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.