Two ordinary blokes making extraordinary music. That’s probably the best way to sum up Orbital in a sentence. That and the fact they’re brothers.

Their new LP ‘Middle Of Nowhere’, is very good indeed. They’ve grown up with electronic dance and sucked in everything from Michael Nyman’s film music to roughest edged junglism along the way. It shows.

It’s been almost three years since we heard from them with their ‘In Sides’ long-player. What have they done since? A year of touring, another year contributing to the soundtracks of ‘The Saint’, ‘Event Horizon’ and ‘Spawn’ (The latter with Mettallica’s Kirk Hammett), the soundtrack to an obscure Channel 4 drama written and performed by young offenders from Hull, and a year locked away in the studio creating ‘Middle Of Nowhere’. But however long it’s been since they blew the whole thing wide open with ‘Chime’ Orbital have been a viable proposition. London Records never really understood what they had on their hands. From the early days when it was two lads from Sevenoaks, Kent, making electronic music that didn’t quite fit the rave bill (NB ‘Satan’) to later on when they wrote a beautiful tune about their mother’s tranquilizer habit (Halcyon & On’) the quietly shaven-headed duo never followed preordained pathways/ Except now Paul Hartnoll’s grown shoulder-length brown hair. Phil Hartnoll may look much the same as ever but his brother… well, frankly I’m shocked.

After the [magazine] cover photo shoot Phil, Paul and I retreat to their regular private bar/club where we can waffle without eager fellow travellers wandering in and gabbling. I start by asking them questions a techy friend of mine suggested about their kit, about the MMT8 sequencer. They both become immediately enthused because this is whet they’re presently engaged in, transferring information onto the MMT8 to be used during their forthcoming tour on which they have a prospective four such machines on the go. The MMT8 is, as fr as Orbital are concerned, the most realistic way of representing their music in a live environment.

But moving swiftly on, let’s pin them down to a sentence worth’s summation of each of their five albums. Paul is game.

“The first LP’s an anthology of everything we still felt was good up to the point we signed a record contract,” he starts, “The seconds a continuation, a part two. The third LP (‘Snivilisation’) is about trying to write something from beginning to end like you’d write a book, about decay and modern living.”

“It comes the closest to having a concept,” Phil intervenes over a vodka and cranberry juice (he hates the taste of booze).

“Yeah,” Paul adds in an uncharacteristic burst of stream-of-conciousness.

“Religion, philosophy by numbers, plastic surgery, not enough time to do anything, consumerism.”

He pauses and looks at the ceiling.

“The fourth,” he continues, “is our most film-score influenced, a lot of John Barry and Ennio Morricone. And the fifth… this one harks back to the first two, a blank canvas, no idea what we were doing.”

Which doesn’t sound very inspiring until Paul expands on his theme by referring to an album track called ‘Spare Parts Express’.

“Rather than starting out with a load of ideas and wearing them out like we usually do,” he explains, “We started with a bunch of tiny demos for a laugh and then didn’t know what to do with them which was very frustrating, a slow start. By the end of it we were on top of our creativity and felt like we could keep flowing so all these bits and pieces which we originally couldn’t find an ending or arrangement for suddenly fitted into place, slammed together, made sense.”

As ever with Orbital, ‘Middle Of Nowhere’ makes the most of female vocalisating as another instrument in their studio arsenal. As well as Björk sound-alike Alison Goldfrapp, their mate who’s appeared on the last two LPs (“A good old stick,” says Phil), there are contributions from women’s singing group Pookah and potent ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ vocal dramatics contributed by Barbara Cohen from the States.

The brothers, however, will not be taking any additional personnel on their forthcoming British tour and we can still expect the familiar sight of their bobbing heads beneath the arc-lights at this summer’s festivals, though whether ‘Halcyon & On’ will once again mutate into Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’ or Bon Jovi’s ‘You give Love A Bad Name’ remains to be seen. [Of course, it did BOTH!]