Beth Orton, whose blend of folk song and electronic texture shaped British music in the 1990s, brings her new album The Ground Above to the restored Victorian theatre at Alexandra Palace.
Beth Orton, who joined folk song to electronics in the 1990s, brings her album The Ground Above to Alexandra Palace Theatre in Wood Green on Thursday 22 October 2026.
Born in Dereham, Norfolk, in 1970, Orton moved to Dalston at fourteen and trained as an actress. Music found her through collaborations with William Orbit, Andrew Weatherall and the Chemical Brothers in the mid-1990s.
Her 1996 solo debut, Trailer Park, set an acoustic voice against electronic texture, the blend that came to be called folktronica. Central Reservation followed in 1999 and won her a BRIT Award. The film Vanilla Sky carried her songs to American screens.
After Comfort of Strangers in 2006, she stepped back to work with the guitarist Bert Jansch. Weather Alive, in 2022, was her first self-produced album and her first for Partisan Records. It drew some of the strongest notices of her career and a new, younger audience.
The Ground Above continues from that turn. The theatre was built in 1875 and reopened in 2018 in a state of arrested decay. It keeps its Victorian stage machinery, one of the few surviving examples of its type in the country.