Beth Orton

Embellishing her melodic, acoustic folk-flavoured songs with a love of techno and dance music, Beth Orton's collaborations with the likes of Chemical Brothers and William Orbit virtually invented a style that became known as "folktronica". Born on 14 December 1970 in Norfolk, and orphaned when she was 19, she went to acting school before touring the UK with a fringe theatre group and later living with Buddhist nuns in Thailand. She embarked on a music career after meeting William Orbit and guested on his 1987 Strange Cargo album, also recording a cover of John Martyn's "Don't Wanna Know About Evil" with him and then working on her first album SuperPinkMandy together. A meeting with the Chemical Brothers resulted in collaborations with them, too, before she released her breakthrough 1996 album Trailer Park, which won her BRIT Award and Mercury Music Prize nominations. Her first hit single "She Cries Your Name" soon followed and, expanding her style to work with a band, she achieved further success with the albums Central Reservation (1999) – for which she received a second Mercury Music Prize and won the Best Female Artist award at the 2000 BRIT Awards – Daybreaker (2002) and Comfort of Strangers (2006) – recorded with musician and composer Jim O'Rourke – Sugaring Season (2012) and the electronic-led Kidsticks (2016), which was produced by Beth Orton alongside Andrew Hung from the band Fuck Buttons. In 2022, she returned with her first studio album in six years, Weather Alive, which went to number 27 in the UK.