In the beginning

To most in London, the second of September 1968 was nothing more than a blustery day. Little did they know that, in a dingy basement shop in Old Compton Street, the most influential organisation in modern music came into being.

Orange was founded by Mr. Clifford Cooper, who remains at the helm to this day. A quiet and reserved man, and certainly not one for the megastar lifestyle, Cooper is probably the last man you would expect to be behind such a highly-acclaimed musical company. With just £300 borrowed from his father and armed with the enthusiasm of a young man of the time, Cooper had set up the shop selling a variety of musical instruments.

Because of his age and low-profile establishment, the majority of the large manufacturers of the time were more than a little reluctant to accept Cooper as a dealer. So, if he couldn't buy them in, the most logical thing was to build them in-house. With a background in electrical engineering himself, he engaged a team of the best design engineers around who set about creating all-valve amplifiers just when the fine and well-established valve technology was being overtaken by transistor-based contraptions. This new wave of amplifiers were cheaper to produce, but could never capture the magical warmth and colour of the old valve setups.

Cooper had acquired a quantity of an orange-coloured vinyl, the material used to cover the wooden shell of amplifiers and cabinets, and it wasn't long before the shop was proudly displaying the very first amplifiers to carry the now famous livery. With that, Orange Amplification was born.

All rise

The thing was, these new peculiar-looking boxes sounded rather good, and the news of them was soon spreading like proverbial wildfire. So much so, in fact, that Orange was almost an overnight success. Before long, Orange was standard backline equipment for stages, studios and rehearsal rooms worldwide.

Shortly after this, the big acts of the time started snapping up the products for use as part of their usual set up. Fleetwood Mac were among the first famous Orange users in the UK, followed by Stevie Wonder in the States.

Voice of the World

The Seventies was a time of big-budget international tours, with bands packing stadiums and festivals the world over. But, when these bands finally washed up on British shores, they found that there was simply nothing powerful enough to drive such big gigs. In stepped Orange, who set about on the construction of a ridiculously over-sized public address system, neatly packed into a fleet of bright orange lorries. Gigging in the UK meant being chased around by the men in Orange, who travelled the length and breadth of the country providing big sound for big acts.

The town was well and truly painted, with Orange amps and cabs behind all the biggest names in contemporary music. Magazine covers, TV, posters, papers... there was simply no escaping the glare of the brand.

But the higher you climb...

There was something very different going on in the Eighties: changes in the world economy meant that spending hit a low. Fashions changed, but more importantly, pop music changed it's face again. The synthesizer that we all knew and loved for it's odd and unpredictable noises became more and more sophisticated, until whole records could be created from inside a small grey box. The popularity of disco originating from the gay scene across the pond, backed by all manner of music industry skullduggery that is not my place to discuss here, meant that dance music exploded onto the charts.

Very few true rock bands survived, and most of those that did were American. Most amplifier manufacturers made the decision to forget about standards and do whatever was possible to shift their cheaply constructed products. The American bands were often persuaded in a variety of ways to take shipment of these transistor amplifiers, that soon became standard issue for such acts.

Orange were not prepared to lower standards of production just to sell the range, but the result of this was the range seeming expensive, compared with the lesser calibre models on the market, and call for the famous brand subsided. The organisation was forced to contract, and it looked for a time like it was going to be impossible to continue trading. The range flowed out only to those who truly believed in the quality, warmth and tone of well-built British valve technology.

The comeback

In the early Nineties, people seemed to grow a little tired of that pre-packaged, just-add-water approach to music that you couldn't relate to. On the underground scene, bands resumed writing rock. These new bands finally broke through into the mainstream, bringing with them the valve amps they had spent their advances on.

I went to see a band called Oasis play a small gig in London in early 1994. There, on stage, was a stack of brightly-coloured, truly retro guitar equipment. I can clearly remember thinking to myself "What on earth is that? That's pretty cool." A couple of months later, that scruffy-looking gang of northern guys had their debut album in every record store I visited, so I bought a copy. As it turns out, so did a lot of people, and not just that album either. Suddenly, there were loads of rock bands back in the game, and things started to go all Orange again.

In 1997, Orange developed and launched the OTR™ system, which was the first major change to the design of the amplifiers that began all those years ago. It was an improvement that was loved by rock and blues musicians from the word go, and Orange was well and truly back on track.

From www.orange-amps.com