Odd collaboration on new tribute disc

Ex-Boy Band star teams up with ambient popsters for BeeGee cover

Here's one for the odd-pairing file. Ex-Take That star Robbie Williams is teaming up with ambient-popsters The Orb on a forthcoming project, according the NME.
 
The project is a track on the forthcoming BeeGees tribute album called 'Gotta Get A Message To You', due out in October on PolyDor, the BeeGee's label.
 
The Williams-Orb collaboration will tackle the song "I Started a Joke" - a song recently covered by the Beautiful South. Other artists on the tribute disc include Space covering 'Massachusetts', The Lightning Seeds doing 'To Love Somebody' and Monaco doing 'You Should Be Dancing'.
 
The brains behind the tribute disc is Peter Lorraine, artist development manager at Polydor. Proceeds from the disc will go to Live Challenge '99, a charity initiative by Granada Television set up to raise money for young people's projects in the Northwest of England.
 
On the subject of the odd collaboration, Lorraine said: "Robbie said he'd like to work with The Orb, so we set it up. The song they recorded was a big hit in the US but wasn't so well-known here."
 
According to lead Orbster, Alex Patterson, Williams' interest in the Orb began seven years ago, when the two met on Top of the Pops, a weekly BBC program showcasing top 40 music.
 
Says Patterson, "We did Top Of The Pops with Take That [Williams' old band] and we were giving it the football chants and drinking brandy at 11 in the morning. He said that when he saw us doing that he wanted some of it. He was very enjoyable company. Robbie's funny in that as a vocalist he's one of the few who can get a song nailed down right in the same day."
 
In the meantime, the Orb are set to release a double CD greatest hits album called 'Ufoff' on October 5. An album of new material is due in February.
 
Robbie Williams, on the other hand, has just released the James Bond-infused single 'Millennium' in the UK. His new full-length album, 'I've Been Expecting You', is due for release in Europe in late October.