The Night Orbital Played My White Label

There was a point in the mid-1990s when a white label was more than a piece of vinyl. It was a calling card, an introduction and, sometimes, an act of nerve.

At Funked in Brixton, I stood near the DJ booth holding one of my earliest Elite Force releases, Bombin’ the Subway, trying to persuade myself to hand it to Phil Hartnoll of Orbital. When I finally did, he put it on the spare turntable, listened for a few seconds and opened the fader.

For more than twenty years, I remembered it simply as the night Orbital played one of my records. Then I heard Phil recount a moment from his own past on BBC Radio 1 and discovered that the gesture had begun long before I entered the room.

My latest Substack essay is about white-label culture, the strange vulnerability of putting new music into somebody else’s hands, and the small acts of generosity that travel through generations of artists.