I stumbled across this interview, one of the most informative I've ever read! They talk about their image, working in the studio and there's also mention of what other artists think about them and their music (and what rare music has been sent to them). There's also a pic of the duo at the link, with Tom looking quite youthful! Follow the link to see the interview in its original formatting and with audio links, otherwise read on.



http://www.guardian....ritic/feature/0,1169,743656,00.html



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As Ed Simons knows only too well, the Chemical Brothers have something of an image problem. When the topic comes up, his face takes on an expression somewhere between pain and bemusement.



And well it might. In the past eight years, Simons, 32, and partner Tom Rowlands, 31, have amassed an enviable list of achievements. The Chemical Brothers have presided over one of the most celebrated British clubs in history.



Their four startling albums have broken new ground and invented new genres, and been rewarded with number-one singles and a Grammy (bizarrely, Block Rockin' Beats snatched the 1998 gong for Best Rock Instrumental). Their live shows have transcended the usual presentational dilemmas faced by electronic dance acts, offering a stark, dramatic and mind-blowing son et lumi�re experience to wild acclaim.



Their appearance at Glastonbury 2000 drew the largest crowd in the festival's history. They have sold more than 6m albums and their 2001 single It Began in Afrika may well be the most wilfully extreme and experimental piece of music ever to make the Top 10. However, as Simons says, glowering: "The nerdy-guy myth is pretty well-travelled."



Simons is by nature a worrier. A smoker since the age of 13, he admits to "sitting here stinging" over the handful of criticisms in the largely positive reviews of their fourth album, Come With Us.



But there is certainly truth in his view that the Chemical Brothers are largely viewed as "nerdy squares" by the media. Delight is taken in the duo's uneventful middle-class upbringings in Henley-on-Thames (Rowlands) and South London's Herne Hill (Simons).



Much is made of their past as students. They met while studying medieval literature at Manchester university - an early single was titled 14th Century Sky, in tribute to their love of the period. Both specialised in Chaucer. Despite the evenings they spent DJ-ing and exploring cheap "loony soup" lager and amyl nitrate, both scored 2:1s.



"We weren't into the just-getting-by ethic at all," says Simons, his voice tinged with suspicion when their studiousness is mentioned. "We did history and some people treated it as a joke, something you could just do two weeks before the exams started. We treated it as something we really enjoyed and got a lot out of. It's the same with making our records now. It's what we do, so we work really hard at it."



It's not just their past that leads people to assume the Chemical Brothers are a pair of aloof boffins. The most common adjective used to describe Rowlands and Simons is "diffident". Part of the problem is their dislike of that pop-star staple, discussing your personal life in interviews. Simons famously described such behaviour as "an odd way to carry on". Rowlands won't even countenance discussion of the lyrics he occasionally contributes to Chemical Brothers tracks.



They chose their friend, folk singer Beth Orton, for the vocals on Come With Us's solitary ballad The State We're In because, says Rowlands: "I can't imagine saying to one of the other vocalists we've worked with, like Bernard Sumner or Noel Gallagher, 'These are the words for my song, can you sing it?' " Attempts to probe any further into the song's meaning are rebuffed with a silent, enigmatic smile. Eventually, you just give up and ask about something else.



Further fuel has been added to the nerdy-guy myth. There's the suggestion that their closeness is a bit peculiar. At a time when manufactured bands largely consist of hand-picked strangers, the duo claimed to have only spent two weeks of each year apart since meeting in 1989. They were flatmates for three years.



These days, they live three streets apart in west London. Rowlands is married with a baby daughter and Simons is in a long-term relationship. Tellingly, both have a tendency to leave sentences hanging in mid-air, half-finished. Rowlands describes the harsh, percussive hammering of It Began in Afrika as "jungle noises... spaceships... future primitive". It's as if you should instinctively know what they mean.



"If I'm in the studio working on my own, I can feel this kind of...presence," says Rowlands. "This Ed presence around me, looking over my shoulder, going: 'Oh, I don't know about that.'"



"We don't really have an element of friction between us," says Simons. "We're friends, and our friendship is more important than the music that we make." He pauses. "Some of the time."



There are certainly a lot of in-jokes shared between them, but, in person, the Chemical Brothers hardly resemble an impenetrable and foreboding cabal. The duo are amiable, chatty, possessed of a dry wit and a keen sense of dance music's ridiculousness. Simons was tickled by a recent TV show featuring a DJ's rosy-hued recollections of minds being opened during 1988's Summer of Love: "Bricklayers used to come up and give him poetry while he was DJ-ing," he says.



The only people Simons and Rowlands seem to have upset during their career are Boy George (who demonstrated his grasp of the Wildean bon mot by dubbing them "the cunt brothers") and a crowd at Ibiza's Space club, who were reduced to tears by a Chemicals DJ set.



Nevertheless, some people express a sense of disappointment that Rowlands and Simons don't embody more of their music's characteristics. They forget that anyone who did embody the prevelant characteristics of an average Chemical Brothers record would be relentlessly aggressive, monstrously loud, overblown and under the influence of vast quantities of psychedelics. Brian Blessed in a frothing, LSD-induced fury. Someone you'd spot a mile off, then cross the street to avoid. The last person you'd want to interview in a cafe at Westbourne Park in London at 11.30 on a Sunday morning.



By contrast, Rowlands and Simons pass unnoticed as they sip their herbal tea. Their anonymity is slightly surprising. Aside from Keith Flint, the Prodigy's idiotically haired, extravagantly pierced, make-up-sporting frontman, the duo are probably dance music's most recognisable couple.



Neither glamorous nor particularly nerdy, Simons and Rowlands still have something inexplicably striking about them. Recently, one music magazine reported that female Japanese fans felt the pair inspired "kawaii - the love one feels for small furry animals". As Julie Burchill once remarked of Slade guitarist Dave Hill, the Chemical Brothers have faces you are unlikely to forget.



Rowlands is additionally memorable because he doesn't actually appear to have changed his clothes for the past eight years. He may have finally divested himself of his long raver's tresses (a hairstyle he maintained long after even the most redoubtable raver had given it up as a bad job), but today, as every day, he sports slightly flared jeans, battered trainers and tinted spectacles. The duo's international success, their number-one singles, their increasing wealth - none of it has had any impact whatsoever on his wardrobe.



Perhaps he has his mind on higher things. Rowlands and Simons claim that the way records like Come With Us sound - overloaded, crazed, saturated with distorted beats and psychedelic noises - has less to do with their own personalities or drug consumption than an ongoing desire to make the listener feel "overwhelmed by sound".



When they start discussing their music's ability to "mess with your mind", they don't sound diffident at all. There's something of the mad scientist about their excited talk of concepts such as their bewildering "Turin Shroud Theory of Implied Music" ("It must have been a good afternoon when we came up with that one," nods Rowlands sagely), and their musical quest for transcendence.



"If you can sit in front of a computer in the studio and feel totally transported by the sound you're making, then that's the most fun there is to be had making music," says Rowlands. "Sometimes when we're onstage, playing a track like [1997 single] The Private Psychedelic Reel and it's really loud, you just don't feel that you're anything to do with this piece of music. It's just happening and you're holding onto the sound desk, going, 'Fucking hell!' It sounds like there's a plane going over your head. I don't feel, 'Wow, I've created this thing - I'm in an incredible position of power.' I'm just experiencing what the person in the audience who hasn't made the music is experiencing. It's all about giving me dem feelings." Listen to the audio clip (49secs)



"We like doing it to ourselves," adds Simons, succinctly.



Nevertheless, they have become used to their music's unpredictable effects on others. The unfortunately coiffeured "world's fastest heavy metal guitarist" Joe Satriani sent them a cassette featuring him frantically soloing over one of their tracks ("I think that's one for the Chemical Brothers Anthology box set," says Rowlands). Then they received a puzzling video from former Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth "of himself, running around his house, getting up to no good, with one of our tunes in the background and him singing over the top of it".



Even Roth's curious behaviour was topped by an Australian fan who calls himself Dan Rad. "He used to rap over our records and then send us the tapes," says Rowlands, shaking his head. "It was just him shouting all this obscene stuff. 'She tells me I'm listening to my music too loud so I say faack off yew baaah-sted! My eardrums are fackin' bleeding, yew drongo!' We haven't heard from him in a while, but we're going to Australia soon. Perhaps he could get onstage with us, do a bit of MC-ing."



They may not look particularly mythic, but in the past eight years, that's exactly what the Chemical Brothers have become. The story of their reign as DJs at the Heavenly Sunday Social - a club held in a packed, grubby Marylebone pub basement during the summer and autumn of 1994 - is enshrined in dance-music legend, and talked about in hushed and reverential tones. To have been present during their four-month residency is still a badge of honour, an e-generation equivalent of having seen the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. Listen to the audio clip (1min 25)



The Sunday Social's fabled reputation is partly due to the number of celebrities who turned up - Primal Scream, Tricky, the Stone Roses. There was something groundbreaking and thrilling about the music Rowlands and Simons played at the Sunday Social.



Uniquely for the time, they were unconstrained by the rigid generic boundaries of dance music. Pounding acid techno was mixed in with old Beatles records, hip-hop, ska, the Manic Street Preachers - anything they felt would fit the mood of druggy abandon.



Rowlands and Simons were doing nothing more complicated than playing records they liked, but the results were refreshing, unpredicatable and kaleidoscopic: a mix that, for the first time, placed the notoriously insular world of dance music in a wider context.



This filtered through into the Chemical Brothers' albums, which pitched unlikely guest vocalists against their unruly sound. Their debut, Exit Planet Dust, offered a collision of distorted hip-hop drums with techno effects and guitars. U2 guitarist the Edge claimed it was his favourite record of 1994. "It said, 'This is the way forward and what we should all be doing,'" commented Norman Cook, who later adopted its style to vast success as Fatboy Slim.



Their second album, 1997's Dig Your Own Hole, featured Noel Gallagher on the number one single Setting Sun. It proved to be one of the most influential and pivotal albums of the 1990s, an evocation of the clubbing experience remarkable both for its musical breadth and its emotional depth.



Dance music has always had problems expressing anything more profound than the earth-shattering notion that dancing and drugs are fun ("Not such bad things to say," smirks Simons). But Dig Your Own Hole shifted from euphoria through numb nihilism to desperate melancholy. Like Rowlands's sartorial sense, it remains unchanged by time: no mean feat in the accelerated culture of dance music, where styles and genres are rendered obsolete overnight.



Today, the venue of the Sunday Social is now a chain pub. More bizarrely, the boundaries between rock and dance, which the Chemical Brothers did as much as anyone to destroy, have been hastily erected once more.



In Manchester, nu-metal-worshipping Moshers and garage-loving Scallies are involved in running battles around the city. Rock has returned to its workmanlike roots. Earthy, earnest musicianship in the early 1970s tradition is big again, and regards artists armed with samplers as deeply suspicious.



Dance music, meanwhile, has greedily abandoned any pretence of innovation and become risibly frivolous and disposable: it is the province of DJ Alligator and Do You Really Like It?. The Chemical Brothers may still express the desire to work with artists as disparate as Bob Dylan ("We got word back that he'd like a formal letter, telling him exactly what it would entail," Simons smiles) and US rappers Outkast, but elsewhere the twain no longer meet. In 2002, the only place you're likely to hear a rock star collaborating with a dance act is Come With Us, where trad-rocking Richard Ashcroft sings over wriggling beats on album-closer The Test.



"There's no cross-pollination going on," agrees Simons. "The rock music that's big is so boring. The idea of us doing a Travis remix... what would that be?" "It would be pretty rubbish," says Rowlands.



But if times have changed since the days of the Sunday Social, so have the Chemical Brothers. Their previous album, 1999's Surrender, contained tracks called Out of Control, Under the Influence and Got Glint? - the latter being Rowlands and Simons' slang for "Were you out until 11 o'clock in the morning?" Despite the nerdy-guy myth, the strict work ethic and the aversion to celebrity hang-outs such as the Met Bar, the duo were well-known in the dance scene for their love of a hedonistic party.



By contrast, amid the invigorating mayhem of tracks like My Elastic Eye and Galaxy Bounce, Come With Us features Richard Ashcroft plaintively moaning: "I almost lost my mind, but now I'm home and I'm free." If Rowlands looks exhausted during our Sunday meeting, it has less to do with druggy excess than the sleeping patterns of his six-month-old daughter, Matilda. It all sounds suspiciously as if the Chemical Brothers, like most clubbers when they reach their early 30s, are feeling domesticity dragging them away from the strobes and sound systems.



"I really love the words about being home and being free," nods Simons. "For five solid years, I've gone out every Friday night in some form or another, but now if 10 o'clock on a Friday night rolls around and there's nothing on, I'm in for the night. I think both of us feel out of that trap, where we have to be out every night. It's not everybody's idea of freedom, sitting around at home, but for me it is. There's a tyranny of going out. That track's called The Test because you do end up wondering if it's some kind of test you were putting yourself through."



Rowlands continues: "It's the only test that this generation has, really. People need to go through a rite of passsage and because there isn't national service or something anymore, you build your own thing. It sounds stupid, but it's true." Listen to the audio clip (57secs)



We live in an era when club attendance figures are plummeting and the chill-out album reigns supreme. But if Rowlands and Simons are feeling the lure of the sofa, where does that leave their brand of punishing dancefloor psychedelia? Does their future hold nothing but odes to the simple pleasures of family life?



Simons snorts. "Nah. We still like to stand in the studio with the speakers on full pelt, listening to something that takes you back into that... "



Characteristically, his sentence tails off. Rowlands takes up the challenge: "When you're in a club and you hear a record for the first time, you get excited, the music overtakes you. That feeling is what I like about music. If you feel that way, other people feel like that as well... "



Aware his partner is rapidly running out of steam, Simons steps in again: "Just feeling absorbed by sound, giving in to it, feeling unselfconcious about dancing, feeling emotion triggered by the way a track's going." He looks at Rowlands and frowns. "Am I talking out of turn?"



"No," says Rowlands quietly. "I think you're talking perfect sense."



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This is a very nice and informative intervieuw , thnx !!!

I was driving home from my dealers house saturday night and saw a place called 'Kawaii Bakery'... I lol'd

read it ages ago forgot to post it. really great interview

beatrobot Escribi�:

Nevertheless, they have become used to their music's unpredictable effects on others. The unfortunately coiffeured "world's fastest heavy metal guitarist" Joe Satriani sent them a cassette featuring him frantically soloing over one of their tracks ("I think that's one for the Chemical Brothers Anthology box set," says Rowlands). Then they received a puzzling video from former Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth "of himself, running around his house, getting up to no good, with one of our tunes in the background and him singing over the top of it".



Even Roth's curious behaviour was topped by an Australian fan who calls himself Dan Rad. "He used to rap over our records and then send us the tapes," says Rowlands, shaking his head. "It was just him shouting all this obscene stuff. 'She tells me I'm listening to my music too loud so I say faack off yew baaah-sted! My eardrums are fackin' bleeding, yew drongo!'

Awesome, simply awesome. What I wouldn't do to get a hold of those cassettes....... 8O