THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS

Spin 1999

 

by Simon Reynolds

 

 

Clutching a trophy to her heaving breast, a sobbing Gwyneth Paltrow is

paying tribute to family members who've "surmounted insurmountable

odds" to be there to bask in her Oscar Night glory. "It's such an odd thing to want to live your emotional life out in public, isn't it?" says Chemical Brother Ed

Simons, wrinkling his nose as he glances up at the TV at Max Fish, a

pseudo-seedy drinking den in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

 

        Paltrow's moistly overwraught performance reminds Tom

Rowlands-the tall, lanky Brother with butter-colored tresses and

yellow-tinted spectacles--of the DJs' own experience with awards

ceremonies. The Chemical's  Dig Your Own Hole was a prime contender to win the 1997 Mercury Prize (Britain's hipper

equivalent of the Grammies), but Roni Size/Reprazent's New

Forms was the surprise victor.  Sitting at a table near  the

Reprazent crew, Rowlands quipped, "I told you we should have put some

drum n' bass on the album," and Simons pulled a  mock-aggrieved scowl

(recreating it now, he looks like a bear chewing a mouthful of bees).

Unfortunately a TV camera  zoomed in for a close-up, making Simons look

like the ultimate bad loser.   

            "At the time I didn't know TV had broadcast this to millions,"

Simons says, looking as mortified as if it'd happened yesterday. "But

the next morning I woke up to about 28 messages on my answer-machine...

It looked like I was pissed off, but honestly I was pleased that a dance record

got the prize."

            Still giggling, Rowlands fantasises aloud: "Oscar night, cut to Ed...That'd be classic!" Simons mimes the choking-on-sour-grapes look again, and Rowlands splutters: "See the love in those eyes!"

 

[break]

 

        The anecdote resonates with what some observers consider the

Chemical's Big Problem: Their inability to comport themselves as stars

(in this case, gracious in defeat). Indeed, two weeks after passing

through New York, the duo are in South London, waiting to perform

another blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in their own video.  In Europe,

"Hey Boy, Hey Girl" is the first single off their new album,

Surrender. Once again they're working with Dom &

Nick, the directorial team responsible for the superb "Setting Sun" and

"Block Rockin' Beats" clips, which helped propel 1997's Dig Your Own Hole to US sales of over 600 thousand. The new video is  partly set in the

legendary Ministry of Sound--"one of our old stumbling grounds," says

Simons, imitating a bleary, rave-glazed casualty. In 1991, he and

Rowlands would go on  nocturnal "missions"-drug-fueled club-crawls-that

would wind up at the Ministry back when it was one of London's only

all-night clubs. 

 

        Lounging in the VIP bar, the Chemicals endure the long, dreary

wait while the lights and cameras  are set up for the duo's ultra-brief

scene. Rowland looks like a not-very-jolly blue giant--blue shirt,

flared navy sailor's pants, even a blue mobile phone. Tensely pumping his left leg, Simons is wearing a short black coat with a black disarmament-symbol pin on his

breast pocket--an almost imperceptible protest against NATO's recent bombing of Serbia.

They peer down at a breakdancer spinning on his back to the trancey

throb of "Hey Boy."  

 

"How much do you think he costs?" asks Simons.

 

"250 pounds?" guesses Rowlands.

 

It's not an idle enquiry--the band pays for half the cost of its

videos, and this one is going to be quite expensive [tk-was there an

estimated budget?]. Worse, it's probably never going to get any

significant exposure in America.  "Hey Boy" has been deemed  "too

underground a beat" for American radio, Simons grumbles, and so the

first U.S. single is   "Let Forever Be,"  the Noel Gallagher

collaboration that everyone hopes will duplicate the breakthrough

success of  Dig's "Setting Sun" (also sung and co-written by the Oasis leader). Errol Kolosine, general manager at the band's

American label, Astralwerks, tries to reassure the duo that there are

many ways to use the clip in the U.S. "Oh yeah, on the

website," Rowlands says with bitter sarcasm.

[        Back on the dancefloor, a scarily skinny, crimson-haired girl

girl--the latest in a series of rave babes hired to take up the slack left by the non-videogenic Chemicals--is throwing shapes for the camera. "Needs some meat on 'er bones", observes Rowlands in a gruff North-of-England accent (he's fond of putting on funny voices). At last,  it's time for  him to flex those dormant thespian impulses. Not

that it's a demanding role, exactly-he and Simons have to climb out of

a mini-cab for a shot that will last all of 15 seconds-and be edited

down to four. But even that may be too much screen

time: Walking awkwardly towards the camera, Simons's tongue visibly

bulges in his cheek.

 

        He and his partner deserve some sympathy, though. Here's a duo

whose forte is sonic thrills 'n spills, yet to get their music heard

they have to negotiate a "pop process" ever more organised around the

visual. The DJs don't consider it their job to live out their fans'

fantasies on screen-they're enablers, not surrogates. What the Chemical Brothers really

resemble is the drug lab technicians their name suggests: backroom boys who brew up

the party-igniting catalysts that make crowds go ballistic. "We don't really like to

expose ourselves," says Rowlands. "That's one of the things we like about dance culture compared with other music, it doesn't come with all that emotional baggage". Simons adds: "Dance cuts across all that. It isn't affected by being on the front cover of a magazine. The power is still there --and that's what we like about it, the anonymity."

 

[break]

 

In the "Hey Boy" video, Rowlands carries a DJ record bag bearing the

logo Eastern Bloc, which belonged to a Manchester record store where

the duo used to hang-out during their student days in the early '90s.

It's the Chemical's little nod to a lost golden age, personal and pop

historical: an era when the Northern England city was rave mecca  for

party people across the land, and  bands such as the Stone Roses,

Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream  led the first great wave of British

indie-dance crossover. Surrender  pays homage to

"Madchester," too:  for instance, "Out of Control," a pastiche of

early New Order co-written and sung by  the latter's guitarist/vocalist

Bernard Sumner, and  featuring backing warbling from Primal Scream's

Bobby Gillespie.

            Rowlands and Simons grew up in the South of England (Oxford and London respectively) and are both from professional middle class backgrounds; Rowlands's father is a director of commercials, while Simons was raised by his lawyer mom. The pair went up to Manchester  in 1989, lured as much by Manchester University's library (they met in a Medieval History course) as by the city's reputation as a rave capital. In Manchester,

the new friends quickly fell into a "double life"--studying

Chaucer by day,  clubbing almost every night of the week (somehow, they

managed to graduate with honors). The mad fun side of their double life

revolved around the club Hacienda and Eastern Bloc, which was

effectively two record stores in one. "It was both a brilliant,

up-to-date dance store," says Rowlands, "and, like, the best indie-rock

shop. You'd go there and buy a SubPop seven-inch, then go next door and

buy an import house single. And we saw ourselves somewhere in the

cavity between the two." In a sense, they've never left it.

 

        Manchester was electric in 1989-90, buzzing with house music

and Ecstasy. The vibe soon spread  to the nearby industrial town of

Blackburn, a hotbed of  warehouse raves which drew 10, 000 out-of-town

kids every weekend, including Rowlands and Simons. "Total insanity,"

says Rowlands. "In the darkness, you wouldn't know what kind of place

you were dancing in--warehouses with ten foot drops and machinery.

You'd look down and see you were dancing on defrosted chickens."

 

        He and his friends were nicknamed the 237 Turbo Nutters, after

their student house at 237 Dickenson Road. The basement was a frequent

location for dance parties, drawing a real cross-section of locals,

even the odd pop star.  New Order's Bernard Sumner  turned up at their

door one night looking for some action, only to be disappointed. "We

followed him down the street, " Rowlands says, still slightly incredulous, "and he turned round and said"--he switches to fluent Mancunian--"'Fook off, yer wurzels!'"

("wurzel" being a local insult for anyone from out of town, especially

students). "Back then, I was a bit of party head," explains Sumner with just the

faintest trace of sheepishness. Clubs closed early in those days, he

explains, and the still-buzzing dancers always wanted to carry on

somewhere else. "But the local police chief was a Christian nut, a real

party pooper, and he was cracking down on warehouse raves. So people

started having parties in people's houses. You might end up with a

thousand people turning up at somebody's house."

 

        In their last two years as students, Rowlands and Simons saw

Manchester's Ecstasy-fueled living dream turn to living nightmare, as

drug gangs moved in with guns and ravers started to overdo the party

potions. At one of their favorite haunts, Most Excellent, a local gang

"ramraided" the club--"drove a car through the entrance way," explains

Simons, his face splitting apart with gap-toothed glee. "You couldn't

get out. It took them an hour to remove it. The next week the gang came

down and started walking around the club hitting people at random. That

was when Manchester started to go sour."

 

One thing's for sure, though: The Chemical Brothers would not

exist without their "Madchester" experiences. It's where they first started to DJ,  at a

small club called Naked Under Leather. And the era's musical

sensibility--known as Balearic, after the easy-going electicism of  DJs on Ibiza, one of the Balearic islands in the Mediterranean--continues to shape what they do as DJs and producers. "At the Hacienda, you'd get a strange mix of stuff, but it was totally

natural, and that's something we've always held onto," says Rowlands.

The Balearic ethos was resurrected at the Heavenly Social, the tiny

London club where the Chemicals became cult DJs in 1994.

 

            It was around the time the Heavenly Social got going that the

Chemicals --then trading under the borrowed name the Dust

Brothers--came up with their "big idea": the fusion of hip hop

breakbeats with techno dynamics. Following the cult success in America of the 1995 debut Exit Planet Dust, Dig Your Own Hole smashed down the Billboard barricades in preparation for an invading army of  "electronica",  1997's heavily hyped "next big thing" that never quite happened. But while it failed to totally redraft the blueprint for modern rock radio like grunge did, the Chemicals sound has been codified, commercialised, and caned to death  by countless Big Beat producers and ad agency creative directors, forcing  Rowlands & Simons to seek a new path. Like many on the British dance scene, they've done this partly by visiting their old skool (Surrender pays homage to New Order and Eighties house, while the album title is an echo of early rave slogans like "Let the Music Use You") and partly by reaching out to rock music. 

 

        Surrender, while hardly sedate, boasts a

glaring deficit of block rockin' beats. It's a classic "grower," a record that grows on you and represents, in the best sense of the word, the duo growing up.  Half the album is

gorgeous neo-psychedelia-the chiming, idyllic ballad "title TK"

featuring Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval; the rhapsodic rush of "The

Sunshine Underground," the title track's halcyon haze. The rest largely

consists of pure techno and deep house--the serene and slinky

"Got Glint", the slamming, squealing "Music: Response". But nowhere

will you find that adrenalin rush-inducing breakbeat + acid-riff formula that the Brothers

coined  four years ago with "Chemical Beats." "There's nothing on this

album for snowboarders," Rowlands wryly notes. "We

have gone out on a bit of a limb  with this record," says Simons, with just a hint of anxiety. "It doesn't fit with how people see us naturally."

 

Putting DJ-ing, live performances and remixing on hold, the Chemicals

devoted over a year to recording Surrender, spending pretty

much every day in the studio. "It was fun but pretty difficult at times," admits Simons. "We found that we were shying so far  from making energetic music that it was quite bland. We finished one version of the album and it just didn't sound right to us." The

process was governed by avoidances--not just of Big Beat's crass

crowd-manipulating dynamics, but of the whole "bolted-together" nature

of sample-collage music.

 

"We can really see what's good about Norman Cook's [aka Fatboy Slim]

music and Big Beat in general," says Ed, diplomatically. "But there's

surely going to come a time when those kind of tricks--all the drops

and builds and rhythm changes-- aren't going to trigger the same

responses in people." Adds Tom, "that's one reason why there's a lot less breakbeats on

Surrender. When I hear that sound now I just switch

off.".  There's nothing wrong with Big Beat, just a lack of

adventure."

            For his part, Norman Cook has endorsed the Chemical Brothers's attempt to transcend the Big Beat formula, self-deprecatingly telling one British dance magazine that   "I'm pleased that the two guys I'm ripping off are moving forwards, because that means I'll have even better ideas to steal!"  On Surrender, those ideas include what Tom calls "a 'can't really see the joins' approach...  less sampling, more synthesis.... lots of  creating new sounds from scratch", and  "acoustic trance music" ("using  different sounds you don't really hear in club music--organic sounds like flutes--but programmed in a computerized way").

            A quest for gentler, subtler forms of exhiliration, Surrender  chimes sweetly with the drug-burned, fatigued mood of UK dance culture. Clubbers are increasingly turning to the redemptive, healing sounds of  rock bands like Mercury Rev and Spiritualized, as they gradually realize that dance culture's quick-fix blasts of  artificial energy are fine for the weekend but leave the rest of your life rather bereft and neglected. Aged 28 (a phase Simons admits to finding "hard... I felt a bit weird in my head"), the Chemicals are going through a classic  late twentysomething  syndrome, aggravated further by their involvement in rave culture:  They're simultaneously nostalgic for all yesterday's parties  andlooking for graceful ways to grow out of  the party-hard mentality.

          And so Surrender is loved-up rather than buzzed-up. Simons talks touchingly of trying "to make a record that people cherish,"  of wanting "to leave people with the feeling of joy." Little curls of cigarette smoke wisp out of the corners of his

mouth as he talks, like there's a small bonfire smouldering away somewhere inside his body.  Rowlands picks up the thread: "Before, the joy in our music was a disorientating, punishing kind of joy. Maybe this is a nicer way of achieving that state--lifting you up instead of  chucking you out of a cannon. That said, a track like  "Under The

Influence" is pretty aggressive--thumping E music!"

 

        Aiming to bypass the Chemical Brothers's undeserved reputation

as music for drunken students and get into the boxes of purist house DJs, "Under The

Influence" has been circulating as a 12-inch single under the alias Electronic

Battle Weapon. The same ruse worked with Dig Your Own Hole's monster tune "It Doesn't Matter," a stampeding mantra that shows how deep the

Chemicals feel for underground house and techno runs. Revealingly, it was the one track that many American reviewers didn't like-too monotonous and  unrelenting. 

 

        Which highlights the difficulties Surrender  may encounter in

this country, where most people think house means C&C Music Factory.

It's Rowlands & Simons's  "obsession with sound and what it

does to you" that underlies both their passion for

underground dance music and their abiding awe for '60s Sixties

psychedelia (The Beatles's "Tomorrow Never Knows" remains the duo's

benchmark for experimental-yet-accessible music). In America right now,

though, psychedelia is  far from fashionable. And feeling they somehow

got their fingers burned in '97, MTV and radio were wary of

"electronica" last year; only a few months ago, the attitude of many

modern rock radio programmers was Underworld or

Orbital or Chemical Brothers, certainly not all

three.

 

 "Electronica didn't work for us," says Skip Isley from KTEG, a modern

rock outpost in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is currently hyping

Korn-style nu-metal. "People want tunes they can hum, words they can

remember. I'm intrigued to hear the new Chemical

Brothers, but I'm not foaming at the mouth. Now if there was a new

Prodigy record, I'd be doing anything I could to get hold of it."

 

Then again, now that Fatboy Slim's You've Come a Long Way,

Baby has climbed into the Billboard Top 40,

maybe the situation has already changed. A flashback to the

Manchester-era classic "Loaded" by Primal Scream, the Fatboy's

gospel-tinged "Praise You" has that same '60s-into-'90s aura exuded by

much of  Surrender.  "It's kind of nice how it's worked out," says Errol Kolosine of Astralwerks, label to both Fatboy and the Chemicals. "If not for the

trail blazed by Tom and Ed, it would have been hard for Norman Cook.

But now Norman's somewhat repaid the debt, preparing the ground for

Surrender."

 

This summer The Chemicals will play at both the massive Woodstock 3 and Red Rock, Denver, the vast arena where U2 recorded Under A Blood Red Sky. Despite their anonymous anti-image, the Chemicals are the kind of band that thrives in this kind of  mega context. "We like playing festivals," admits Ed, sucking on a Marlboro Light in Max Fish. "When we're good, you get this manic energy buzzing from the crowd."  Breaking out of his normal placid aura, a slightly drunk Tom disconcertingly slips into Iggy Pop mode and  growls  to convey this collective energy rush. Unfazed, Ed continues: "A big mass of people all reacting to the same thing....  That's what turned me on about  raves in the first place--the communal  force of people sharing something. That's when music gets magical."

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS
Come With Us
(Astralwerks)
Spin, 2002

by Simon Reynolds

It's a tough time for dance believers. Clubland chugs along with blandly efficient floor fodder (trance, so-called "progressive", filter house), deejayed by globe-trotting technicians marketed as pseudo-personalities. On the underground tip, you can choose between a deep house scene stifled by its own conviction that it was so much better back in the over-mythologized day, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-'em succession of leftfield subgenres (microhouse, clickhop, glitchcore, etc) whose frequent excellence is somehow diminished by their scene's hermetic seclusion from the wider world (this despite Bjork's best efforts as ambassador). 2step, still one of dance culture's few claims to edge, is bedevilled by the peculiarities of transAtlantic transmission, and remains stalled as a hipster clique pick in a few major American cities. As for drum'n'bass---believe it or not, some people have only just noticed it's dead!

And what of the class of 1997, the heavy-hitters of electronica's false dawn? Despite being chockfull of potential hits and rock-listener-friendly moves, Daft Punk's Discovery and Basement Jaxx's Rooty have not exactly set Billboard on fire. Like The Chemical Brothers found last time around (1999's Surrender), with American radio programmers sceptical or hostile, and video channels looking for stellar faces and bodies, the sales ceiling for the Anglo-Euro giants of dance music seems to be slightly lower than, say, the runt of Roc-A-Fella's litter, or a side project by Tool's drum-tech.

Right about now would be the right time for the original funk-soul Brothers to retrench. Come With Us follows not one but two bid-for-maturity albums---the second of which, Surrender, lost most of the commercial ground gained by the first, 1997's rocktronica-spearhead smash Dig Your Own Hole. So you could forgive a chastened Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons for getting back to (big) business as usual and offering a rote dose of block rockin' big beat. What makes Come With Us a modest triumph is that the Chems haven't fallen back on the fratboy-friendly formula that launched a thousand TV commercials. Instead they've gone one step beyond the under-rated Surrender by integrating like never before their two sides, high-octane thrust and airy psychedelic dreaminess.

Come With Us might actually even be their best album, in the precise sense of being their least bitty, most cohesively album-like album. It's like they've applied the mix-CD flow-motion aesthetic of track-to-track compatibility to an LP of all original material. No single song attains, let alone surpasses, their highest heights to date --"Setting Sun", "It Doesn't Matter" --but there's a superbly sustained wholeness of mood, feel, sensation. In a word: whoooosh! One of the Chems's fave tricks this time round is using delay and similar FX to create the audio equivalent of after-image trails and tracers. Tremolo is another constant: sounds that seem to physically shiver in your ear. And it sounds like some of the techniques they came up with during the drawn-out agony of the Surrender sessions have become permanently installed in their music-making arsenal: self-coined concepts like "implied music" (building up a huge density of multitracked sonic layers, then stripping them down until only Turin Shroud-like ghost-traces remain) and "acoustic trance music" (using "organic" sounds like woodwinds, but programmed and patterned in the ultramodern ways allowed by digital technology). "Trance" is a key reference point for this album: Simons & Rowlands have talked in the past about appreciating the populist appeal of DJs like Paul Van Dyk, and on Come With Us it's like they've assimilated some of the spangled kineticism of recent trancefloor monstertunes like Hatiras's "Spaced Invader".

Come With Us starts fast, as if to banish the mellow aura of Surrender, their self-conscious attempt to leave behind over-adrenalized Big Beat and blatant crowdpleaser dynamics. The first three tracks are urgent but serene, like a car chase on Prozac. On "Galaxy Bounce" and "Come With Us," rippling arpeggios hurtle backwards in the mix like landmarks receding in a rear-view mirror. In this propulsive context, even "It Began In Afrika"--which seemed lame and nondescript as a single--works great. Things take a very slight shift to the pastoral with "Star Guitar," a serotonin supernova of calm elation, and then "Hoops," a perfect meld of the duo's B-Boy and psych-rock tendencies that entwines 12-string folkadelic guitar and a woozy "I'm too high" vocal around a warm pulse of 808 bass. In contrast, "Denmark" harks back to early Eighties punk-funk and "mutant disco" with its heavily processed slap-bass, trumpet, and skittering hand-percussion: Pigbag on pills. And the endlessly ascending crescendoes of "Pioneer Skies" puts some Rush in their rush, achieving (a la Daft Punk's "Digital Love") a grandeur oddly poised between kitsch and kosmik.

Only the obligatory guest-vocalist spots interrupt the seamless joy-ride. Yet another collaboration with Beth Orton, "The State We're In" resembles a Jesus & Mary Chain ballad (over)produced in the Brian-Wilson-for-Generation-E style of Screamadelica (the 1991 album by Primal Scream that defined a rave'n'roll epoch in the U.K., but means nothing over here except for a handful of diehard Anglophiles). Come With Us's climactic closer "The Test" draws on the blowhard talents of Richard Ashcroft, formerly of The Verve--another one of those groups, like Primal Scream, The Charlatans, and Spiritualized, who serve as a token rock band for Brit rave kids who otherwise have low tolerance for guitars. With Ashcroft declaiming quasi-visionary vagaries like "I'm seeing waves breaking forms on my horizons/Lord, I'm shining," "The Test" veers perilously close to transcendental bombast. Moderate, essentially Anglican at heart, it's hard to imagine Ed or Tom uttering the words "now I think I've seen the light" themselves, and generally you can't help thinking they'd be better off keeping any mystical tendencies implicit in the music. Minor defects aside, Come With Us is an almost perfect-thing, and an invitation not to be refused. So, er, go with them.