Jeeeej! I know what i'm going to do tonight! Hahaha.

Thnx mate!

Right chemistry

By Stephen Dalton

January 23, 2005



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Chemical Brothers, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons (L-R), certainly attract some bizarre admirers: Joe Satriani and David Lee Roth have both sent demo tapes to the duo.

Photo: Supplied

They're a taciturn duo, who let their music do the talking. Stephen Dalton elicits reactions from the Chemical Brothers.



For two such soft-spoken characters, the Chemical Brothers have an unerring knack of bringing out extreme reactions in people. Maybe some sinister voodoo power lurks behind their suspiciously ordinary image as the tight-lipped Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of dance-rock. Or perhaps it is simply the ribcage-shattering, mountain-levelling, man-made thunder of their high-decibel racket that pushes listeners into strange behaviour.



Either way, Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands certainly attract some bizarre admirers. Poodle rock superstars Joe Satriani and David Lee Roth have both sent the deadpan duo unsolicited tapes of themselves improvising wildly over Chemicals tunes. But both are surpassed in the wacko stakes by an Australian superfan calling himself Dan Rad, who mailed them cassettes of his own foul-mouthed rap accompaniment to their block-rocking beats.



"We haven't heard from him in a while," Rowlands admitted recently, "but we're going to Australia soon. Perhaps he could get on stage with us, do a bit of MC-ing."



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AdvertisementFirst united at Manchester University in the late 1980s, Simons and Rowlands enjoyed a meteoric first decade at the forefront of the superstar DJ revolution, when ecstasy-fuelled rave music spread outwards from London clubland to the worlds furtherest-flung hippie festivals and hedonistic beach resorts.



In between breaking audience records at Glastonbury with their epic, ear-busting, sense-blurring turntable sets, they also scored an epochal UK chart-topper with Setting Sun , a memorably hardcore techno-punk-psychedelic duet with Noel Gallagher of Oasis.



"Noel was in the biggest band in the world at the time," recalls Rowlands, "but he didn't act like that.



"He turned up in a cab, left it running outside, did his vocal, told us a few tales about Liam and p---sed off. Later that night we went round to his flat and played it to him and he really liked it." Simons grins at the memory. "He made us a cup of tea and that was it."



In the late 1990s, Simons and Rowlands appeared indestructible. But having turned 30 soon after the new millennium dawned, the Brothers have recently seen their hipster credentials dented by sharp young challengers, shifting fashions, critical backlashes and the increasingly sickly state of dance music. Soon after winning a Grammy for Block Rockin Beats in 1998, their once-healthy US profile also went into decline. But Rowlands, the taller and blonder of the pair, remains philosophical.



"We released Hey Boy Hey Girl , which was our biggest ever record, but it meant nothing in America to anyone at all," he shrugs. "A lot of people would kill themselves to get a big record in America, but that's not what we do. We're not going to try and convince you we're good. We go to South America now, they love us!"



The Chemicals can afford a little arrogance here. They are about to release a mighty new album, Push The Button, which applies several new coats of paint to their ailing reputation as sonic innovators and discobruisers. Almost uniquely among the rowdy generation of bands that exploded out of Britain's semi-legal club culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chemicals have not just survived but thrived, give or take the odd career wobble. All thanks to a potent cocktail of bloody-minded attitude and commercial clout, explains Rowlands.



"We've always been successful enough to be left alone," he says. "Record companies love it when you can do everything yourself. The reason why we had the freedom to get on with things is we've always traded on our ideas. When we signed to Virgin, Exit Planet Dust came out and it was a success. Everything is our decision, and when things go well, no one questions you."



While former post-rave peers including Orbital and Leftfield have thrown in the towel, and one-time fellow travellers Prodigy and Fatboy Slim have stagnated into self-parody, Simons and Rowlands are virtually the last remaining acid house survivors still making progressive and surprising records. No wonder they insist reports of their imminent demise, like that of dance music itself, have been exaggerated.



"Our music is ignited by going to clubs," says Rowlands. "Clubs are always fascinating as they're specifically designed as places to listen to really loud music. But our music doesn't only make sense at 4am. I get very sad when people talk about some supposed demise of clubs and dance music as they're both still incredibly important things in my life."



Ed argues that the duo's legacy should also be measured by all the cheesy offers they resisted when they were the most in-demand remixers and collaborations in rock. "We turn down a lot of things," he frowns. "Most things. We have trenchant decisions and my thing is always: Is it good enough?"'



Rowlands laughs. "And mine is: it's too good; people arent ready for it!"



He is only half joking too. The music press in Britain has long been fiercely divided about the Chemicals and their place in the pop pantheon. Even after 10 years of turning out thunderously exciting records, their shared background as well-spoken, middle-class university graduates is frequently used as a stick to beat them by chippy rock critics.



Fiercely private and scarcely the most forthcoming of interview subjects, they are often caricatured as either quasi-autistic bedroom nerds with an image problem or moody, drug-addled obsessives.



"Moody?" Rowlands muses, moodily. "Compared to Scissor Sisters, we probably are." Simons disagrees. "We're not moody, but this isn't about us. The music is bigger than us, it doesn't matter what trousers we're wearing. I love New Order but I knew nothing of them at all. I know nothing about Kraftwerk, but I still love them. Actually I do know what Kraftwerk's trousers are like. They're pleated."



Ed and Rowlands have unquestionably worked with some impeccably cool vocalists over the years, from Noel Gallagher (twice) to New Order's Bernard Sumner, via neo-folkie waif Beth Orton and former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft. They even had the brass balls to invite Bob Dylan to sing with them, only to receive a sniffy request for a clarification of their precise intentions. And yet in person they must be the most dressed-down, anonymous-looking double act ever to sell six million albums and counting.



"We're not perceived as particularly cool people, but I don't care about that," Simons shrugs. "Cool suggests detached," Rowlands adds after a frosty pause. "But our music is more locked on, closer to you. If that makes it uncool, then so be it. It's more important to be interesting than to be cool."



Cool or not, the Chemicals suffered their first serious career setback in 2002 when their last studio album, Come With Us , met a largely lukewarm reception from critics and fans. For the first time in a decade Rowlands and Simons seemed to be lagging behind their imitators, losing direction, lacking momentum. At the time they were bullishly defensive, but they now concede the record lacked spark. A painful learning experience, in retrospect.



"Absolutely," nods Simons. "We're pretty proud people so it did hurt us. But with the last three or four years of making music we did get into to trying to second-guess people and make what we thought they wanted. I love all the music we made, but I can see how people may think we were pandering there for a while."



With hindsight, Rowlands agrees. "It's unconscious, but when you think you've made what people want it's easy to be satisfied by that. I feel like we'd got a bit cliched with the psychedelic whimsy and the bombast, the production had gone down a real cul-de-sac. It's easy to dribble on, to just bang them out because youve got a record contract, but we wanted there to be a point to this new record."



The duo blame the apparent water-treading exercise of Come With Us on hitting their late 20s, having children and drifting away from the vibrant London club scene that had long been their lifeblood. "There was a smaller gap between Surrender and Come With Us in terms of development and change," says Simons, "but we started working differently and changed everything. We were left to our own devices more. We got a bit older, spent less time in clubs, didn't spend every day in each others pockets. Things changed."



Ed admits his lowest point was the relative failure of The Golden Path, the duo's collaborative single with Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, which felt like an afterthought to their 2003 hits anthology Singles 93-03.



"That was a headf--k," he says glumly. "I thought it would set the world alight and it didn't. I was intoxicated by what Wayne had done but the rest of the world thought it was a damp squib. That made us feel more fervent about change. When the Greatest Hits came out everyone assumed we were drifting towards the end."



There is nothing like a critical and commercial battering to focus the mind, of course, and Push The Button finds the brothers fighting to regain their dance-rock dominance against all odds. Crisp, sleek and dynamic, it crackles with futuristic electricity.



"I sat down and wrote a list of words that I wanted to apply to this record," says Rowlands. "It had to be freer, closer, like a sound you couldn't ignore. And it had to be wilder. It's all those things."



Significantly, despite its smattering of left-field celebrity vocalists, Push The Button is more an album of great noises than famous guests. "This record is so strong that the voices never take over, they never dominate,'' he nods. "We didn't want to use people who were too familiar."



Ed says: "We worked for ages on some of the tracks, but we mixed it quickly. There doesn't feel like there's a lot of differences when you're sat in a room trying to make an idea real. It's the same process. This album makes me feel like we've got that freshness back. It makes me feel alive. Ideas are what it's all about."



From a taciturn duo who never sing and rarely write lyrics, Push The Button is bursting with emotion.



"Music affects mood and that's what we feed on," Simons insists. "We are into sound and feeling."



The album's opening track, Galvanise, is a propulsively upbeat call to arms featuring former A Tribe Called Quest rapper Q-Tip. Simons and Rowlands flew into New York with a bare-bones tune and just five hours to record it, but their guest vocalist was initially underwhelmed.



"When he first got to the studio he wasn't that into it," Rowlands recalls. "We had to enthuse him and get him excited, but by the end he was bouncing off the walls. We were in awe of him and it was quite hard to jell at first, but then he began spouting genius and we knew it was going to happen."



But it is the album's wordless grand finale, a symphonic sweep through Kraftwerk to New Order and beyond entitled Surface To Air, which packs the strongest emotional punch. "We make very emotive music," Rowlands insists, "but emotional doesn't have to mean introspective or browbeating. It is difficult to get our emotions across as a lot of what we make has no words, but Surface To Air says everything about us without words."



Which is convenient, given that the Chemical Brothers are just about the most tight-lipped interview subjects you could meet. Thankfully, the music speaks for itself. And when they get it right, it speaks volumes. As in deafening.



"We both know when something is right," nods Simons with a quiet grin. "At the end of it, its the two of us. Everything else is just opinion."



The Chemical Brothers will play the Big Day Out next Sunday.

They don't play any instruments, but the Chemical Brothers have invented dance music's brand-new beat. Pat Blashill mixes it up with electronica's premier boogie band.



The Chemical Brothers, also known as Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, feel a bit out of place. It's not because we're sitting in a slightly dingy South London pub surrounded by small-time mobsters. It's not because the jukebox is playing Lionel Richie. It has more to do with the fact I've mistaken them for a band.

"The thing is, we never thought we'd be playing live onstage-we just thought we'd be in our studio, making records," Tom tells me later. "With all that's happened lately, I don't know -what- we are anymore."

What's happened lately is that the Chemical Brothers' single "Setting Sun," a howling, trip-hop inversion of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," has loped up the U.S. charts and into the Buzz Bin. Which is wierd, because the Chemical Brothers don't have a cute alterna-boy guitarist, or an angry-white-chick singer, or a freaky androgynous frontman who eats bugs, or any singer at all. They don't even show up in their own video for more than seven seconds. Nevertheless, they've come to be regarded as the crown princes of something new called electronica.

Maybe that's because nobody really knows what electronica is yet, least of all the Chemical Brothers. Tom and Ed think they make hip-hop like techno producers. Or techno like hip-hop DJs. Actually, the Chemical Brothers play funky acid rock that sounds most exquisitely right in a discotheque. Except that they don't really "play" anything. Most of their music is pieced together from samples of other music.

The Chemical Brothers are quiet.

"I don't even know any drummers," Tom muses.

Tom's eyes are slightly hidden behind a pair of yellow-tinted glasses, and his long, straight hair is stuffed up underneath a cap. He is the tallest and shyest of two pretty tall and shy people, which means that he answers a lot of questions with "Yeah," a tug at the drawstrings of his Nike hoodie, and a look at the floor. Ed Simons, the boyish one, has a head full of Roman curls, and occasionally lifts his chin like a tough kid daring you to defy him, though his quick blush belies that bit of cool.

But, like the small-time criminals in the corner who occasionally stare over at us twits, the Chemical Brothers are most definately petty thieves. They don't bother to pay for the rights to much of what they sample. Somewhere on their new album, they explain, is a snatch from a famous classic-rock song, though they refuse to say which classic-rock song.

"I guarantee you," Ed Simons says, "we could play that track for ten of the top musicologists in the world, -and- the guy who actually played the music originally, and none of them would be able to figure it out."

Do you tell -anyone- where samples like that are taken from?

"Nope, no," says Tom.

"Uh-uh," says Ed.



The number of samples in one new Chemical Brothers song, according to Tom Rowlands: Three hundred, in "Elektrobank."



Here in England, the Chemical Brothers pal around with Oasis, the biggest band in the land, and play for 125,000 at a time at stadium-size concerts. In the U.K.-where "Setting Sun" went to number one on the singles chart and the Chemical Brothers' debut album, -Exit Planet Dust-, went gold, and where dance culture is a huge, communal business-the Brothers' techno is regarded as rowdy lad's music. But in America, next to the received and unrevised funk of our lad's music-the Chili Peppers and 311-the Chemical Brothers sound like the avant-garde. Or at least something truly fresh.



The Chemical Brothers are a kind of tarnished science fiction, a booty-wagging antidote to the sheen and futurism of colder techno. Despite the trippy flourishes of their new album, -Dig Your Own Hole-, they are not the Beatles of trip-hop so much as the Aerosmith of machine music. They are, at heart, a boogie band.

-Dig Your Own Hole- is an incredible hurtle, a Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang of manic drum beats, heart-attack bass shudderings, and, louder than everything else, synthesizer squelches, keyboard sirens, and funky old organ blasts. It's the sound of a recording studio tearing itself apart from the inside out. Their music, which is largely composed not of notes and chords but of found sounds an rerecordings of recordings, raises all sorts of questions about the creative process, the nature of art, and the death of the author: Is the distortion of a note as musical as the note itself?

But when I meet Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, it seems pretty clear that they'd rather not inspire too much chin stroking with their jammy jams. They got their start as DJs in clubs like Manchester's Naked Under Leather and London's Heavenly Social, and that's where they learned that the best audience reaction is interactive.

"Naked Under Leather had a really low ceiling," says Tom. "We tried to play music that would get the crowd to throw their hands in the air and graze their knuckles. There were lots of bleeding knuckles."

"At the Social, someone set their shoe on fire and threw it at us once," Ed reminisces. "That was pretty good."



The Chemical Brothers met in a medieval-history course at Manchester University. They were both into the apocalyptic mood of the Middle Ages-riots, plagues, religious persecution, and the like-and they enjoyed reading dusty old books written entirely in that "funny language everyone used to speak."

"Plus, those courses never had lectures on a Friday," Tom explains.

"Yeah, and Thursday was a big club night," adds Ed.

Tom and Ed were going out to clubs like the Hacienda, New Order's place, four or five nights a week. Tom had tinkered with guitars and keyboards for years; Ed had done nothing of the sort. But after they discovered the distorted oscillations and communal buzz of acid house, all they wanted to do was be DJs. Tom was also listening to a lot of hip-hop, especially Public Enemy. One day he invited Ed over to hear a 3rd Bass album, and that was when the two of them decided they might be Brothers.

"We actually had a conversation where we said, 'Let's try and do a record that's got all the energy and dynamics of an acid-house record, but with a brilliant beat that sounds like hip-hop as well,'" Ed says. "And that's when we came up with our song 'Chemical Beats.'"

"That's what we base our whole thing on," says Tom. "I don't think people believe hip-hop and acid house have anything to do with each other, but that was our USP."

Your what?

"Our Unique Selling Point."



A series of random questions for Ed Simons:

Do you drive safely?

"No, I drive like a madman."

Can you let yourself go at a party?

"Uh, yeah. Too much."

Do you cheat when you play games?

"No. Yeah. Sometimes. I think that's part of the game, finding a way to cheat."

Have you ever shoplifted?

"Yeah. A pair of shorts. They were a really horrible kind of Hawaiian design. I was on holiday in France. I ran like crazy. I was the worst shoplifter. It was just an adrenaline rush, something to spice up my evening."

What is your favorite London street noise?

"The sound of the rubbish collector. I like the sound of the squashing of the rubbish in the back of their truck."

What is your favorite TV theme song?

"The A-Team."

What is your favorite sound that signals pleasure?

"My girlfriend makes this little sigh just before she goes to sleep, a contented little sigh. That's probably my favorite sound. It kind of reassures me."

Thirty minutes in the studio with Tom Rowlands: The Chemical Brothers' studio, Orinoco, is an unassuming white town house in the middle of a dodgy Sound London hood of council houses and juvenile delinquents with spray cans. Tom and Ed got the name -Dig Your Own Hole- from a graffiti scrawl just down the street.

Inside, Orinoco looks like a blue-and-green industrial refrigerator. The wall hangings could be cooling coils, the chandeliers resemble molecule diagrams, and the door handles could be from a walk-in freezer.

We trundle up a skinny, baby blue stairwell and in the brain center of Chemical Brothers world headquarters. It's a small brain, just enough room for two people to move around between a keyboard rack, a Mac, a mixing board, and maybe a hundred records on the floor. These range from a 1961 -musique concre'te- record which looks like it was nicked from a public library ages ago, to a Miami bass record with two huge brown booties in thongs on its cover, to Joy Division's "Atmosphere," to acid-rock novelties with titles like "I've a Zebra, She Can Fly." Above the keyboard is an autographed photo of Boy George and a letter from him which begins "Dear Cunt Brothers..."

Tom calls me over. "Y;know how I was saying we sometimes make melody out of sound? Well, I'll show you how."

He's at the Mac, scrolling through a list of sound samples with names like ACID 1, ACID 2, and GOBLIN. He stops at one untitled sample, clicks on it, then reaches over and hits a white key on the keyboard. I hear a sound that could be a Tibetan night bird choking on a seed.

"Now, I scroll through that," Tom says, moving the cursor across a waveform on the computer screen, "and make this."

He hits the white key again, and a new sound emerges: It's hardly melodic yet, but it is rhythmic. Tom's just transformed the call of the wild into a brand-new dope beat.

"See, I'm taking the end of that noise and putting it first, then putting the beginning in the middle, and the middle at the end," he explains. "I'm making that sound into something no one could physically play."

You're rearranging time itself, then?

"Oh, yeah," says Tom, nodding casually.



A series of random questions for Tom Rowlands:

Your favorite video game or arcade sound?

"Table football. You call it foosball."

You like the -tock- of the ball going in the hole?

"Yeah. Or the noise of the rods. I went through a stage where I was playing that solidly for about three years. We use to go to the pub and play when I was underage. We call it babyfoot."

You were a babyfoot hustler?

(bashfully) "Yeah."

Now we're getting somewhere. What's your favorite London street noise?

"I quite like the noise of the street that I live on because there's hardly any noise at all."

Your favorite sound that signals pleasure?

"The Boom."

Pardon?

"The Boom. Most of our records have the Boom. I'm obsessed with the Boom. I love the Boom."

You're talking about a big horrible noise.

"Yeah."

Your favorite sound that signals danger?

"The Boom."

Do you drive safely?

"Yeah, I'm quite a safe driver. Ed drives badly, you see."

He said "madly."

"Badly. I drive safely buy speedily."

Do you cheat when you play games?

"No."

You -are- very different from Ed.

"He cheats, doesn't he? I didn't know he cheated, but I've had my suspicions, when we're playing cards and so forth. He gets so indignant if you say, 'You're cheating' that it's certainly not worth it."

Do you ever talk quite a lot about something you don't really know about?

"Yeah. That's basically us. And the main thing I find myself talking about is why we make our records."

here is a audio interview half way down the page with them

http://www.abc.net.a...ten/default.htm

more interviews come with us interview





The Chemical Brothers' studio, in a squat, unfriendly building just a stone's throw from the Old Kent Road, in south London is a sight to behold. It is truly, terminally messy.



Newspapers and magazines, records, ashtrays, esoteric musical equipment and god knows what, fight for space on shelves or in volcano-like piles on the floor, surrounding the banks of mixing desks. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons ? who are the Chemical Brothers ? spend anything up to 18 months in here making their albums. You can tell.



Downstairs, there's a newspaper cutting proclaiming Bermondsey's new cultural cachet. Robert De Niro has bought a flat here and local newspaper fantasies of grey and gritty SE1 turning into the new Tribeca ? more bijou eateries than you can shake a cheese stick at ? are in full swing. The Chems themselves are less convinced.



"Nice part of the world Bermondsey, Robert De Niro's moving in, you know," Simons says. "Yeah. Bob'll be walking down to the Tower Tandoori, getting his sweets and beer from Costcutter," Rowlands answers, draping himself over a sofa in the studio's TV room.



The Old Kent Road has been the musical home to the Chemicals for the past four years. During an interview in France they were asked what the studio's neighbourhood was like. They described it "via the Monopoly board". "It's on one of the brown squares, cos it's near the Old Kent Road which is the cheapest thing on the board," says Rowlands. He looks at Simons, "60 quid?" "Sixty quid," Simons confirms, quick as a flash. "Wouldn't get you much now, would it?" tuts Rowlands. "Not with Robert De Niro moving in," replies Simons.



This is the Chemical Brothers of legend in full swing: old mates with a decade's worth of private jokes, an inbuilt radar for each other's mannerisms and idiosyncrasies and an unerring ability to finish each other's sentences. Ask probing questions about the building block of new album Come With Us or the lyrics Rowlands wrote for the elegant ballad "The State We're In" (sung by longtime chum Beth Orton) and they'll murmur evasively, as if unsure of the questions.



But once an in joke or an aside starts, it runs and runs and runs, thanks to the mental telepathy they've developed over 10 years in almost constant company. One music magazine recently likened them to Morecombe and Wise, in their pyjamas and propped up next to each other in bed. What they do voice however, is concern over how Come With Us has been greeted by some of the press. There have been some decidedly sniffy reviews, some claiming that the band are out of touch with the latest trends in clubland (which, as working DJs, they hotly deny) or that Come With Us is trading off the glories of their past.



"Some of the comments have been a bit infuriating. Some of the things that have been written betray ignorance of what we set out to do ? they just say that we don't like doing interviews or saying what we do in the studio. But I do think some of the tracks have got a raw deal.



"Reading things like 'this track could have been on any one of the Chemical Brothers' albums' is a particular bugbear," grumbles Simons. "We don't reject things in the studio, we're excited by what we've done, and then also if we hear something that reminds us of it. "Galaxy Bounce" has got a particular amount of stick..." "...for just sounding like the Chemical Brothers," finishes Rowlands with a snort.



"Then there's this continual comment that we ignore the trends of the day like electropop or twostep," continues Simons. "We might be excited by those things in a club, but we never sit down in the studio and go, 'let's make a record like that'."



Simons is aggrieved that the duo's music can be dismissed so easily. "We don't just whack stuff out like some people do. Our records take a lot of time. They don't sound laboured, but to get what we like about music into it takes time. It has to have a thrill to it and sound exciting and instant, like club music is when it first hits a wave of people. And it also has to have other stuff so that you can listen to it for a long time. It takes a lot of exploring for us to do it. But it would be nice to make a record that didn't take quite so long to make. They all seem to take us about a year and half to make."

Come With Us might not have the genre defining moments that Dig Your Own Hole or Surrender had, like the Noel Gallagher-graced "Setting Sons" or "Hey Boy Hey Girl", but it's not the lazy effort that it's been painted either. There are just two tracks with live vocals ? Orton's "The State We're In" and the epic closer "The Test" with Richard Ashcroft.



The latter collaboration had interesting beginnings. Despite the pair being massive Verve fans, they'd met Ashcroft only once ? when he stopped them from DJing at a party. As Rowlands mischievously lets slip, Ashcroft tells a different version these days: "He was talking about it the other day, saying Liam Gallagher at the party was shouting 'right, fucking getting off', and Richard was [cue posh accent] 'Actually, if you listen Liam, you might find you're wrong'. But says that he couldn't stop Liam from getting us kicked off." There are no hard feelings, though and the pair claim Ashcroft's voice was the only one that could do justice to the sprawling, spacey beats of the track.



And Beth Orton? "Beth wasn't on the last record but we've done great stuff with her and decided we should do it again. Her voice sounds wicked with our music, it fits really well. When Richard came in we had to get to know him and settle down. When Beth comes in she's our friend and we can just gossip." A chat over a nice cup of tea? Very homely.



"Not a cup of tea but the entire menu at Nando's actually," Rowlands says. Simons nods. "From the chicken livers up. An amazing appetite for such a waif-like figure. We also played an awful lot of Gran Turismo."



"Basically she's just your average teenager," quips Rowlands, "eating fried chicken and playing Grand Theft Auto." The homely, refined Beth Orton image is now forever stained with chicken grease. Incidentally, Rowlands and Simons have produced a track for Orton's forthcoming album.



Rowlands and Simons are now working out what to put into the Come With Us live shows, which hit Japan and Australasia before reaching the UK in mid-March. It's not just the fitting-new-tracks-with-old dilemma every band faces at these times, it's the fact that every song has alternative melodies, beats, sounds and rhythms added to it that might not make it on to the recorded version but which could be used live. Added to that, Rowlands has found a cherished old keyboard that sports several mangled keys from previous live shows. He's desperate to get it working again.



First off though, it's a DJ set at London's Heaven tonight, the Chems' first live set in the UK since New Year's Eve, in a post 11 September clubland that is cold and gloomy and suffering poor attendances. "It's been a long month. Everyone's skint. Everyone's depressed. The weather's crap," agrees Rowlands.



"But I get the sense that it's going to be a lot of people's first night out. First of February. The start to the year."



The Chemical Brothers' 'Come With Us' is out now on Virgin Records. Their UK tour begins on 18 March at Birmingham Academy (0121-262

Thanx Thomas , pretty cool intervieuws , i always like to read about their Human Side ( yes sometimes i have to remind myself they are human! Hahaha ) , Ed cheating with cardgames and stuff , hihihi X-D

X-D Ed stealing a tacky pair of Hawaiian shorts out of a French shop, then making a mad dash getaway!!



And what he says about his significant other is very sweet, the sigh she makes before she goes to bed and how it's reassuring.



More interview gems - thanks irish fan!

Thanks Irish, nice interviews!

I'm having a hard time finding certain interviews that have been flickering about in my memory for some time - my google powers must be corrupt.



Anyway, back in 2000, the Chems were asked by Hillary Clinton to play a senate nomination party she held, but they turned her down citing they were busy. (I recall they mentioned she was a little too conservative for them as well) It was even mentioned in an Astralwerks newsletter and if I recall correctly, the invite was brought up in a Mexican interview a few years back. Damn it all, I can't find the interview or that Astralwerks newsletter!!! :(

Hilary Clinton

As in , HILLARY CLINTON ?!

Moehahahahaha X-D

"See, I'm taking the end of that noise and putting it first, then putting the beginning in the middle, and the middle at the end," he explains. "I'm making that sound into something no one could physically play."

You're rearranging time itself, then?



Amazing!!! :D great interviews thom

read that interview about hilary clinton will find it soon.

Excellent interviews, I learnt so much about the music and the people. There are some more myths and legends though?! I've heard about this boy george thing before but not much else apart from the first sentence, also I wonder which dyoh track has the 'classic rock song' they sampled? Also, elektrobank has 300 samples?? And they did actually invite Dylan to sing on a record! 8O Someone should copy these interviews and archive them on a site or something, it would be great!



My favourite quotes:



The homely, refined Beth Orton image is now forever stained with chicken grease.



The music is bigger than us, it doesn't matter what trousers we're wearing.



X-D

another one



comments

Tuesday, 10th May 2005

Brothers' beat goes on

Paul Taylor



MAY 28 SHOW: The Brothers

TOM Rowlands has been getting into gardening lately. It's not the first leisure pursuit you would associate with a man dedicated to providing the pulse of club culture. But as Rowlands points out: "If life didn't change, it would be boring."



Married with two young children, Rowlands has moved out of London to seek a quieter family life in rural Sussex. Until recently, he and musical partner, Ed Simons, lived just a couple of streets apart in the capital, and, for over a decade, the Chemical Brothers have spent more time in each other's company than the average husband and wife.



In a business filled with vaunting egos and titanic tiffs, it has been a remarkably happy musical marriage.



"At the heart of it is the fact that we have managed to remain friends. A lot of people, especially musicians under pressure, find those things overtake them and acrimony comes in," says Rowlands. "Ours is a real democracy of making music.



"It's never been about the glorification of us. We don't have a lead singer figure, so there's not some annoyed songwriter who plays bass and always feels he should be getting the credit. It also helps that there are two of us. If there are three, people gang up on each other."



While some pundits were predicting the imminent death of dance music, the Chemical Brothers' fifth album Push The Button, out in January, garnered a crop of good reviews, and the single, Galvanise, was one of their biggest-ever successes.



Creatively



"Creatively, it feels really good. The record we have just made seems to have connected with people almost like never before," says Rowlands.



The duo both hail from London, but met while studying history at the University of Manchester. Rowlands picked the city for study on the strength of a visit to the Hacienda and was not disappointed. "Before going to Manchester, it always seemed as if people who made music held some special key. It was something that other people did," says Rowlands.



"But you would go into Eastern Bloc records and be at the counter listening to records, and next to you would be a bloke who was making a record you were buying. It just seemed as if this world of being creative and making things was not too distant."



Tom and Ed began DJ-ing in 1991, and then decided to create their own music, melding their beloved house, hip-hop and other electronica, pretty much inventing the genre of big beat.



Five albums later, you wonder, though, whether two men now in their mid-thirties can remain in thrall to club culture?



"Club culture totally informs the music we make. It's where it comes from," says Rowlands. "But it's never been the only thing our music is about.



"We were making dance records, but they were influenced by lots of other types of music and lots of other feelings and sounds. A lot of dance music and club culture is about making records that are very strictly fitting into a genre. They are made to sound the same as other records, so DJs can play them and build a set.



"We wanted to make records you couldn't just segue into your set without anyone noticing."



The pair return to Manchester as part of Carling Live 24, a round-the-clock series of events, which, since it begins at 7am, may mean some fans will have been gigging for 13 hours by the time they arrive for the Chemicals' set. "Hopefully there will be a good injection of energy," says Rowlands. "We played at the Apollo quite recently and it was a really good gig.



Big balcony



"I really like the venue. You have a big area on the floor and a big balcony. Our show is good, either way. Some people like to sit down and be bombarded by this full-on audio-visual experience, and there are other people who like to get up and get involved."



Those block-rockin' beats have gone well beyond the dance floor, into the charts and into every part of the media. You are as likely to hear the Chemical Brothers on Match Of The Day or a commercial break as in a club.



"We get offered lots of adverts and many of them don't feel right. For example, to have Hey Boy Hey Girl in a shampoo advert," says Rowlands. "But it excites us to hear our music in lots of different places.



"Take a record like Hey Boy Hey Girl. For us, it is an acid house record to be played late at night in clubs and it sounds totally demented.



"Then you hear it in a different location, like a kids' TV programme, and it still makes total sense and people bounce around to it and get something from it."

Thats a great intervieuw Thomas! U find all the good ones :p Didn't know Tom had another kid , ah , soooo cute. 8)

ha hey boy hey girl in a shampoo advert. maybe a fructis ad jeanie

Awww so cute, Tom and his wife have 2 kids... playing out in the garden! I see Tom's been a busy boy! ;)



hehehe, imagine the song Close Your Eyes playing in a Fructis ad, Jeanie soaping up her hair trying not to get the bubblies in her eyes!

whirlygirl Escribi�:

Awww so cute, Tom and his wife have 2 kids... playing out in the garden! I see Tom's been a busy boy! ;)



hehehe, imagine the song Close Your Eyes playing in a Fructis ad, Jeanie soaping up her hair trying not to get the bubblies in her eyes!

I got soap in my eye saturday morning , it sucked.

And hmm , i wonder if Tom's kids will be as talented as he is , so when Tom and Ed are grey and old , there can be the Chemical Kiddo's hahaha X-D

^ Just have to wait and see if his kids have inherited any of his talent! A legacy would be kinda cool.



I've always been creative and artsy and musically inclined, but my son didn't get hardly any of that. He just has no interest, whatsoever. He's tried at least, but... well, maybe he's too young. Maybe it's something that will come in time.



He does have a good eye and a keen sense of noticing minute details in everything from what he sees when he's out and about, to certain things he in film. He even said he wants to make movies that look cool like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Ah, to be a kid and have dreams!



He's just mathematically and scientifically inclined I think. He didn't get that from 'stash, and he certainly didn't get it from me. Recessive genes at work!!!

whirlygirl Escribi�:

He's just mathematically and scientifically inclined I think. He didn't get that from 'stash, and he certainly didn't get it from me. Recessive genes at work!!!

That's interesting Whirly - my parents aren't really mathematically or scientifically inclined, but when I was in primary school that was all I was interested in. Maths, science and computers <- Nerd X-D But once I hit 15 or 16 I started becoming really interested in music and since then that's been my passion. You would never have picked me for being a creative person back then, but now I can't get through the week without composing something.



Funny how life works hey