Posted on 18th Jun 2010 @ 5:35 PM

The History of Orange Amplifiers

1960's

1968, From The Voice of the World to the brand On Which the Sun Never Sets has been a journey which has taken founder Cliff Cooper from an almost-derelict shop in London’s West End to an Enterprise Awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace hosted by Her Majesty The Queen.

It all began for Cliff back in 1960s’ Swinging London when he opened the Orange musical instrument shop and recording studio during the summer of 1968. Legend has it that in the very beginning not only did Cliff work all hours to make his business successful, but any sleep that he did manage to get took place in the shop itself and with the luxury of a plastic Vox speaker column cover used as a sleeping bag…

Fast-forward nearly forty years to the summer of 2006 and, as C.E.O. of the Orange Music Electronic Company Ltd, Cliff was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive the Queen’s Award for Enterprise given to Orange for its contribution to international trade.

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From the very start, the words ‘brand’ and ‘organisation’ were pivotal to Cliff’s thinking about Orange. But the organisation
he originally had in mind was rooted in all aspects of making music – as opposed to making amplifiers. Feast your eyes on the groovy early Orange catalogues on this very website and you’ll notice that the  top of the New Compton Street shop window advertises Orange Publishing; Orange Agency; Orange Records; Orange Music and Orange  Recording Studios.   The actual birth of the Orange brand was not the shop but the basement  of 3-4 New Compton Street in early-summer 1968 where, equipped with little more than a Revox tape  recorder and Vox reverb unit, Cliff opened Orange Recording Studios.

In later years the studio would house an IBC mixing desk once owned by the legendary producer Joe Meek, and was booked for stars such as Stevie Wonder, Tom Jones, John Miles, Robin Gibb, and blues-rockers, the Pretty Things.

But that summer of 1968 the studio wasn’t even paying the rent and so Cliff – also a musician in a group called the Millionaires – was forced to put some of the band’s gear up for sale in the shop window. Amazingly, it was all sold that same day and, thus, the journey that soon led to Orange Amplification had begun.

Whilst he would have maybe preferred to have been a music producer and publisher, fate had other plans in store and so Cliff entered the cut-throat world of musical instrument retailing where dirty tricks by competitors then were commonplace and to be expected. 

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The 1960s may have been a freedom-seeking decade, but as a young businessman wishing to sell amps and guitars Cliff at first only met with closed doors and barriers to free and fair trading. Because the major music companies refused to supply his shop with their products, he had no choice but to become a manufacturer as well as retailer. Luckily, the market for quality second-hand guitars was booming when he set up shop.

Cliff’s background was in electrical engineering. Central to his amp design ideas was the maxim once popularised by guitar design legend Les Paul: Les has always maintained that ‘people hear with their eyes’ - in other words, styling is crucial.

Brilliant orange-coloured vynide covering; robust picture-frame amp sleeves and cabs; and the 1950s retro sci-fi amplifier controls, together marked out Orange as totally unique.

The first Orange amps were supplied by a small north of England company called Radio Craft which made a versatile, top-spec 30-watt valve guitar amp - the Matamp Series 2000.     

In autumn 1968, Cliff placed an order with Huddersfield-based Matamp (named after founder Mat Mathias) to make some 100-watt`valve amps for Orange.
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Cliff was also friendly with what was then a premier blues band called Fleetwood Mac. Mac became the first chart group to go Orange in late-1968 when they took with them to America the very first half dozen Orange 100-watters ever made. Sportingly, Cliff included the name Matamp below the psychedelic Orange logo engraved on amplifier front-plates.

When Orange introduced a 200-watt head in time for Fleetwood Mac’s spring 1969 tour with BB King, Peter Green remarked that the sound was too clean – and so Cliff’s engineers voiced the amps deliberately to produce more distortion.

But the Orange Matamp era would be relatively brief as stars as big and wide-ranging as Stevie Wonder, BB King, Jimmy Page, John Mayall, Ike and Tina Turner, and James Brown joined the client list and helped to establish the brand. Orders worldwide soon far outstripped the production capacity of the Huddersfield factory that Cliff had bankrolled for Matamp in early 1970.

Then the 1972 introduction of the 120-watt and 80-watt Orange Graphic Amplifier OR series marked the start of an era in which Orange truly became The Voice of The World - even outselling Marshall at one point, with manufacturing now mostly in Bexleyheath. The Graphic’s front-plate used eye-catching graphic icons taken from a computer industry which was then in its infancy. The mid-1970s saw the launch of the first Orange amp with master volume overdrive – the OD 120 model. And Cliff by now was known in the business as ‘Mr Orange’ – or ‘Monsieur Orange’ in France where Orange drum kits were made.
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1970's - Drum kits were only a part of the Orange brand’s development. Other products included electric guitars “aimed at the market gap between Japanese copies and American originals”; guitar strings; Hypercondenser microphones, and disco systems made famous by another high-profile friend of ‘Mr Orange’.

Namely, the Radio One deejay Emperor Rosko. Rosko’s keen endorsement of Orange disco sound systems led to an exclusive contract between Orange and the BBC which meant that they were used on the Radio One Roadshow.  
 
Meanwhile, a fleet of Orange trucks cruised around the country during the summer rock festival season transporting a 4,000-watt PA system to the next open-air event.

And in the capital Londoners on occasion could clock an Orange beach-buggy brightening up the streets. This was brand-building on the move.

The Orange Records label had already been established in late-1969 with singles by a band called Influence and a duo named Contrast. Orange Records was promoted by Orange Agency and Orange Design. John Miles would be the label’s biggest-selling artist in the mid-1970s.

In 1975 Orange launched two additional brands - OMEC (Orange Musical and Electronic Corporation) and JIMMY BEAN.
The OMEC Digital was the world’s first patented digitally programmable amplifier which enabled musicians to key in four different pre-set instantly recallable sounds. JIMMY BEAN was a new range of solid state amplifiers whose selling strengths were reliability and stylish presentation – amps and cabs were covered in real denim cloth, had leather corners and a hand-engraved brass badge. Sound features included a stereo pre-amp.  But thanks to Cliff’s rather timid bank manager at the time – both innovations were never given the financial backing needed to establish them in the marketplace.  And so for the first time in ten years, Mr Orange was getting blue about the state of the amp business: he saw it was getting overcrowded with a plethora of cheap transistor amplifiers.
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In the mid-1990s Cliff licensed the Orange trademark to the Gibson Corporation in America and reissues of 1970s' Orange amp designs were soon back on the world stage; especially so after Oasis's Noel Gallagher went Orange and used the amps to record their first two albums.

But Orange really began to blossom once again when it was back in Cliff’s hands in the late-1990s: the company came up with some new designs to mark its 30th anniversary: namely, the AD series of Class A combos. These amplifiers proved to be so popular, that the series was expanded to include 30 watt and 140 watt twin channel guitar heads and a 200-watt bass amp.

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2001 saw Orange launch Crush – its entrance-level budget range, and then in 2004 came the Rockerverb series of amp heads and combos.

In a sense, the wide variety of artists who choose Orange says more about the amps than do tech specs and magazine reviews: today that list includes Prince, Madonna, U2’s The Edge, the Kaiser Chiefs, Travis’s Andy Dunlop and Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys.

And, in a nice instance of the company coming full circle, one of the guitarists who helped to launch Orange back in 1968 – Fleetwood Mac’s Jeremy Spencer – now still phones Mr Orange from time to time just to enthuse about his much-cherished AD30.

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Summer 2006 saw the launch of the 200-watt Thunderverb which represents a new and unique concept in valve amps, being both a bass and lead amp all in one. The design features ETR (extended tone range) with bass bandwidth going down to 30Hz without distorting.

The Thunderverb also features a revolutionary new transformer design. 2006 is also the year of the 15-watt Tiny Terror – an amp head that combines cool styling, portability, power, and value in one deceptively small package.

In this way the Orange brand keeps ahead, remains dynamic, and is looking to keep on diversifying and coming up with the very unexpected. 

OMEC’s well-established global distribution truly does make Orange the brand On Which The Sun Never Sets. So as one Orange dealer closes his shop for the night, elsewhere in the world another stockist is opening for another day of doing good business selling Orange’s award-winning amplification.
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In addition to the successful launch of the Thunderverb 50 head,  in 2007 a detailed marketing strategy was devised for Orange's 40th Anniversary in 2008.  

This included designing the Limited Edition Custom Shop series; the 40th Anniversary OR50 head;  the Tiny Terror Combo; the new AD5 Combo, and an open-backed version of the PPC 212 cabinet - the PPC 212 OB.  A commemorative book Orange: 40 Years Of A Brit-Brand  was commissioned, due to be published in 2008.

In America, a company was appointed to make Orange speaker cabinets at its manufacturing plant in the town of Eminence, Kentucky.
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January saw the 40th Anniversary Custom Shop Limited Edition and Anniversary OR50 head attracting massive interest when they were launched at NAMM 2008.

In addition to these models, the Tiny Terror Combo and AD5 Combo were introduced in March at Frankfurt Musikmesse 2008.

In September Orange HQ  moves to a much larger factory at 108, Ripon Way in Borehamwood. 

In the autumn, the ever-in-demand AD30HTC head was re-styled to bring it in line with the rest of the Orange range. The head's new cosmetics featured larger control knobs for each channel's Volume & Gain, and the classic front panel orange/black horizontal bar with hieroglyphs.

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2009: White Finish Orange... Second series Tiny Terror... 'Smart Power' bass cabinets & Crush PiX combos

 

White was the new Orange during 2009 as a Limited Edition White Finish option is made available throughout the year for all UK-built amplifiers and loudspeaker cabinets. These came with a 'Limited Edition 2009' Badge of Authenticity affixed,

Spring saw the unveiling of the Tiny Terror Hard Wired Edition, the acclaimed Dual Terror head, and Terror Bass 500 head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The revolutionary 'Smart Power' range of compact bass speaker cabinets is also introduced featuring Neodineum speakers and Isobaric (see diagram below) and ported cabinet design. Three models: SP210 (600 watts) SP212 (600 watts) and SP410 (1200 watts) make up the range.

 

 

 

 

 

Black Rexine covering is optional on all the SP range.

The 1970s classic 8x10" bass cab (OBC810 - 1200 watts) also makes a return to the Orange Bass Cabinet range. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the summer, it was announced that OMEC had once again been awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise in International Trade, having also gained this prestigious award in 2006.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In November, the new Crush PiX range of combos - announced during the summer - became available.The range consists of four guitar and three bass combos. New features include hieroglyphs' cosmetics and, on some models, 16 preset digital effects and a built-in tuner.