A blast from the past: Orange Drums

As you’ve made your way to our website and blog, chances are your interest in Orange is above average and that you might already be familiar with some of the company’s history, but you may have missed that we did a series of drum kits in the 70s.

Orange drums were made in France by Jacques Capelle from around 1971 – 1976. He was a lovely guy, and became a good friend of Cliff Cooper. The earliest kits had the Capelle badging, but it didn’t take long before they were replaced with “Orange London” badges, although every drum kit was made in France.

Jacques made beautiful drum kits in his small facility in France, but his manufacturing techniques were labour intensive and very costly to produce. so Orange stopped importing them around 1976 as they were no longer competitive with the mass production of Premier, Ludwig and the introduction of Pearl, Tama and Yamaha etc in the mid 70s. These kits are very rare, and achieve very high sale prices when people are lucky enough to come across them.