Beth Orton Skips Her Old Hits in Brighton, Plays New Albums Instead

Beth Orton walked onto the stage at Brighton's Concorde 2 on October 13, 2026, and played almost none of the songs that made her famous. Her set drew almost entirely on her last two albums — this year's The Ground Above and 2022's Weather Alive — with only the title track from 1999's Mercury-nominated Central Reservation representing her older catalogue.

The Guardian's review of the show called the omission "a bold move from someone 30-odd years into their career." It worked because of what came out in place of the oldies: a sound rooted in jazz and experimentation, played by a band that treated Orton's material as live work, not folk-revival throwback. The crowd, the review noted, reacted rapturously.

Why so little nostalgia?

Orton's 1996 debut Trailer Park fused classic singer-songwriter tropes with misty electronics. It found its first audience, the critic notes, "in a smoke-filled living room in the post-club small hours" — clubbers unwinding after nights out, where the record worked as comedown music. The easy move on this bill would have been to play that world back to a room largely populated by people old enough to have first heard the record three decades ago.

She didn't, and the choice functions as a quiet verdict on her newer work. The Guardian writes that the set "would count as a bold move… were it not for the fact that Orton's recent albums are so good." The strength of the new songs is what licenses leaving the hits on the shelf.

What changed musically?

The shift lives on the records, not just in setlist choices. By the mid-2010s, the review argues, Orton had drifted into "an increasingly acoustic and traditional" sound. Her two recent albums mark the pivot back toward what made early Orton feel strange on the radio: experimentation with what the critic calls "dancefloor-adjacent" grooves, this time run through a jazz-credentialed band rather than the dance producers of the 1990s.

Weather Alive, released in 2022, is the first move in that direction. The Ground Above, out in 2026, is the second. Read together they argue — as the Guardian's review argues with them — that Orton's third act is also her sharpest.

What does this change for her audience?

For promoters, the brief is concrete: Orton no longer needs the hits on a setlist to fill a room. Audiences walked out of Concorde 2 humming songs they didn't know going in. That's how a 30-year career stays relevant — by treating the back catalogue as fuel, not set dressing.

For listeners, the practical move is to hear Weather Alive and The Ground Above before catching her live. They aren't nostalgia records. They're the active material of a career the Guardian suggests is making its strongest music now, three decades in.