The Chemical Brothers Push the Button for a glorious return to form, says Dan Cairns









Ed Simons, left, and Tom Rowlands (THE TIMES)



When the Chemical Brothers convened to record their fifth studio album, they came armed with a new tool. Not new as in cutting-edge, but new in the sense that they hadn?t used it before. The tool was a notebook belonging to Tom Rowlands, in which he had scribbled words such as ?closer?, ?freer? and ?wilder?. If neither he nor his bandmate, Ed Simons, can quite bring themselves to acknowledge that their previous album, 2002?s Come with Us, was a misfiring disappointment, the striving, could-do-better spirit of those adjectives speaks volumes nevertheless.

And there is a definite feeling among fans that, as the notion of hugely commercial dance music becomes less and less viable, the release of Push the Button sees its creators poised on a thin ledge ? with a slide into rehashing, decline and irrelevance on one side, and the opportunity to claim, maintain and justify our renewed affection on the other. It is a mark of the duo?s staying power that, despite carrying an awful lot of baggage and expectations ? accrued over a decade of remarkable creative highs and dimly recollected club nights ? they have proved up to the challenge. What?s more, they have met it triumphantly, even as the last rites are read over a genre supposedly at death?s door. But then, were the Chemical Brothers ever just a dance act? ?This morning, we were doing phone interviews for Australia,? sighs Simons, seeming to shudder at the memory of being woken at the ungodly hour of 9am, ?and we were having to talk about our work in terms of dance or electronic music. It just seems so removed from what we do. Then to get dismissed because there?s this feeling, ?Dance music is in a creative cul-de-sac and therefore we don?t need to listen to the new Chemical Brothers record.? It?s sad and misguided, because it?s still a creative place, the dancefloor.?



The more outwardly vexed of the pair, Simons, 34, is also the more genial, sucking on his ciggies and giving fluent voice to his hopes and fears. 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.







They met as history students in Manchester in the late 1980s (which forever afterwards led people to attach the label ?boffin? to the pair), and were quickly sucked into the city?s then explosive and now mythologised club scene. Weekend, for-the-love-of-it DJing soon led to regular bookings and, until legal problems intervened, they worked as the Dust Brothers, ripping up dancefloors with a mix of house, hip-hop and rare grooves that was as baffling and unsettling as it was heady and eclectic.



Yet it was their decision to join in ? to make records, rather than just play them ? that set them apart from the burgeoning DJ scene. A limited-edition mash-up incorporating This Mortal Coil?s version of the Tim Buckley track Song to the Siren pricked up ears, and the renamed duo moved south to head up the Heavenly Social, a Sunday club night in an airless pub basement that soon became the hottest ticket in town. Ten years and 8m-plus album sales later, Rowlands and Simons may have left the days of bedroom recording setups and juggling degrees and turntables behind, but they still talk and think like the DJs they originally were.



Thus they can dispatch the topic of their unlikely and, as it turned out, brief breakthrough in America ? where 1997?s mighty Dig Your Own Hole went gold ? with a curt sentence. But get them onto the dark arts of working a dancefloor and the eyes grow misty, the tone elegiac.



?At the Hacienda,? Rowlands recalls, ?there?d always be a record you?d be talking about on the bus home. We wanted to make a record where the night almost seemed to stop if you played it. It?s almost a sense of wrong-footedness, which is so alien to how a lot of people DJ. But we are wrong-footing people.? They aimed, he says, to recapture the strangeness and excitement of listening ?as a suburban, middle-class boy, to Public Enemy?s Yo! Bum Rush the Show; the strength of it all, the rawness of it?.



Simons widens the theme. ?The dance records we?ve liked have always seemed to come from nowhere ? they haven?t been part of a trend or sound.?



Yet, whether they liked it or not, the Chemicals? sound was, by the end of the 1990s, near ubiquitous, as the likes of Fatboy Slim took the template and smoothed its passage to the top of the charts. At the same time, the band themselves settled into what at first looked like a winning formula ? months of painstaking, mildly obsessive recording, in collaboration with fellow Top 10 artists such as Noel Gallagher, Bernard Sumner, Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft; huge, festival-defining live appearances; highly lucrative, globetrotting DJ gigs ? but, by 2002, seemed like a treadmill. Come with Us found the duo backed into a creative corner. Something had to change.



?I think we were, in a sense, pandering to how people would imagine a Chemical Brothers record to sound,? says Simons, warily. ?Kind of second-guessing.? The two years between Come with Us and sessions for the new album saw a number of changes, both logistical and psychological. Rowlands, for years Simons?s neighbour and almost daily sounding board, moved to the country ? where he took out his notebook and wrote down those words.



By unspoken agreement, they decided to alter the rules of engagement. ?We thought,? says Rowlands, ??We?re only trying to make a record. It doesn?t matter if it doesn?t turn out great.??



?Rather than using the big icons we used before,? continues Simons, ?we wanted to start not worrying so much about things going wrong. We thought, ?Let?s experiment; let?s try it.??



This could, of course, have resulted in self-indulgence and disaster. ?That?s the way a lot of bands give up and step back,? Simons concedes. ?By making very esoteric music.?



?Even experimental music can be presented in a form that people react to,? parries his friend. ?There are a lot of other ideas that aren?t on the album that were very strange, but I just thought, ?They don?t really mean anything.??



?There was definitely a shadow album that we were making,? Simons suggests. ?The esoteric squat-party album.?





It?s like the evil twin,? Rowlands concludes, ?where all the mad stuff gets poured in.?

Larking aside, they seem to have kept a lot of the ?mad stuff? on Push the Button, their most coherent but genre-bending musical statement since Dig Your Own Hole. In part, this is clearly down to their choice of collaborators: most are relatively unknown newcomers who seem to have provided the tonic the duo imply they required. The rapper Mos Def?s brother, Anwar Superstar, snarls through Left Right, the most overtly political track the two have recorded to date.



The wonderful Magic Numbers scatter their vocal glitter over Close Your Eyes, the album?s show stopper and the best song that Kate Bush never wrote. And the star-in-waiting Kele Okereke, of Bloc Party, ignites the power drive of Believe.







But it is the tracks that top and tail the album that give Push the Button greatness. The opener, Galvanize, is a brutal blast of eastern-flavoured weirdness, with vocals by A Tribe Called Quest?s Q-Tip, that compels you to shake off your new-year inertia and make a mad dash at life. And the final track, the part optimistic, part wistful instrumental Surface to Air (a duality Rowlands describes as ?euphoric fear? and Simons calls ?a mellifluous sigh?), meets the former?s tortuous standards.



?It?s a weird puzzle,? Rowlands says, ?reducing all these options to this one straight line.? He pauses, then tries again, as Simons sparks up a ciggie. ?It?s a possibility, then reducing that possibility: the reduction of all these wrong ideas to the right one.?



That notebook scrawl is more succinct, and as good a des- cription of their superb new album as the Chemicals are likely to find. ?Closer, freer, wilder,? Rowlands wrote. To which might be added: ?Better?. And, just possibly: ?Best?.







Galvanize is released on January 17 on Freestyle Dust/Virgin; the album Push the Button follows a week later

thats the first decent review i've ever read about the chemical brothers. that's because it was by intellegent people rather than these stuck up god almighty magazine pimps who are so conceated with there taste of music, that nothing remotely creative/artistic can be accepted as anything other than "not rock and roll".

What a great interview.



Closer... freer... wilder.

Thank you, what an excellent interview that reveals some new background info, I'm looking forward to the secret one too coming up.

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.

I just have to say right here right now, that is the most bizarre and fucked up description of Tom's physique I've ever read!

Hehe, it's funny though.



Cheers for that interview - it's nice to read an intelligent interview with the chems for once. That last bit sounds very promising too :D

Wow, will they release the *Evil Twin* album!? 8O



They should have it as some kind of limited edition thing for fans, at least.