William Orbit, the British producer who shaped records for Madonna, All Saints, Prince, Blur and Beth Orton, has died aged 69, the Guardian reports.

To mark his death, the Guardian has published a guide to Orbit's 12 greatest recordings, tracing a career built on one distinctive gift: his ability to bring elements from dance music's cutting edge into the work of pop royalty — and, as the paper puts it, to make those artists "often sound better than ever before."

The list begins where Orbit's career did: with Torch Song, his first band. The group was, in the Guardian's description, "a curious business." It kept one foot in the pop mainstream and one in the left field.

The mainstream side brought commercial exposure. One Torch Song track appeared on the soundtrack of Bachelor Party, the Tom Hanks-starring sex comedy — the band's biggest success.

The left-field side ran deeper. Torch Song recorded at Centro Iberico, the London anarchist hub known for staging gigs by Crass and Throbbing Gristle. They covered the Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs.

The Guardian singles out one Torch Song recording, Mothdoom Ecstasy, as emblematic. The track is "very much of its time," the paper notes, with stuttering samples and booming drums. Yet its hazy synth textures and ethereal female vocals carry what the reviewer identifies as "intimations of Orbit's future approach" — the sound that would later draw music royalty to his studio.

Orbit's death at 69 closes a career that spanned from anarchist-adjacent synth experimentation to the top of the pop charts. The full Guardian ranking of his 12 greatest recordings — spanning his work with Prince, Madonna, Blur and Beth Orton — is available to read in full, offering a map of how a producer with experimental instincts became one of pop's most sought-after collaborators.