Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don’t stop off on the way somewhere else – it’s an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it’s an effort.
BETH ORTONI was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.
More Beth Orton Quotes
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I don’t believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I’ve been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.
BETH ORTON -
You can have all sorts of relationships, but there’s something with musicians working together where you can have relationship that can just continue to grow in a beautiful way.
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I don’t read music; I taught myself guitar.
BETH ORTON -
I didn’t jump a lot of trees because I didn’t like heights. I liked getting a mirror and walking around with it facing the sky. I’d imagine I was walking in the tops of the trees and falling into the sky, or walking up the stairs whilst going down.
BETH ORTON -
I just like the child’s nightmares and therapy, once an experience has found the light of day I’m no longer under its spell, I’m free to tell it. I hope in telling honestly I can in some way help other people to do so also.
BETH ORTON -
I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words.
BETH ORTON -
My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.
BETH ORTON -
We’re all like little ants who scurry around with the materials that are at hand right now. Each generation finds new materials. Its just evolution, isn’t it?
BETH ORTON -
At about the age of ten, my friends and I discovered the joys of sitting in graveyards drinking merrydown cider and kissing and stealing our elder siblings’ records.
BETH ORTON -
I want it to be more universal than that – like a painter doesn’t have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.
BETH ORTON -
I was scared of the Bible – it seemed whenever I read it I got bad luck. Then I befriended a couple of Jesus’s disciples and I used to show them modern life – how to run the hot and cold taps and things like that. They seemed alright but it didn’t change my feelings about the Bible jinx.
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Kissing was something I did a lot of. Kissing in a wheat field as the sun begins to set on a summer’s evening, with the haze of that light.
BETH ORTON -
I get told I’m a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word “confessional”. I don’t like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don’t want to put myself so directly in the foreground.
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I’ve also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he’s amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it’s incredably personal to write with someone else from scratch.
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I’m not comfortable holidaying in other people’s poverty.
BETH ORTON