"We lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in 'em..."

Music One of the big sellers on Amazon at the moment is the compilation album Moods which has all the tracks you'd expect it to (Enigma, Vangelis, DJ Sammy) and includes The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds which I first heard when it was played to me by a friend at university when I visited his house. We sat on his carpet and he pumped it out of his very good sound sound system and it was like nothing this Debbie Gibson fan had experienced before.

Listening again just now on Spotify, I finally decided to try and find out exactly where the sample interview came from, this voice I've been listening to all of these years.  I've always assumed it was a news voxpop, perhaps from some US cable channel.  Or a documentary about the weather.

Inevitably the Wikipedia has an answer:

""Little Fluffy Clouds" is centred on clips from an interview with Rickie Lee Jones in which she recalls picturesque images of her childhood. Critics and fans sometimes attribute the odd nasal tonality of Jones' voice to drug use, though Jones later claimed that it was the result of a heavy cold. The samples are widely believed to have come from a conversation between Jones and LeVar Burton on the children's television programme Reading Rainbow., but in fact originated from an interview disc that was issued with some promotional boxed copies of her album Flying Cowboys. The interview was not actually conducted by Burton at all."

Which then leads to YouTube and the first interview most of us can actually speak along to ...



Interestingly, the uploader makes the LeVar Burton mistake too even though the voice we hear sounds nothing like Geordi LaForge.

What the Wikipedia doesn't mention is what the first voice we hear is. That would be John Waite whose audio show reel is also on YouTube and mentions The Orb in his CV:



He's currently the reporter on Radio 4's Face The Facts.