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.
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.
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.
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 , 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.
