Well, next week sees the release of Orbital's first new track since 'Beached' at the beginning of 2000. 'Funny Break (One's Enough)' is out next Monday (April 16), and with the excellent long-player 'The Altogether' to follow on April 30, we got together with Phil Hartnoll for an exclusive run-through of the background to all the tracks on their monstrous sixth album. Not only that, but we've got the promo video for 'Funny Break (One's Enough)' as well. Enjoy!

Tension
"I've been thinking about the whole LP in general, and to me it's like a nice little day out at Thorpe Park. All the fun of the fair - you go for a nice day out with a group of mates. It's to be listened to with friends, and shared with friends, and you get all the different rides. You start with 'Tension', and this is like the biggest, fastest rollercoaster ride. It reminds me of my old punk days - Paul calls it "techno psychobilly for the 21st century". It's a great laugh to me, it's just a release for all your tension."

Funny Break (One's Enough)
"That's your love tunnel ride. I went to a house-warming party for this girl called Naomi Bedford. It got late in the night, everyone got pissed, and she went upstairs, got the guitar and started singing - and we just thought, 'Jesus Christ, she's got an excellent voice.' We were going to have this big orchestral brass section, but instead we gave her a demo, one thing led to another and we ended up with that vocal on it, which I think is lovely." To watch the video for 'Funny Break (One's Enough)', click here

Oi!
"It's a very funny LP. It's not heavy - this is what I mean about the funfair. 'Oi!' is in that vein. It just started out from one of those sessions when you're listening to old records and something just leaps out at you. We just grabbed the Ian Dury loop off the shelf, and Paul and our engineer Mickey Mann knocked it into shape from there. Something that's quite spooky, though, is that we found out he'd died when we were in the middle of recording it. So, conceptually, it was born when he died. It's a strange little connection - quite touching for us."

Pay For View
"Nick Waplington is a photographer, and the BBC gave him the budget to produce a 40-minute art film. He's a mate of ours, and asked us to do the music. He went around the world just filming things that he saw - and one of the most striking things was of South American prostitutes in G-strings with fat businessmen ogling them. That gave us the theme - but we then turned it into something quite beautiful. It's a tribute to prostitutes - because they are just taking the piss out of men, really!"

Tootled
"This is my brother's baby. We did the Lollopalooza with the rock band Tool, which was fantastic. We got to know them, got to know their music. When we got back, Paul bought loads of their stuff - so this is just a montage of bits and pieces of Tool records, really."

Last Thing
"It's a bit more of a traditional Orbital song, I would say. Which is just the way it turned out, really. It's got a bit of a two-steppy, drum'n'bassy kind of vibe to it. It's just from playing with a new synthesiser that I've got, and it all going ballistic. Me dancing around the studio on my own, testing out me sub-bass."

Dr Who
"That started off just for a laugh, live. We normally try to chuck something in live for a bit of fun - but obviously this a highly respected, fantastic tune. It was so out there at the time, and still is. Doing a cover of it is really difficult even now, with all this technology. Delia Derbyshire was out there, that girl, she really was! We did that live version and people loved it! We weren't even going to do it on the LP, but people on the Internet and our website made it obvious that they really, really wanted a copy of it. So it's there through popular demand."

Shadows
"This is the ghost train of the theme park! The mood of that came about because we were working with Paul Anderson and Jeremy Bolt - who we've done stuff like Event Horizon for. There was this pilot episode he was working on which was called 'Shadows', and was a bit of a 'Sixth Sense' supernatural thing, solving the mystery as to why ghosts were in purgatory. We wrote the whole thing from script, but then some person in LA flexed their muscles and thought that our stuff was too weird, or whatever. This track was actually written for a graveyard scene, and I'm actually quite pleased that they didn't use our music, because we got some fantastic tracks out of it."

Waving Not Drowning
"Ah, a lovely little track! This is another one to come from the Nick Waplington thing - well, the guitar at the beginning comes from that and we made it into a full-on piece. It's very naive, very playschool, so I suppose it's the soft play area for the under-threes! It's just so jolly - it's from looking forward to summer. It could also be the dodgems or the waltzers, because it breaks down into that carousel bit in the middle. It's kinda 60s-sounding."

Illuminate
"Yeah, this was a track that Paul wrote a couple of years ago. David Gray is actually my brother-in-law, so it's keeping it all well within the family! Anyway, Paul always felt that the track needed a male vocal, and David came down at the time and did a quick vocal on the top just to get how it would sound with that on top. We were a bit unsure, so it went back on the shelf. It wasn't right for the last one, but it came out of the vaults again last year, and it really matured well on the shelf! It's the most song song that we've ever done, so it's a bit of a departure for us. People seem to really hate it, or really love it. Orbital fans love a good moan, so it'll give them something to moan about!"

Meltdown
"It was a brilliant experience for us - we're a great fan of Scott Walker's anyway. The theme was to collaborate with a contemporary choreographer. We just connected with her when she was doing one of her pieces. It's a bit like writing for a scene for a film, because there's stuff to go with it. So Lea Anderson [the choreographer] had a big part in the writing of the track, even though she didn't actually write a note."