Melody Maker, January 20 1996
THE
FABULOUS
FURRY FREAK
BROTHERS
Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands aka
THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS
are The Stooges of techno - freaky, raw
and seriously hip. Like The Orb, The
Prodigy, Leftfield, Underworld and
Sabres, they're A Dance Band It's
Essential For Indie Kids To Like. Last
year's 'Exit Planet Dust' was a major
critical and commercial success. This
year, expect further shockwaves.
DAVID BENNUN meets The Mary Chain
of remixology. Bros: TOM SHEEHAN
-------------------------------
TEENAGE SCANDINAVIAN MISTRESSES
"I was brought up by Sweedish au pairs." But Ed Simmons, the Less Hairy One, was to young to appreciate his good fortune. "My mum worked, so I was brought up by Sweedish and Finnish au pairs who used to play all my mum's Beatles records."
"That's probably why we go down really well in Sweden," Tom Rowlands, the Hairy One, surmises.
"We had a 16-year old who I think had run away from home. She lasted a couple of days because me and my sister decided they couldn't cook properly. We just started bawling."
And you would have been - what? 17? 18?
"Twenty-one."
-----------------------------------------
THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY, THANK CHRIST
The Chemical Brothers, like Andy Weatherall, The Prodigy, Leftfield and Goldie, have no sense of manifest destiny.
"We see ourselves as a dance thing," avers Tom. "I know that most people who make dance music don't see us as a dance thing at all. I don't feel part of the rock scene."
"A lot of techno music," Ed allows, "relies on people following what bass drum's being used this year."
"We're not on any crusade to make dance and rock as one," Tom adds. "It's just that a lot of people think we are."
Tom, not all that long ago, was a member of a band called Ariel. Ariel were on a crusade to make rock and dance as one, as were If before them and... others whose names escape both me and history. This is the lingering aftermath of that grisly hiatus between the peak of baggy and the coming of grunge, when The Farm could sell records wih impunity. It gave us, on the one hand, "Screamadelica" and "Blue Lines"; on the other, a rash of appallingly sincere hippies and cack-handed opportunists so bent on breaking down the barriers that they were willing to put them up again first if necessary. Remember Candy Flip? No? Good. We didn't need barriers for these f***ers, we needed quarantine. We needed barbed wire and suernaturally vicious dobermans.
Ariel we can forget about. What matters is that Tom went to college in Manchester and met Ed. Neither had ever wanted to be black, but both these home country boys, in their hearts, wanted to be Manc.
"I went to Manchester," says Ed, "because New Order came from there. You go there on the train, you've got The Smiths and New Order running round and round your brain. Then you hear someone talk. You pay your money to the bus conductor and you think, I'm not going anywhere else but here.
"In America, they think we're from Manchester, and we don't do anything to correct them. 'Two chancers from Manchester.' I like that. We speak like we always do. They don't know any different."
'I live in a pretty good
concil estate. I wake
up to the smell of piss.
Loads of Kit Kat
wrappers on the
stairs where people
have been smoking
heroin' - Ed
---------------------
I'M JUST A DILETTANTE
You must know who The Chemical Brothers are.
At least, you must've seen the name. Even if you haven't heard them, you'll have heard of them. On the hazy, hapazardly patrolled border between rock and clubland, there they stand, blinking in bewilderment, wondering how in hell they got there.
By the beginning of '94, they were the hippest DJs, by the end, the most-wanted remixers. If you're a dance promoter of greater discernment than avarice, theirs is the name you want on your flier. If you're a rock act, seeking to affirm your credentials, theirs is the mix you need on your single. And in '95, they became a chart act on their own. Top 10 album, hit singles. A name to drop, with sales to back it up.
There was a danger that The Chemical Brothers might become mere mascots on the rock scene. But instead, without ever intending to, they have become figure heads for a group of people I call The Dilettantes - music lovers who open their ears to all kinds of pop (by pop I mean just about anything that The Maker at its most ecumenical would cover), not because we ought to, but out of hedonism.
Music for pleasure.
The trainspotters hate The Chemical Brothers. We love The Chemical Brothers.
-------------------
NAKED UNDER LEATHER
Like everybody in Manchester who isn't in a band - admittedly, that leaves little more than the cast of "Coronation Street" - Tom and Ed wanted to be DJs. They adopted the name of The Dust Brothers, in tribute to the production crew behind Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" (an early Dilettante favourite). Either it never occoured to them the original Dust Brothers might be protective of the title, or they assumed that they would never do anything so notable as to come to the Americans' attention.
"We had our own crowd," Ed recounts. "I always see it as like your mum playing records to her friends from college days, when they come over and put in a Neil Diamond record and all start jumping around the house. Even now, if we put on our own thing, or at The Sunday Social, we're basically playing for our own friends. The people we can actually see right in front of us are our girlfriends or Tom's brothers. We're not anonymous Djs inflicting our taste on anonymous crowds.
"I've always played records at parties, always been the person who sticks my tape in. That's what every DJ's like; always the person who wants control."
London's Heavenly Sunday Social, and its nearest Manc equivalent, Naked Under Leather, proved themselves the favored places for dancing dilettantes. These were clubs that took the idea of the second room, where the more esoteric and unpredictable sets are played, and made it their raison d'atre. The Dust Brothers (as were) were resident DJs at both.
By now as Djs are obliged to do under the Acid House Act (Disc Jockeys) of 1987, they had started making records. Remarkably, they were superb at it.
-----------------------------------
BRAND NAME GOODS AND CHEAP GENERICS
Although their first release, "Song To The Siren", was made in '92 and picked up by Junior Boys Own the following Feburary, it was in 1994 that the "14th Century Sky" EP established The Chemicals' sound, in the sense that a five-foot branding iron establishes the ownership of cattle.
The lead track was called "Chemical Beats", and it was from this that Tom and Ed later took their new name when the first string Dust Brothers decided they were through sharing. "My Mercury Mouth" followed in May of that year, without the health warning that by rights should have been affixed to every copy. The Chemicals' technique was based around breakbeats; had they been trip hoppers, junglists or hardcore holdovers, this would hardly have been remarkable, but on the British techno scene, the Roland drum machine has held sway one way or another since the house explosion. Breakbeats at house tempos; that was odd. More to the point, in the hands of the Chemicals, it sounded like all hell breaking loose and setting forth on a rampage through clubland - which, in that paradoxically complacent and rived world, is never a bad idea. By last spring, "Leave Home" was a Top 20 hit, and the "Exit Planet Dust" LP would bring news of the name to nigh-on 100,000 buyers.
"We did come up with a new sound," Ed points out. "The amount of records that are similar to us - there's a Josh Wink record which is basically our record with different sounds on it. Good luck to him, but we did invent that sound. We came up with our own mutant thing, and now people make records that sound like ours. For people to go mad about that record, and not say, 'It's good, but...'"
"We were trying to copy Meat Beat Manifesto, Renegade Soundwave and Coldcut," admits Tom, "with a more techn inference. It's now quite a normal event to get a record with a breakbeat and a mad acid line on it, but 'Song To The Siren' didn't sound like anything else when it came out. You'll go into a record shop now and they'll play you 50 just like it. It's just people sampling in a limp kind of way."
There's a more effective way to duplicate The Chemical Brothers on your record. Get them to do it for you.
---------------
THE GOOD MIXERS
At first, it was other club acts, albiet ones with an audience outside clubs, that the Chemicals took to remixing: Lionrock, Leftfield, The Sandals, Republica. Then they turned their attention away from dance, to Saint Etienne, Primal Scream, The Charlatans, Manic Street Preachers. Like the Chemicals, all these bands have passed through or remain in the hands of Heavenly, the record label and PR company behind The Sunday Social, and, along with their allies Creation, a highly influential arm of - for want of a better phrase - the indie scene.
'We've become mates
of people we've
remixed, like Tim
from The Charlatans.
Echobelly? We often get
asked to remix the
Endsleigh league of
indie bands' - Tom
A Chemical Brothers remix, then, is a mark of hipness in more ways than one. It indicates not only the endorsement of the rock world's favourite dance band; it also demonstrates you move in the right circles.
"Very few remixes get done for creative reasons," Tom points out. "The record company wants the artist associated with your name."
"It's become to work the other way," says Ed. "It can be seen as a cliched thing. We were due to remix 'Begging You' by The Stone Roses, and we really wanted to do it, but it didn't happen. I can see why: the press could have easily written, 'Stone Roses reach their most desperate point yet.'
"Before we signed to Virgin, we couldn't get enough records out, because Junior Boys Own are a small record comapny. They didn't have the money. So doing remixes was a way of getting our own stuff out. Going to a club, the Weatherall or Oakenfold mixes of rock bands would be the highlight, the thing you'd really look forward to. And when we started doing those remixes, we did them with some style. If I was on the outside, I think those would be my big records."
"We always wanted to do the stand out records in clubs," Tom enthuses, "and not pull any punches. They are functional, but they're not utility records. We've become mates of many of the people we've remixed, like Tim from The Charlatans."
With whom they've collaborated on both their own album and the "Help" LP. So who have they turned down?
"Echobelly," mutters Ed, as if the name is an expletive. "We get asked to remix the Endsleigh league of indie bands all the time. And then there's the weird stuff. A Gary Numan tribute album."
"I got asked to do a New Age release called something like 'Wings Of Desire'. A cassette-only release with a picture of a dove on the front of it. I have no idea," Tom ruminates, "of the thought process that went into listening to that tape and deciding, 'What that needs is a Chemical Brothers remix.'"
Unlike many formerly fashionable remixers, who hung signs over their doors reading "Old Rope - 1,500 (pounds) A Foot", the Chemicals are wont to do a good job. Their take on "Jailbird" was a tantalising taste of how "Give Out But Don't Give Up" might have sounded had Primal Scream been as adventurous in their choice of collaborators as they were on "Screamadelica".
Partly through the company they kept via the mixes, and partly because their own records and live shows (like The Prodigy's before them) rocked like robot hippopotami f***ing in a hammock, The Chemicals were well on their way to becoming the rock fan's dance band.
----------------------------
TEEN SCANDINAVIANS (REPRISE)
Do The Chemical BRothers want to be rock stars?
"We played at Brixton Academy," replies Ed, "and I've been going to that place since I was 14. To actually stand onstage and see thousands of people, to a bit of that" - he pumps his fist in the air - "and get a response, whatever life holds in store for me, it's not going to be much better than that. And getting looked after - no one knows what it's like to have a tour manager. If you're missing having your mum around you, to have someone telling you how long you can sleep, looking after you, protecting you from bad people, it's pretty good."
Yeah, but you don't want to live like rock stars - expensive addresses, free drugs, sex on tap?
"I live quite well," Ed claims, "in a pretty good council estate in London. I wake up to the smell of piss. Loads of Kit Kat wrappers on the stairs where people have been smoking heroin. I hate the idea of sleeping with people who sleep with you cos you're in a band. There was one festival where everyone at the hotel got picked up to do an airport, and the guitarist from (indie trio whose name may not be mentioned - Ethical Ed) had these two little Swedish girls, I mean, knockout, but they must have been about 16. And we were all filing out, and he was snogging these two girls, groping them, in full view, and to me it was just sadness. Have some respect. Do it in your hotel room, but don't grope them up in front of everyone...
"I'm a purist when it comes to morality," he concludes. "The Newt Gingrich of the dance scene. It was a bit tawdry."
Kids, this band thing works. If the guitarist from (indie trio whose name may not be mentioned - Ethical Ed again) can do it, anyone can. Go and start a band now. Just don't take that as an invitation to send me your tape.
"Those innocent little bands you see in the music press," frets Ed, "they get up to some rough stuff at festivals."
"Sniffing felt tip pens," Tom elucidates. "But we were down to the curve at that point. We're better now."
Oh yeah, the drugs.
"My drug of choice is alcohol," says Ed. "my dad was an alcoholic, so I've sort of given it up. Both of us don't really do drugs. It's melted our brains over the years. Drugs are nothing to us."
I know why you chose your successive names, but it must have occured to you that they would set a few bells ringing.
"As the great Tricky pointed out," Ed responds, deadpan, "everything is a chemical. If you think something, that's a chemical reaction in your brain. So it's your fault that you think chemicals mean drugs."
Don't you think that's a trifle disingenuous?
"I think it's cool."
"The best thing about it is when you get paid," Tom reckons. "The envelope has a thousand pounds in used notes in it, and 'Chemicals' written on the front."
----------------------
HOW YA DOIN', BRIXTON?
The main obstacle separating The Chemical Brothers from rock stardom isn't their music. It's their characters. Here is a pair of ordinary, happy, well-balanced young men. No hang-ups to work out, no traumas to bare, no delinquency to titillate (unless you count Ed getting suspended from school every month for smoking). For all that they see themselves as interlopers, as fans given a ringside seat, stardom seems to be gaining on them regardless.
"My ambitions," says Ed, "are to make a record that's as good as 'Tomorrow Never Knows', and to play the Brixton Academy and be the band that people are going to see; you know, you're coming up the Tube, and it's, 'Spares, Chemical Brothers'."
"We played support with Oasis in Manchester, this huge gig, that was wicked. Watching Noel Gallagher play 'Free As A Bird' in soundcheck, not many bands get to see that. You can't turn that down, playing to a 14,000 seat hockey arena. Even though we thought we were going to get bottled off, which we didn't at all.
"It's things like that," he reflects, "that make us different from Bandulu."
A limited edition single, 'Loops Of Fury', is out this week on Freestyle Dust
MultiQuote
Probass, on 19 June 2010 - 08:32 AM, said: