Beth Orton

On her brilliant new album, Orton ploughs her deepest emotions – and doesn't hold back. She talks about living with Crohn's disease, her identity struggles ...

The song Fractals was “written to him, written to that feeling. Actually you might just have to admit that you love what you do, and shut the fuck up and get on with it. Two deaths hit her hard, and fed into her songwriting: first Andrew Weatherall, who co-produced Trailer Park. “I was the best folk singer I ever was when I worked with him,” Orton says. “By now we’d been through a lockdown and I’d had to be very present for that, but by the second one I was like” – addressing Amidon – “Dude, I’m out of here, I’ll be in the shed if you need me.’ And I’m sorry to all the women that this irritates highly, but I was owed this. But I had a room full of critics still; I had my head chock-a-block with: who do you think you are?” In 2019, she signed with a subsidiary of a major label, and was being set up to work with a “super-fancy” producer. “They were like: ‘We’ll rehome you!’ And I was like: ‘I’m not a dog.’” This was October 2020, and she and Amidon had already lost plenty of touring income due to the pandemic. “In learning to take care of my kids, I learned to take care of myself,” she says, comparing her life now with the “benign neglect” she faced as a child: “By the time I was 19, I had barely any teeth.” Dalston had been the teenage Orton’s home with her divorced mother (“Vodka and white bread seemed to be what we lived off”), and a nominal base for years afterwards, although her parents were both dead by her 20s, and she had few ties to anything much as a young musician. While she calls her daughter and son “the biggest love story of my life”, being a mother chafed against her identity. The first gig I went to of my own volition was the Fall when I was 12. “Not to complain, but motherhood is lonely.” And I don’t know if I am that person, but I’m trying to be.