okay i found this interview a couple of days ago. i think this was scanned in and converted to text with some OCR software. It was tricky to read, there was alot of errors in the text. i have managed to repair some of the mistakes. i hope it all make sence when you read it.



not the best interview i have read. but some good stories on the the sunday social



West London, December 1995. The afternoon after the Christmas party the night before. Tom, the Chemical Brother most resembling a sedated Afghan hound, is drunk. Ed, the other one, is grappling with both his hangover and his pigeonholes.

Ed: I think our music's funk. I hate it when it's described as "rock music for dance heads".

Tom: I don't see anything wrong with rock'n'roll.

Ed: I'd prefer it to be described as funk.

Tom: It's not rugby music.

Ed: It does upset me when we're associated with that big, thuggy hands-in-the-air male thing. And I don't like being associated with amyl nitrate.

The, ahem, Chemical Brothers are about to find themselves without a choice. "Brit Hop And Amyl House", a compilation album released this month, is the first (and not the last) to gather together the like-minded bust-up breakbeat sounds of Richard Fearless, Emmanuel Top, Justin Robertson and, indeed, The Chemical Brothers. "I think it's the worst title for a record I've ever heard in my life," says Ed. Tom doesn't agree. "Brit Hop And Amyl House" is, after all, released on his girlfriend Vanessa's record label, Concrete, and was mixed (despite insistences that "she's a good mixer, my girlfriend") by him.



Brit hop? Amyl house? You would be forgiven for envisaging genre-fretting journalists and unit-shifting record companies alike engaged in a new year round of backslapping over the fabrication of yet another spurious scene. Remember New Wave Of New Wave? How about Fraggle rock, Lionpop or Krautrock? Well, the news is that this particular turn of fashion's fickle wheel is actually pretty grand. Refiecting the roughness of early-Eighties electro and hip hop, your typical track combines walloping looped beats, scuffed-up samples and acid 303 squawks with a verselchorus structure alien to most techno music. In short, the notion of The Song is put back into a genre (at times) obsessed with chin-stroking cleverness and a belief that Hard + Fast is in direct proportion to Quality. Which is why Josh Wink is on this album and Carl Craig isn't. And if you think this sounds like a recipe for It All Sounding The Same, then you're right. But, as Tom once sagely noted, it's a bit like complaining that Stone Roses records always have too many guitars on them.

Keen music genealogists will point to The Chemical Brothers' genre-defining "Song To The Siren" single in 1993, since which a number of similarly inclined acts (Daft Punk, Monkey Mafia, Death In Vegas) have started to surface. "Obviously you go to record shops and you hear tracks you wouldn't have been able to hear a couple of years ago. But when we were making our records we were copying bands like Coldcut, Renegade Soundwave and Depth Charge," says Ed. "That's how dance music has always progressed. "



The Chemical Brothers story is one you probably know. Manchester 1989: two Chaucer students discover their mutual passion for over-indulgence at the Hacienda. They befriend club-running and Eastern Block-working DJ Justin Robertson and themselves behind the decks and clueless at his club nights Spice and Most Excellent. Encouraged, they start their own night, Naked Under Leather, mixing Mantronix with the Happy Mondays, The Beatles with Ravesignal III and prompting epidemic overuse of the adjective "eclectic". Taking the name The Dust Brothers - later changed to Chemical after legal moves by the US producer duo The Dust Brothers - Ed and Tom famously decide they haven't got any records loud enough and vow to make their own. Using an S1000 sampler and a Hitachi hi-fi, "Song To The Siren" is created in Tom's bedroom. A pre-Sabres Of Paradise Andrew Weatherall hears and champions the single. Record deals, fastidiously cool remix offers, hitching up with Heavenly Records via the Sunday Social and a top-ten album all follow by natural progression.



Herein, however, lay not only the origins of the music but also of the club culture that has grown alongside it. For intrinsic to the notion of "Brit hop" as a genre are the lager-fuelled, jump-around shoebox clubs like Athletico, London After Midnight and the Big Kahuna Burger Co (most usually the basements of tawdry pubs) to which it is best suited. A decade ago, when Marshall Jefferson, Steve "Silk" Hurley and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk span old Philly records over Roland 808 kick-drum patterns, they realized that the beat had become the focal point of the music: the most significant sound since punk was born and the rest is history. But in 1996 when your identikit silk shirt and Soho crop has become more important than the music that moves your feet, it's time for a rethink. And action and reaction breed change. "Spice and Most Excellent were about variety," explains Justin Robertson with reference to his old Mancunian nights. "When house became so big that it moved to large venues it lost its intimacy. The 'eclectic' nights sprung out of the tradition for playing chunky hip hop stuff at the end of the night. Those were the records people went the maddest to." If Spice and Most Excellent have found themselves reduced to mere footnotes in the chapter of Clubland History entitled ?Balearic", it's doubtless due to the overshadowing presence of one club. And that club is the legendary Sunday Social. So legendary is the legendary Sunday Social that it's almost never referred to without its prefix "legendary". "Basically we ripped it off," enthuses Heavenly Records' Robin Turner who runs the club. "We ripped it off from a lot of clubs. There was Full Circle in Slough, Disco Pogo and a pub called The Swan in Windsor which was free on a Sunday night. It's a formula that works. It's for people who feel isolated by techno and glamorous house clubs, for people who were bored of hearing Richie Hawtin play 'Spastik' for 20 minutes and wanted to hear songs, have a beer and get a bit stupid again." Listen to any of these Brit hop tracks and you'll discover a vitality, humor, energy and soul (soul doesn't stop at Aretha Franklin) lacking in so much "dance" music. Look around any of these pub-clubs and take in the punters. At the bar Northern Soul fans spotting B-sides, by the DJ booth ligers and B-list indie pop stars vying for attention, on the dance floor, kids on drugs, dolled-up glamour girls and dressed-down students. You know, like, variety. Life. Something a bit different. It's probably not the future of music, dance music, clubs, or even Saturday night but at least - and this is the important part - it's spontaneous fun. As the effortless successes of Gilles Peterson and James Lavelle's That's How It Is, Goldie's Metalheadz and Paul Anderson's The Loft illustrate, a new climate has broken that's seen intimate, mid-week clubs as a stalwart alternative to predictable Saturday nights. "It just works a lot better when it's a small crowd. When people are crammed in they've gotta dance," says Ed. "Smaller places are like being at a house party when you are 14.?



And not unlike those teenage house parties, the Sunday Social also managed to capture something of the joys of youthful hedonism. There were tales of blow-jobs behind the decks. Dancing on the tables and along the bar was de rigeur. Nights would reliably end with a communal shout-a-long to The Beatles' "Helter Skelter". And then, woeful reader, there were the amyl nitrate stories. "This flaming shoe came past us while we were DJing," reminisces Ed. "Someone dropped a bottle of amyl and their leg went up in flames.'' "People used to do amyl circles," nods Tom. "And then dance in a burning ring of fire. We've seen some pretty strange things." Bizarrely, the wholly unpleasant act of sniffing poppers has become something of a Brit hop institution. Sordid folklore dictates that Heavenly's Robin regularly had to

dispatch someone from the Sunday Social to the sex shops of Soho in order to replenish supplies. "Most Excellent used to be held in a gay club and they sold amyl behind the bar," suggests Justin Robertson. "Perhaps it's a throwback to that." Tom: "It's grim. It's seedy. It's sniffing glue for the Soho set. But it's quite funny isn't it? I wouldn't call a record 'Amyl House', though." Heavens, no.



The true measure of the impact of This Music Known As Brit Hop, however, is its infiltration into the lives and record collections of previously disparate groups of clubbers and music enthusiasts. House and techno heads have latched on to its big beats and wailing samples, while your traditionalist rock fan has seen the likes of Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher show up to endorse the Chemical Brothers' sets personally. The Chemicals themselves are particularly enthused by rock music (check the titles -"Leave Home" lifted from the Ramones, "One Too Many Mornings" from Dylan, "(The Best Part Of) Breaking Up" from Phil Spector), they prefer reading the NME to dance magazines, and say: "We tend to remix rock records and indie records because there are sounds that we have no access to. On dance records there aren't going to be that many sounds that we couldn't have made ourselves." Meanwhile, pop fans can witness Brit hop's erstwhile chart success via the likes of the Chemical Brothers and Josh Wink. And there will certainly be others. Those who proffer the elitist argument that this is merely whiteboy hip hop - a lame Happy Shopper version of an authentic sound - should be directed to the Chemical Brothers' sledgehammer reworking of Method Man's "Bring The Pain" included on his "You're All I Need. . . " single.



Where the analogous successes of the Chemical Brothers and the Sunday Social have led, others have followed. Newer clubs taking up the Social blueprint have appeared like the Big Kahuna Burger Co in London. "What happened with Dan and Jon [Big Kahuna's founders] was brilliant," enthuses Robin Turner. "They were people who came to the Social and were inspired. When we had 14 months off they wanted to do it for themselves. It was that total get-off-your-arse attitude, total Dance culture. They built up a following by DJing last, like the Chemical Brothers, and trying to make the audience freak out to them." And some wise words of warning for potential Dance enthusiasts. There's more than a little method in the eclectic madness that lies at the heart of the success of these clubs; a new night recently took over the old Sunday Social site and, on a Sunday, promised anything-goes abandon and promptly mixed up The Cure with A Guy Called Gerald, Ozric Tentacles with The Pop Group. The result? Audio hell and audience horror. "It's really easy to abuse and the whole thing becomes pointless. Taking over the same night, the actual place. It wasn't really on," reckon the Brothers.



The new big-beat faces are coming, too. Many have been knocking around a while, others are a debut single away. And they've all got proper pop star names, just like the old days. Daft Punk ("More like NME cover material than anyone else," says Robin Turner), Death In Vegas, Lionrock, Depth Charge, Mekon... the beat is, indeed, on. "Tom and Ed have started something because people relate to them. They've got an out-look on things and an opinion. It needs something for people to latch on to. The whole point of being young is being in a gang," reckons Justin Robertson. And when you're in a gang with thousands of other paying househeads in a disused aircraft hangar, any ideas of youthful rebellion seem a bit laughable. Things are getting smaller, more intense. Jon Carter, the man behind Monkey Mafia (about to unleash a scratch-up frenzy follow-up to his "Blow The Whole Joint Up" single), agrees. "I can't hack going to house clubs any more. Total respect to the Chemical Brothers. They came first. They've changed people's minds and opened people's minds up to it."

So what does he make of all this Brit hop and amyl house business? "Well. . . " he muses for a moment. "Dodgy name, isn't it?"



The Chemical Brothers' new EP �Loops Of Fury� is out now. "Brit Hop And Amyl House" is released on Jun 29. Jon Carter's new single �Work Mi Body� is released in March. The Big Kahuna Burger Co occurs every Saturday in central London; location varies. The legendary Sunday Social moves to Deluxe, 22 St games' Street, Nottingham from Feb 16

Nice one, thanks sneaker. Interesting stuff about their early dj times - bj's behind the decks, flaming shoes, rings of fire - crazy shit! 8O



But Tom a "sedated Afghan hound"???

A little poem about amyl nitrate:



amyl nitrate has it's place,

and that's in the nightstand drawer,

huffing during sex is ace

but no fun on dancefloor.

Afro88 Escribi�:

Nice one, thanks sneaker. Interesting stuff about their early dj times - bj's behind the decks, flaming shoes, rings of fire - crazy shit! 8O



But Tom a "sedated Afghan hound"???

And another thanks to sneaker, who hasn't failed us yet!



But which is more strange, the Afghan hound description or this one taken from the Irish Times recently:



The lanky, conversationally convoluted Rowlands is less readily available. Wearing his trademark tinted specs, the 33-year-old seems at the mercy of his unwieldy, sharply angular frame, whose unexpected movements and sudden, urgent uncoilings resemble a sackful of unwanted cats.



X-D Poor guy!

sneakerbeater , This is also a precious interviews...

Thank you !

I used to read ' The face ' and ' ID ' for many years.

:P

i have more interview i'll get up soon.

sneakerbeater Escribi�:

i have more interview i'll get up soon.

Really? Great ! I would like to read the other one as well !

:D

sneakerbeater said:

This seems to contridict the credits on the actually release as they say "compiled and put together by Vanessa Rand"

yeah it seems to be be that he mixed it but no confirmation

Another nice interview, I liked it when they metioned about remixing rock acts and the nods to other rock influences. 8)