by Robin Murray

Beth Orton and The Chemical Brothers have shared a newly unearthed version of Tim Buckley's wonderful 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain'.

Beth Orton has signalled the launch of new label Lost Leaves, a project with Caroline which will feature unreleased and new material. This new track owes a debt to serendipity - recorded some 20 years ago and then lost, it fell from a copy of a Russian literary classic.

"I rediscovered this track when it fell out of an unread copy of War and Peace after we’d moved house," she recalls. "The disc just said ‘Mountain’. There wasn’t a CD player in the house so I went out to the car to try to work out what was on it. Sat out in the road, I had no idea what I was listening to exactly and was thinking, "What the hell is this?" By the time it was over, I was none the wiser."

"I called Tom to see if he remembered the track as it was clearly something I’d done with them and he was equally vague but at least remembered it happening back in Orinoco Studios in London in the late ’90s. It’s still all a bit hazy but when I put the track on I felt a beautiful rush of nostalgia hearing their beats building."

A perfect fusion of Beth's vocal and the psych-tinged beats of the Chemical Brothers, this new version of 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain' sits somewhere between 'Setting Son' and 'Central Reservation'.

"Tom (Rowlands) remembers it being Jeff and Martin from Heavenly (my? record label at the time) who suggested we cover the track," Beth explains. "Tom and I were huge fans of the original and loved the idea. Back then, Tom and Ed and I spent time with each other going out and making music and generally getting up to no good. As male dominated a moment in music as it was back then there was a mutual respect between those guys and myself."

"We enjoyed each other's music, we enjoyed making music with each other. I can still vividly remember the night they put they put 'Alive: Alone' on as the last record of the night at the Heavenly Sunday? Social at the Albany."

"I don't remember much else from those nights but I do remember how amazing it was to hear that track loud as anything as I stood in shock and wonder as everyone went crazy dancing to a track we’d recorded just a week or two before

 

© 2018 Murray/Clash