From Belfast

Something else from 2025 that I missed and was sent last week by a friend- a cover of Orbital's Belfast by Spanish artist Pepe Link. You might think that a cover of Belfast is entirely unnecessary at this stage in proceedings but I think this casts doubt on that thought...

It's chiller than chilled, totally inappropriate for this Arctic blast we've been experiencing recently. The trumpet line, played by Pepe Navarro, is gorgeous. It crosses the line into easy listening I guess but on occasion that's a line worth crossing. 

In 2024 Orbital came back with their own new version, Tonight In Belfast, together with DJ Helen and David Holmes and Mike Garry's words- a celebration, a eulogy, a love letter- at the heart of a new take on Belfast. 

Yep, that still has the capacity to move me. 

In 2018 Orbital came back with an album, Monsters Exist, that was led by this track, Tiny Foldable Cities, that showed the Hartnoll brothers still had the chops and the capacity to surprise. Tiny Foldable Cities is as good as anything they've done since their golden years in the 90s. 

Tiny Foldable Cities

Forty Minutes of Belfast

This occurred to me as an idea a few weeks ago. I've been playing Orbital and Mike Garry's Tonight In Belfast a lot, it's become one of those songs for me. The idea of segueing different versions of Belfast together popped into my mind driving home from work. I did wonder if it might be too much, an overload of Belfast but there are some things you can't have too much of. I toyed with some kind of Easter mix for today, and almost went with all the versions of A Man Called Adam's fabulous Easter Song but on Friday (Good Friday) this mix came back to me and I thought I'd resurrect it for today. Roll that stone away and immerse yourself in Belfast. Happy Easter. 

Forty Minutes Of Belfast

• Belfast
• Belfast/Wasted
• Tonight In Belfast
• Nothing Compares 2 Belfast

Orbital released Belfast in January 1991, one of three tracks on their III EP along with Satan and LC1. Belfast was discovered by David Holmes and Ian McCready after they booked the Hartnoll brothers to play their Space Base night in May 1990. Orbital left a tape with the track on, later on named after the city they had a great visit to and night out in. The vocal sample, also widely heard in The Beloved's Sun Rising single that year, is of soprano Emily Van Evera, singing O Euchari. The chiming synths, bubbling bass and operatic vocal combine to produce something genuinely moving, ecstatic and otherworldly- one of British house/ dance music's great moments.  

Belfast/ Wasted features the voice of Gavin Fulton, available on the CD/ booklet series Volume (Volume 3, 1992). It then came out as a single in 1995 and then on the Wasted best of compilation. Gavin's vocal takes the track into a new area. 

Tonight In Belfast has the voice of Mancunian poet Mike Garry, speaking the words to his poem Tonight. It's one of the best and most affecting single tracks I've heard this year, Mike's words perfectly accompanied by David Holmes' magnificent and euphoric remix of Belfast from Orbital's 30 project, their thirtieth anniversary box set. Mike's words and Orbital's music came together on the suggestion of DJ Helen. Mike's words come over like a eulogy, a hymn to a lost love- sometimes I find it difficult to hear it without thinking of Isaac. 

'Tonight

I just wanna paint pictures of you

Write poems and songs just about you

I wanna hold you up so high you're gonna need a spacesuit

I love to speak your name aloud

Simply because I love its sound

And it feels like I'm kinda calling you

It feels like I'm kina talking to you

It feels like I'm trying to break through

You know across this divide

I'll tell you what

Let's slip beyond the confines of this world

Let's forget every single thing we've learned

Let's rewrite the way this world does turn'

Nothing Compares 2 Belfast is from David Holmes' NTS show that he did in tribute and in memory of Sinead O'Connor following her death last year, Belfast with Nothing Compares 2U, with Sinead's voice at the end speaking directly and openly in the way she did. 

Miles And Miles And Miles And Miles

In some ways this track seems almost too easy. 

Take Orbital's Belfast, a track that in 1991 defined blissed out, emotive, euphoric, hairs on the back of the neck standing up house/ techno, get David Holmes to give it a sweeping, majestic, emotional  2022 remix and then in 2024, courtesy of DJ Helen, get poet Mike Garry to perform a new poem over it, one filled with those affecting, heartfelt and every day lines he's so good at. 

Lines like, 'I wanna hold you up so high/ You're gonna need a space suit', and, 'I wanna write your name across an empty beach at low tide', and, 'And it feels like I'm kinda calling you/ It feels like I'm trying to break through/ You know across this divide/ Cos we live such separate lives'. Tonight In Belfast- it's almost too easy but it works so very, very well.