More than forty years on, many Orange and Matamp enthusiasts are mistakenly under the impression that ‘Orange Matamp’ was an amp manufacturer co-owned by Cliff Cooper and Mat Mathias. The black name-plates on the back of the very early amps probably added to the confusion, in that the wording on them implies that Orange Matamp was actually owned by Cooper Mathias Ltd.

Cliff’s amp company was initially called Orange Music. In autumn 1968, Orange Music appointed Mat Mathias’ company, Radio Craft, as the sub-contractor to supply their amplifiers. The first Orange amplifiers were branded Orange Matamp after Mat requested that Matamp’s logo be added to the front panel. Out of courtesy, Cliff agreed to this but In reality, there never was a manufacturer called ‘Orange Matamp’- that was a brand name.

As demand for Orange Amplifers rapidly increased, Radio Craft was unable to keep up with orders and was producing amps in very small numbers at the back of Mat’s tobacconist shop.

Mat couldn’t finance the move to the larger Cowcliffe factory in Huddersfield on his own. So, in August 1969, Cliff formed a company with Mat called Cooper Mathias Ltd, to replace Radio Craft as the sub-contractor supplying Orange Musical Industries, as it was now called.

Cliff explains the background to Cooper Mathias

“Because we were making a lot of money, I was able to bankroll Mat’s move to the Cowcliffe factory. I could have simply loaned Radio Craft the money for Mat to expand, but I had the feeling that a 50-50 partnership could work to everybody’s advantage.

Even forty years later, there’s still a lot of confusion about the first few years of Orange. A lot of people don’t realise the fact that Cooper Mathias Ltd was set up as a sub-contractor to OMI. When I first thought about forming the partnership with Mat, my vision was a manufacturing company based in Huddersfield which would benefit from having lower overheads than would be the case in London.

Initially, Cooper Mathias would handle all of OMI’s orders, but central to my plan was that the firm’s capacity and productivity would increase to a level at which we could then also manufacture amps for other companies. That was my intention for Cooper Mathias, but sadly it wasn’t to be…

The Cowcliffe factory opens: early 1970

The Cowcliffe factory opened for business in early 1970. By that time, business for us in London was moving very rapidly, but in Huddersfield the situation was much slower. When I drove up for a production meeting, the first thing I noticed was everything seemed to move at such a slow pace. It was extremely frustrating as we were so back-ordered. The people there were very nice, and it was therefore very sad that I had to pull out of our business arrangement. I had no choice but to do this simply because the operation was just not cost-effective. The Cowcliffe factory wasn’t turning out amps fast enough to meet our demand and it was not covering its overheads. Soon after that, OMI moved to Bexleyheath.

After the split

“The split was amicable. Mat and I always remained very good friends. He carried on making his black-covered amps and we became a main agent for Matamp and sold Mat’s amps and cabs in the Orange shops. Another thing I really liked about him was that he never copied our picture-frame speaker cabinet design. Mat was a real gentleman for whom I have always had nothing but the greatest admiration.”

Cliff Cooper founder and CEO:

During 1969, we sampled the sounds used by a number of top guitarists – among them, Peter Green, Marc Bolan and Paul Kossoff, all of whom liked to spend time in the Orange Shop just chatting and playing guitars. We asked these and other professional guitarists to plug into our mixing desk, play around, and find the sound that they liked best. We were then able to measure the sound characteristics and decide what changes were needed to the Orange amp circuitry. We would then send these circuitry changes to Mat up in Huddersfield so that he could incorporate any modifications into our amplifiers. Basically it was a question of what our customers wanted.

As Orange became more established, we found that a lot of people liked our amps, but it wasn’t across the board. Many guitarists told us that our amps just didn’t sound as loud as some other makes, watt for watt. Using signal generators, oscilloscopes and other measuring equipment, we measured an Orange OR120 amplifier in our workshop. It gave out a true 120 watts RMS (Root Mean Square). We then measured another famous make of 100 watt amplifier, which gave 96 watts output – but it still sounded much louder than the Orange amplifier. We just couldn’t figure out why this was. At the same time, we tested the distortion levels. The other amplifier had a far more distorted sound than the Orange amp.

I arranged a meeting with a leading ear specialist with a practice in London’s Harley Street. He explained to me how the brain can register distortion as pain in order to protect the mechanism of the ears. The jagged harmonics produced by the distortion work the ear’s conducting bones harder, and this is perceived by the audio nerves as an increase in sound level. The original Orange amps were especially clean sounding with very little distortion and so it was, in fact, the clean sound that was the root of our problem. So thanks to the ear specialist we had solved the mystery. In order to correct the situation we gave the amp a lot more gain and modified our circuitry in a different way to the amplifiers we had tested. The main changes were to the tone stack at the front end and the phase inverter. These changes gave birth to the ‘Orange sound’ and were incorporated in the first ‘Pics Only’ amps – our amps with hieroglyphs. The sound perhaps is best described as ‘fat’ and ‘warm’ – more musical and richer in harmonics, with a unique saturation in the mids band. It also improved the sustain. That said, choice of sound naturally is a personal thing.