Graham Coxon Remembers William Orbit: 'A Genius Tinged by Madness'
William Orbit, the producer behind Madonna's Ray of Light and Blur's 1999 album 13, has died at age 69. Blur guitarist Graham Coxon paid tribute to Orbit in an interview published 11 August 2026, recalling a collaborator whose methods were as unorthodox as the results were lasting.
Coxon described Orbit as "a genius" who was "a bit tinged by madness," according to Rolling Stone. The characterisation drew on their time recording 13 — Blur's sixth album and their first with a producer other than Stephen Street, who had handled the band's first five LPs.
The connection between band and producer began with a remix. Orbit contributed an eight-minute reimagining of Blur's 1997 song 'Movin' On' to a remix project, and the band took notice. "We really liked what he did," Coxon said. "I picked up on some sort of perversion in him musically." That encounter led to a full-album partnership: over the summer and autumn of 1998, all four Blur members — Damon Albarn, Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree — worked with Orbit at studios in London and Reykjavík.
The sessions were improvisatory by design. Coxon recalled that Blur would play for 40 minutes at a stretch, and Orbit would stay up through the night structuring and editing the recordings into finished songs. The album yielded two enduring singles: 'Tender' and 'Coffee & TV', the latter featuring Coxon on lead vocals.
13 also marked a turning point in the band's lineup. It was the last Blur album with Coxon as a full-time member until 2015's The Magic Whip. Coxon, who now makes music with Rose Elinor Dougall under the name the Waeve, looked back on the 13 period as one defined by Orbit's singular working method — long, unstructured playing sessions transformed overnight by a producer who treated raw material as something to be shaped rather than simply captured.
Orbit's death closes a chapter on a career that crossed genre lines and decades. For Blur, the 13 sessions produced both the band's most experimental album and some of its most widely recognised songs, the product of a collaboration that Coxon frames as equal parts discipline and disorder.
