced by Orbit and only released in Japan that is often not acknowledged as her first album.

Orton appeared on two songs on The Chemical Brothers' UK top 10 album Exit Planet Dust in 1995. By then, Orbit ‘wasn’t really into’ the songs Orton was writing at the time, so she formed a band and released a cover of The Ronettes song “I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine”. Her 1996 album Trailer Park followed and found success in the UK including her first top 40 song “She Cries Your Name”. Despite not charting in the US, Trailer Park still won Orton a devoted following. An EP, Best Bit, surfaced the following year and gave Orton her second UK top 40. Orton perfomed at the Pinkpop, Essential, Glastonbury and T In The Park Festivals that same year.

In early 1999, Orton released Central Reservation to further success, with two more UK top 40 singles, a top 20 album peak, and a British Female Solo Artist Award. It also gave Orton her first US chart appearances on the Albums, AAA, Dance, and Alternative Songs Charts. That summer she toured as part of Lilith Fair alongside: Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls and several other female-fronted acts, later revealing she found it to be patronising and only did it because her management insisted. She also performed at Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds Festivals that year before touring with Beck in 2000.

Daybreaker followed in 2002 and became her most commercially successful album, reaching the top 40 in five countries (including a #8 UK peak) despite its singles finding only moderate success in the UK and very little in the US. Orton toured the US alongside Hem that summer in support of the album before performing across Europe in the fall. 2003 saw the release of the companion album The Other Side Of Daybreak and a greatest hits compilation entitled Pass In Time: The Definitive Collection, which was followed by appearances at the Field Day, Glastonbury, Austin City Limits, Bonaroo, and Home Fires festivals.

After her moderately successful 2006 album Comfort of Strangers, an album that would see Orton largely abandon the electronic elements of her music, she ‘seemed to disappear’. Soon after its release, Orton was forced to stop touring due to pregnancy. When she did resume gigging, it was alongside Scottish folk singer Bert Jansch doing his band’s old folk songs – which she later called ‘awful’. Then her eventual return to performing her own material proved to be ‘awkward’.

It took six years for her next album Sugaring Season to materialize in 2012. Despite having no charting singles, it still performed well on the UK and US album charts. Orton toured the US before its release, then throughout Europe afterward. Over the next few years, she performed at the Latitude, Newport Folk, Ottawa Folk, Rifflandia, Woodward Folk, Folk By The Oak and Stockholm Music & Arts festivals.

2016’s Kidsticks would perform similarly on the UK charts, but not make any impact in the US aside from the controversy surrounding her music video for its single “1973” which included vandalizing a government-protected joshua tree in California with spray paint, to which she quickly apologized on her Facebook account.

In June of 2018, Orton and The Chemical Brothers released the single “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain”, a song recorded two decades earlier.

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