In a west London pub on a Wednesday lunchtime, the Chemical Brothers are taking a break from preparing for the smallest DJ gig of their recent careers. Twenty-seven years since they began playing records together as students in Manchester, under the unfortunate and short-lived pseudonym the 237 Turbo Nutters, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ forays into DJing usually take place on the grand scale of their spectacular festival headline sets. Such huge gigs have become useful circumstances for road-testing new material: the pair knew they were on to a winner with Eve of Destruction – the bizarrely effective blend of apocalyptic 2019 paranoia, early Chicago house and disco samples that opens their new album, No Geography – after playing an early version to a vast crowd in Europe. “We’re always searching,” as Rowlands puts it, “for that feeling of intensity and … waaaaah!”
But, in a few days’ time, they are returning to their roots: the days when, Simons says, “we would be crammed in a tiny booth with people everywhere, no barrier, so people would just wander in and start cheering and screaming at you”. They are DJing for a grand total of 250 people at the Social, the central London bar/venue run by the record label Heavenly. As part of the efforts to save the venue – then under threat from rising rents – they offered to play the same kind of set they played 25 years ago at the Sunday Social, the hugely influential club night also run by Heavenly, in the basement of the Albany pub on nearby Great Portland Street, where the pair were resident DJs. The preparations have brought their own challenges. “I’ve been going through the old record bags that we used at the time, pulling out a 12in, then going to digitise it so we can play it again and finding I can’t because the record’s literally got a boot print across it,” says Rowlands, frowning.
In fairness, the Sunday Social was very much the kind of club night where the resident DJs’ records might get trampled on. It was open for only a few weeks in the autumn of 1994, but quickly gained a reputation as a bastion of unruly hedonism in an era when British clubbing was becoming ever-more polished and professional. That was the year that Ministry of Sound and Cream began turning themselves into “superclubs”/lifestyle brands that went on to flog everything from clothing lines to fitness videos and hi-fi equipment. By contrast, the Sunday Social felt like chaos, a club where Tricky turned up to play a set that seemed to primarily consist of heavy metal records at the wrong speed, and a significant proportion of the clientele looked like they hadn’t slept all weekend.
It looms large in Chemical Brothers folklore. When the club opened, the pair had already made a handful of acclaimed singles under the name the Dust Brothers, a pseudonym they had pinched from a production duo who worked with the Beastie Boys (working on the principle that they were never going to become successful enough for their US counterparts to notice). By the time it closed, they were something of a cause celebre, largely as a result of the music they played, which seemed to break every rule of an increasingly regimented, genre-specific dance scene. Hip-hop was juxtaposed with the Beatles, the intense acid techno of Emmanuel Top’s Lobotomie was played alongside the lush 70s soul of Love Unlimited and the night would invariably end with the Specials’ You’re Wondering Now.
“We were putting together something that, in London, was quite new at the time,” remembers Simons. “A lot of records we’d been playing in Manchester when we were students – you know, the second instrumental track on the B-side of a hip-hop single, mixed in with techno. Then, at the same time, we were making our own music, we were in the studio recording our debut album, we were pretty much doing a remix every week. It felt like a bit of an onslaught. It’s quite emotional to revisit it.”
The Sunday Social’s distance from the clubbing mainstream was demonstrated when the duo attempted to take the sound to Ibiza. “It was on the terrace at Space at 9am in the morning, and the crowd were like: ‘Please make this go away.’ We were asked to leave after about half an hour of … dope beats,” Simons says, smiling.
“We’d spent ages working it out,” says Rowlands. “‘This will be amazing, playing Barry White and stuff at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning, outdoors’ – and people were crying, literally crying because they hated it so much. I remember one girl, just in tears, going and getting the manager, and him saying: ‘You have to stop now.’”
It is clearly many years since a Chemical Brothers DJ set reduced anyone to tears of impotent rage. Over the intervening decades, they have sold millions of records, become used to their albums entering the UK charts at No 1, won four Grammys and drawn what is reputed to be the biggest crowd in the history of the Glastonbury festival. They have turned from profoundly reticent live performers – “We weren’t the sort of people that would be queuing up to audition for the school play,” notes Simons – into one of the biggest live draws in dance music. The vast son-et-lumière show they initially devised with longstanding collaborator Adam Smith “as a sort of Velvet Underground thing to hide the fact that we were a bit self-conscious”, says Simons, has been the subject of a film, 2012’s eye-popping Don’t Think. It was fairly obviously an influence on the extravagant stage presentations of America’s EDM artists, a state of affairs about which the pair seem equivocal.
“Dance music and clubbing could seem quite countercultural, like you were doing something a bit different, getting in touch with people and being around people you might not be with all the time,” says Simons. “Sometimes you see pictures of what’s happening in Las Vegas, Electric Daisy or whatever, and it does look quite monocultural, part of the 1%, so I think that feels quite different. You didn’t really have to pay to go to the old orbital raves – I mean, there was a nominal ticket system, but you really just tipped up, so that meant there was quite a different spread of people there. That definitely has changed.”
It all feels a long way away from DJing in the basement of a pub, but the show at the Social isn’t the only reason the duo have recently found themselves thinking about the early stage of their career. No Geography was recorded using more or less the same equipment as Exit Planet Dust, the debut album they were working on during their Sunday Social residency.
“It wasn’t a plan – ‘We’re only going to do this with old-fashioned things’,” says Rowland. “It was just fun to be in that 94-era machine area – where the restrictions are liberating. A lot of our records are made by shunting things together, which meant something interesting came out of it. Now technology means you can practically make anything fit with anything. Whereas then, it would be more like you get a weird place in the middle where two or three things are meeting. They’re not quite in right, they’re not quite in tune, but the sound they’re making is more interesting than something pristine. It’s so easy to make a good record that sounds like another record now.”
“You get in danger of bordering on a White Stripes ideology,” smiles Simons. “But when you listen to an old acid house record, there’s such a weird minimal sound, it’s so heavy, it could make a whole room vibrate. Now, there’s records that automatically push the button for ‘this is amazing’ – they’ve got a good groove, the sounds are great and crisp, but it’s so far away from that kind of weird, avant-garde texture.”
No Geography also sounds remarkably angry. A track called MAH samples Peter Finch’s speech from the 1976 film Network, in which he attempts to galvanise TV viewers to open their windows and scream that they’re “not going to take it any more”. The title track features the US poet Michael Brownstein discussing the need for a lack of boundaries between nations. You don’t have to be a genius in decoding the semantics of dance music to work out that it’s an album made in the shadow of Brexit. “The record wasn’t made in a vacuum, we didn’t retreat from the world to make it,” says Rowlands. “Even musicians like us who are not writing in an explicit way about what they feel, everything you do is impacted by how you feel and every creative choice you make is obviously influenced, subconsciously or consciously, by what’s going on in the world.”
“With Brexit, there’s the aspect of losing something you’re used to having – your rights, whether you use them or not – and for what?” says Simons. “There’s no trade-off, which makes me quite angry and sad. You’re going to have something reduced about your country and your own personal opportunities, and that’s being celebrated? It’s maddening. I think Brexit hits into something about collaboration, this sense of we can do it together. Whatever happens with Brexit, whether it happens or it doesn’t happen, the European Medicines Agency has now left Britain, it’s not coming back to London, that’s gone. The idea that we are at the centre of people collaborating to make better medicine, that’s gone. It’s really sad. Anyway,” he says, drawing the conversation to a close, “that’s my little Brexit rant for the day.”
A week later, at the Social, the Chemical Brothers find themselves once more crammed into a tiny DJ booth, surrounded by people screaming and cheering. They play tracks from No Geography mixed in with the kind of records that caused pandemonium on the Sunday Social’s dancefloor: Eric B and Rakim alongside the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, their own early remixes of the Prodigy and Bomb the Bass next to Jeff Perry’s northern soul anthem Love Don’t Come No Stronger. The room is packed, the atmosphere charged. The thing is, says Simons, it’s not just about the threat faced by the Social. It’s also about what that symbolises about the way the world has changed, in an era of social media and everything delivered to your door at the click of a button.
“Part of being in a band is the sense of getting people out of the house. I feel like movement and being together is something that is declining. For me, growing up, dance music was a way to socialise. It’s how I found Tom, it’s how I found a lot of friends, a sense of community. It was about creating something that brings people out, that brings people together. Loneliness is difficult, it’s a real struggle for people now. When I used to go to raves, I felt a real sense of belonging, dancing on a stage with people I would never see in my day-to-day life. People can be dismissive of all that, but it’s really liberating.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion