Beth Orton: ‘I’ve set free another part of me’

Beth Orton’s latest album is a joyously abandoned swirl of words and sounds. She talks about living in the US, being a motherless mother and letting her music ‘hang out a bit’Imeet Beth Orton for lunch in a pub in Islington, north London. Dressed in a red leather biker-style jacket, T-shirt, jeans and red leather boots, she seems taller than I remember, but just as intense in her own particular way, often veering from garrulous to guarded in a single sentence. We first met in t