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NEW YORK — Let the music speak for
itself.
It’s
something Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands — aka the Chemical Brothers
— wish the world would let them do. It’s not that they have
nothing to say — both are university educated, and Tom, especially,
has a mischievous sense of humour. It’s just that interviews are
not the forum in which they shine. Take this sample exchange:
Tom,
tell me about Ed.
Tom: He’s alright. [long pause]
Okaaaay.
Ed, what’s Tom like?
Ed: He’s alright, yeah.
Tom [reluctantly expanding]: It’s difficult to have
a snappy answer. The basis of what we do is our friendship, really,
and days like this you need to be with a friend who can have a different
view on what you’re doing. Otherwise, I think you’d drive
yourself a bit mad, really.
Translate “days like this” as “international
press days.” It’s a summer-like Friday afternoon in November,
and the Chemicals are in a still shell-shocked New York to talk up their
new album, Come With Us. Later that night they will DJ at Manhattan’s
Centro-Fly, a retro-future night spot which would surely have been frequented
by the pre-marital Jetsons. Taking the decks half past midnight, the
duo’s quiet ways disappear as the first big beats hit the assembled
crowd of hipsters and danceheads. This is where the Chemical Brothers
shine: in a dim club playing loud music for an appreciative crowd eager
to dance into the wee hours.
And Come With Us
is nothing if not a testament to Simons’ and Rowlands’ ability
to incite head nodding and bootie shaking. Recorded last year in the
duo’s London studio, Come With Us continues to refine the
Chemicals’ mix of massive drums (‘Come With Us’, ‘It
Began In Afrika’), space-age melodies (‘My Elastic Eye’,
‘Galaxy Bounce’), and guest vocalists, including long-time
collaborator Beth Orton (‘The State We’re In’) and ex-Verve
singer Richard Ashcroft (‘The Test’).
It’s a formula which has served the Chemicals well.
As Manchester University students more interested in attending clubs
than classes, Rowlands and Simons immersed themselves in that city’s
burgeoning dance music scene, eventually moving to London in the early
‘90s to become DJ’s and recording artists in their own right.
Their collaboration with Oasis mastermind Noel Gallagher on the single
‘Setting Sun’ helped usher in the short-lived electronica
invasion of 1997. It also made reluctant stars of the press-shy duo,
whose disdain for celebrity comes out in their groundbreaking videos,
in which they do little more than cameo.
Settling into their label Astralwerks’ board room,
the leggy twosome talk about getting crowds to dance, New York post-September
11th, and their mutual love of New Order.
What
did you want to be when you grew up?
Ed: I can’t really remember.
Tom: I wanted to be Scottish.
Who
were your musical heroes growing up?
Ed: For me it was New Order. I liked the fact that they wrote
pretty catchy songs that were just cool to listen to. They just had
some really good sounds on there and I just loved the synthesizers.
Tom: In a way, you didn’t know anything about them. They
just existed and just made amazing records that were like nothing else
you heard, really. They took all these different influences and just
make something that was really their own.
What
was it like working with Bernard Sumner? [The New Order singer guested
on the Chemicals’ last album, Surrender. They then returned the
favour by working on New Order’s new album, Get Ready.]
Tom: Bernard Sumner is someone who likes to keep doing the same
thing over and over again. It’s cool working with him. You can
see why they made such cool records because he’s totally committed
at that time to trying to make the best piece of music he can, and that
was quite inspiring, really, because he’s made all this amazing
music in the past and yet he’s still up at 7:00 in the morning
trying to find a gold-plated guitar lead because he just felt his guitar
sound could be enriched. At the time you’re like ‘my God,
what are you doing?’ But then when you wake up the next evening
you’re like ‘it was worth it.’
Was
there any one song or record that inspired you to think you could do
better making your own music?
Tom: That really wasn’t what inspired us. We met each other
in Manchester in 1989, and at that time the club scene with The Hacienda
and clubs like Conspiracy and stuff, that’s what we used to do.
There weren’t many other people doing degrees who wanted to go
out and go to dance clubs at that time, really. That was our shared
thing, that’s what we used to really enjoy doing. People would
be doing other stuff — rugby society or something — and then
we’d go to Hacienda and hear Mike Pickering and Graham Park play,
and end up going to the records shops the next day. It was just that
immersion in music, that’s what brought us together.
Ed: Yeah, for me, when acid house first came along in London
I just loved it. It was absolutely made for me. I loved going out with
my friends and doing the scene. I loved dancing, I loved hearing the
music. But then when we were in university I met Tom, who was in a band
[Ariel]; he was making music and playing the music that he’d made.
And then through that [we] got to know a lot of other deejays and people
making records, and then going to The Hacienda and knowing people that
were making records that people were playing... And I just thought that
must be the greatest feeling you can have, to hear your record coming
out of a club and watching a thousand people reacting to it and dance
to it.
How important is
it to get people to jump to your music?
Ed: It’s not every record we make makes people jump. There
are records that are slow, records that kind of meditate. But for me,
the idea that people are getting some feeling from the music we’ve
made, that’s everything to me. For me, the music doesn’t exist
until other people have heard it and got something out of it. I’ll
enjoy it, but what I’m most keen on is sharing that with someone;
straightaway playing people things before I should really play them,
before they’re finished, because I know it’s good, or I think
it’s cool. But until I’ve shared it with someone it doesn’t
feel complete.
Was there any downside
to the press-created ‘electronica’ explosion of 1997?
Tom: Making the music is the thing we’re good at, and our
records are good. If they weren’t good then it would probably be
a terrible thing to bear. We always have confidence in... making a good
album, so, no, not really. [pause] But that sounds a bit conceited!
[laughs] Those phases come and go. People are interested one
moment and they’re not the next. That doesn’t dent our belief
in what we do.
Government officials
in Toronto banned raves for awhile, but local dance fans helped overturn
that decision. Is there a similar sense of community amongst the dance
music scene in England?
Tom: The interesting thing you say about what’s happening
in Toronto, about how the local council was down on the rave culture,
in a city like Liverpool in the north of England, the club Cream which
is based there, the council sees it as an amazing sort of thing for
the city. It’s brought people in. Young people want to go to Liverpool
because of the association of this cool club, and [the government realizes]
that, that it’s a good thing. It’s a vibrant place. They’re
just scared of it because they don’t understand it.
Have you sensed a
different vibe in New York since the bombings?
Ed: I think people want to get on with their lives now. Everything
stands still. We’ve talked to people on the phone and everyone
seemed really, for obvious reasons, really winded by the whole thing.
Tom: It doesn’t make it any easier to comprehend. When we saw
what was happening in New York and in Washington it was still probably
the most shocking thing. But in London we’re just used to this
sort of daily thing of you go into the city and there’s a ring
of steel around the city and you drive through checkpoints. If that’s
what it takes to feel safe then that’s fine.
We were phoning friends here as we were organizing tonight
and [we were wondering] ‘will people still want to go to a club?’
But, yeah, people still want to have a good time out and go out with
their friends instead of staying in.
Do you have a different
standard for your music now than when you started?
Ed: That was a great feeling to have on that first record, the
fact that we could put together an album that really excited us and
definitely had an unique sound that was new. We weren’t ripping
people off. This was our thing, and it was a really new fresh sound.
To still have that and to still have that excitement in the studio...
that we had seven years ago, that’s hard but when it comes up it’s
good.
Is it tougher to
get excited from one album to the next?
Tom: We still get excited in the studio, but we don’t get
excited about doing the same thing again. For awhile, we’d just
made the album Surrender and loved that record and... then we
started making this record and we thought ‘that’s a bit like
that one’, and there’s no point in doing that. We’ve
made that music. It’s time to make something different but still
within the framework of how we work. It’s difficult but no one
said it was going to be easy.
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