If Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella concert was the moment that the great American public was introduced to live electronic music, then Orbital’s 1994 Glastonbury festival gig was the spark that sent British dance music into orbit, 12 years earlier.

By this point, live dance music was already pretty well established in the UK. Inner City had played live extensively in Britain in 1989, while The Shamen’s Synergy tour, which stretched around the UK from 1989 to 1990, did the early groundwork of fusing live electronic music performances with DJs. Orbital, in fact, made their live debut in February 1990 at London’s Town and Country club during a Synergy gig.

Even so, Glastonbury 1994 - which is being released on a live album for the first time this month - was huge for Orbital and for British music fans as a whole, paving the way for dance music to take over the UK mainstream in the mid to late 1990s and helping to make the humble festival into a staple of British life.

The reason for this is national television. Glastonbury 1994 was the first time that the festival was televised live, beamed by Channel 4 into millions of houses from Thursday June 23 to Saturday June 25, when Orbital headlined the NME Stage. 

I say “millions of houses”; no one seems to really know how many people watched the Orbital gig. Maybe “millions” seems overblown for a set that went out at 11pm on a Saturday night. But the vast majority of households in the UK in 1994 only had four channels, so obscure programming could wrack up millions of views if the wind was blowing the right way and nothing else was happening.

Whatever the case, it certainly seemed like everybody - or everybody who counted, anyway - had seen the Orbital Glastonbury gig when I returned to school on Monday June 27 and started immediately planning to attend Glastonbury 1995. Over the coming months, my friends and I wore out our VHS players playing and re-playing the Orbital gig, itching with expectation that we too could one day attend something so epic.

Physics permitting, the best way to enjoy Orbital’s Glastonbury 1994 set would be to travel back in time and watch it live. Second to that - and eminently more practical - is watching this clip of the band playing Chime at the climax to the iconic gig, the crowd looking like they might levitate with excitement as the song’s synth riff explodes into life - like heavy metal rendered in pure celestial tear drops - and yellow lights burst over the Somerset field. 

Faced with this stiff competition Glastonbury 1994, the band’s new / old live album, will inevitably struggle. This is the first time that the whole eight-song concert (nine with the intro) has been released, although three songs - Walk Now, Are We Here? and Attached were released on Orbital: Live at Glastonbury 1994–2004 in 2007 and you can find video of most of the gig online, in various shapes and sizes.

However clean the audio might be on the new record, losing the visuals is a tough blow, not so much for Orbital’s own light show - which is fun, if not boundary breaking - but for what we miss of the crowd. You can see from any of the video footage that the Glastonbury crowd is equally, if not more, important as the band during the gig, musicians and public caught in pure euphoric synthesis. Orbital’s Phil Hartnoll says as much in the new album’s notes. “All I remember is the energy from the crowd, this love…. oozing out, like it was vibrating from them,” he explains.

Glastonbury 1994 the album can’t compete with the live video footage of the gig, then. But it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the set’s communal ecstasy on record, with the roars, whistles, stomps and claps of the huge crowd poking through the mix at opportune times. To hear the scream of appreciation when the tickling, teasing synth lines of Remind give way to hard acidic burble and punishing kick drum is to feel the sweet adrenaline of a perfect concert moment burst through the veins.

By1994 Orbital were already veterans of live electronic music and they knew how to work a Saturday night crowd. Riffs are extended, synths are tweaked, beats are teased and their songs climb towards prog-techno-rave peaks that are largely faithful to their original versions - an Alive 2007-style song mash up this is not - although wilder, larger and most ambitious. 

It’s not exactly a subtle sound that the Hartnolls blasted from the Glastonbury stage that Saturday night but it’s not particularly heavy either, at least by today’s standards, with Orbital relying on colourful synth riffs and huge builds to carry the day, their sound caught somewhere distinctly Orbital between rave, techno, what would soon be known as IDM and progressive house. It’s hearteningly live too: right at the end of Sad But True / the start of Impact you can hear a breakbeat looping just out of time, which gives an idea of the heart-in-the-mouth experience this gig must have been for the Hartnoll brothers.

The duo also have a knack of picking vocal samples that are perfectly primed for huge festival crowds - the voice on Are We Here that ponders human reality, for example, seems to get right inside the collective unconsciousness. Orbital sound enormous here, their music designed for the masses, a world away from the sweaty Detroit basements in which techno started. And it really doesn’t seem that far from here to EDM super festivals and vast DJ light shows.

It is perhaps unfair to nitpick a concert this euphoric. In retrospect, though, the four songs from the band’s third album, Snivilisation, released a couple of months after the Glastonbury gig - Forever, Sad But True, Are We Here and Attached - don’t quite clear the very high bar set by the earlier songs. Are We Here has a gorgeous recorded vocal from a pre-fame Alison Goldfrapp but its clattering breaks and metallic dread bass  - an attempt to copy the nascent jungle sound - feel a little lumpy and on record the song’s 15 minutes overstay their welcome.

By contrast, the three tracks taken from Orbital’s second eponymous LP (known as The Brown Album) - Remind, Impact (The Earth is Burning) and Walk Now - are incendiary. The Brown Album was a record that sounded designed to play live, as Orbital got ever bigger on the gig circuit, its songs flowing into each other in a fiery melodic rush of synths and vocal samples.

And Chime is, well, Chime, a rave classic that has endured into dance legend and beyond, a track made in one take under the Hartnoll brothers’ stairs that screams with freshness and profundity and will do so forever more. I don’t know if the version on Glastonbury 94 is necessarily better than all those other takes on Chime that exist. But it is certainly the best placed of all, coming as the howling climax to this historic gig.

Besides, much as no one reviews the Bible for the elegance of its sentences, it doesn’t really make sense to assess Glastonbury 1994 as a simple live album. It’s way beyond that. 

Orbital at Glastonbury 1994 was an event, a 10/10 festival gig and TV phenomenon that would be vitally important for dance music history and British cultural life as a whole. After Glastonbury 1994 no one questioned that electronic music could be performed live; and everyone wanted to go to festivals. Dance music became an integral part of the British festival experience and an integral part of British life, where it would stay until everyone got bored around the turn of the Millennium and The Strokes came along to save rock.

Orbital’s headline gig was a musical happening; but it was never just about the music. It was about the time, the people and the way the music lifted them up, together; it was about hope, possibility and optimism, about dance music coming 180 degrees from its rave infamy and slamming right into the mainstream. 

No live album can come close to recreating that. But Glastonbury 1994, the record, runs it pretty close, a fire flash of energy, creativity and synchronicity that is one of the most important live electronic music albums ever made. 

Some listening

Jazztronik - Samurai (Afro Latin remake)

Modern updates of classic tracks are the festering boil on the butt of dance music. Apart from, it seems, in the case of Jazztronik’s broken-not-broken beat 2000s classic Samurai, which slips into its new Afro Latin remake like a moisturised foot into a creamy new sock. 

The original’s distinctive piano and string melodic lift, the sonic equivalent of a walk in the country with a breeze in the hair, is re-modeled into a slinky vibraphone lilt, while the sharp broken beats are ditched in favour of a warm, live-sounding groove, very much in the spirit of the original song without aping its much-loved actual sound. If this had slipped out on the NuYorican soul album back in 1997, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place; equally, it sounds perfectly simpatico to the sound of 2026. Bravo. 

Skalah & Novelist - South of the Thames

It’s a grime generational crossover, as rising producer and DJ Skalah runs headlong into legendary MC Novelist, with the results being breaks-y, grime-y, hard and yet surprisingly airy at the same time, like one of those rave songs that lures the listener in with chillingly pretty synths before battering them over the head with the corruption of the come down. 

Black Bananas - All The Way

Given that Jennifer Herrema formed Black Bananas after Royal Trux split and initially called the group RTX, it’s no surprise that the (ahem) banana hasn’t fallen that far from the tree. It’s not so much that Black Bananas sound like Royal Trux, pulling from P-Funk, synth pop and hip hop, where Royal Trux drank deep on the Rolling Stones and Captain Beefheart; it’s more that they resemble them in their densely-packed, borderline chaotic sound that is pulled relentlessly along by a groove. 

Eddie’s Album, the band’s first record since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall, seems to work right at the edge of pleasure, daring you to find patterns and melody at the heart of their electric mulch. Sometimes the search feels in vain - Tiny Chewbacca is like Herbie Hancock’s Rockit being pulled into a black hole - but more often diamonds are found amidst the dark caves of chaos, with All The Way, for example, like a summer jam for the terminally dissolute, with electric synth riffs, squidgy funk bass and a vocal that flirts with breeziness. (No link as the album isn’t out until Friday.)

Things I’ve done

Saul Williams - Leap Life

Floating Points - Mere Mortals

A couple of reviews for DJ Mag. “‘Leap Life’, poet, actor and writer Saul Williams’ first new album in four years, is a real mulligatawny soup of a record: rich, wholesome and packed with dense flavour, the kind of album to be chewed upon, savoured and considered, rather than wolfed down whole.”

And: “From Daft Punk’s ‘Tron: Legacy’ to Classical Ibiza, the worlds of orchestral and electronic music have become increasingly common bedfellows. And yet there have been few - if any - genuinely essential records to come out of the crossover. Floating Points’ ‘Mere Mortals’, recorded with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, isn’t quite that - but it does have a number of dazzling moments where the classical / electronic hybrid makes total sense.”

Line Noise 277 - Erika de Casier (Essentials interview from 2019)

Back in May 2019, pre-musical stardom, K-Pop songwriting, Dua Lipa remixes and all, Erika de Casier was an independent artist whose debut album Essentials was getting everyone very excited. She came to the Radio Primavera Sound offices for an interview with Sprung, our English-language morning show, and was charm itself. So much so, in fact, that I thought I would recycle the interview as a Line Noise, even though I don’t feature. Instead, Johann Wald and Mark Dix spoke to Erika about lo-fi Sade, jeep music, Essentials, being independent, friendship with Smerz and much more.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest