Going Overground
Caption: We’re Underworld. We can do what we like.
Melody Maker | 22 January 1994
UNDERWORLD are the future. Their 'DubNoBassWithMyHeadMan' album has picked up the baton from the Primals' 'Screamadelica' and is poised to shoot rock, dub and dance into a whole new direction. The New Eclecticism? Underworld are it. PUSH meets the club/pop crossover band of your dreams.
There's no way you will hear a more thrilling dance music album this year than Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman. Nof" ** ing way at all.
"DubNoBass ... " is special for a zillion and one reasons. There's the irresistible beats and unforgettable melodies aren't the half of it. Then there's the psychotic vocals, the distressing lyrics and the guitars which suddenly swerve through the shimmer of a heat-hazed dubscape. Not forgetting the delicious sensation of realising how far this music stretches beyond the confines of the dancefloor.
Hang on, though. A dance album you can play in your bedroom ?! A dance album with vocals and lyrics and guitars !?! You mean, just like rock music? Oh yes. And proud of it. A dazzlingly innovative hybrid of ideas, "DubNoBass ... "has the feel of a timeless classic. No wonder it's been dubbed "The most important album since The Stone Roses' and the best since 'Screamadelica'". Not bad for three Essex-based guys who spend half their time watching the Romford Raiders ice-hockey team.
UNDERWORLD first made a dent in the dance scene with "Mmm ... Skyscraper, I Love You!", a tom-tom-powered track which knocked every club in the UK an inch to the left at the end of 1992. Back then, the interest in the band centred on the role of 22-year-old Darren Emerson. Built like a brick Honey Monster, Emerson has been a DJ for no less than seven years, and has run a very close second to Andy Weatherall as the turntable whiz of the Nineties. Darren's partners are elfin vocalist/guitarist Karl Hyde and Welsh-born keyboard master Rick Smith. Both thirtysomething, Karl and Rick have been working together since the early Eighties, when they formed one-hit-wonder synth-popsters Freur (remember "Doot Doot"?). They then launched Underworld as a seven-piece funk-rock outfit in 1986. This original version of the group even recorded two albums for Sire Records. Although they passed unnoticed in this country, the LPs sold reasonably well in America and Australia. "The last thing we did as a seven-piece was a tour of North America supporting Eurythmics in 1989," recalls Karl. "It was a good laugh to play to 30,000 people at places like The Ontario Skydome, but after a while you go, Where's this leading? I don't even know who I am any more.'"
Rick came back to Britain at the end of the tour, while Karl stayed in the States to work as a session musician at Prince's Paisley Park. He returned home two months later to find Rick knocking out dance tracks with Darren, who Karl had never met before, at the studio he and Rick owned in Romford. "Karl came back to find me, this teenage lad, sitting in his studio, working with his partner," chuckles Darren. "I'm sure he thought, What the f ** 's going on? Who is this f *** ing guy?’ Nah, I'm just joking. It wasn't really like that." "But it was!" yells Karl. "It was exactly like that. I loved the stuff you guys were doing together, you'd made some great dance tracks, but I had no idea how I was gonna fit in with it. And you, Darren, were thinking the same thing. Your face said it all: 'What, he sings? And plays guitar? Oh God, no!'"
THE wildly eclectic "DubNoBass … reflects the widely different backgrounds and experiences of the three members of Underworld. Darren's influence can be most strongly heard on the full-on fizz of "Cowgirl' but it seems unlikely that he came up with the guitar-based ballad which is "Tongue". It's hard to believe these two cuts are by the same band Stranger still, "DubNoBass ..." does not feel the least bit disjointed. Ideas ebb and flow with astonishing ease; sometimes like a DJ in a club, and sometimes like a soundtrack to a road movie. Nor does anything on the record sound like a fusion of musical styles.
What we're talking about here is a seepage. "We're grabbing elements from all different time and areas of music and taking them somewhere else," says Karl. "We don't want to simply regurgitate the past, and even though we're using vocals and guitars, we're tryingto do it in new ways. We're trying to find ways which makes those elements relevant to today. "By not following a blueprint," he continues, excited, "we're able to base a song on an acoustic guitar or we can do a pure techno track based on an oscillator. In the past Rick and I have often been excited by a poem or a film or something and thought, That's inspired us to do a great reggae tune but we can't because we're not in a reggae band'. Now we would think, 'F *** yes, let's do it'. "We're Underworld," smiles Karl, a man with good reason to be confident. "We can what we like."
HOW does it feel to be touted as The Most Important Group Since The Stone Roses? How much pressure does this put on Underworld? "It's brilliant to have people appreciate what we do, but we still demand the righttof *** up," says Rick He's grinning from ear to ear, but his eyebrows are arched in a "Got that?" expression. He means it. "Underworld," he explains, "works on the basis of one simple question: 'Are you enjoying this?' The only pressure we have is the pressure that we put on ourselves. If Darren hasn't DJed for a few weeks or Karl hasn't scribbled anything in his notebook for a couple of months, then we'll know it's over. Because if that happens we'll have stopped doing the things we love. It's only because we love this that we do it in the first place."
UNDERWORLD make a lot of other people love it in the process. The dancefloor success of the wonderfully experimental "Skyscraper" is a case in point. "I was shocked by that," says Darren. "The club mixes which we did of that tune were a waste of time. Everyone preferred the vocal version, which I didn't think was a dance track at all." In this trio's Underworld, nothing is certain. The idea of a single song, an individual track, is blown out of the water by the band's working methods. "There's lots of cutting and pasting," explains Rick, "especially with the vocals. Something which is recorded for one track one day may well end up on three different tracks a few months down the line. Nothing is fixed. They' re just points for us to jump off of. If you start trying to work to a formula, you lose it."
This loose, feverish approach to working must lead to conflict. "It has been known," laughs Karl. Adds Rick, "There have been a few times when we've been listening to the same track for seven hours and somebody says, 'This is great', and somebody else will say, 'Yeah? Well I f *** ing hate it'. But that's fine. That's what happens when you make music. It's an emotional thing. And f*** , it would be so boring if we agreed with each other all the time."
UNDERWORLD are probably the first dance group to gain as strong a reputation on the gig circuit as they have in clubland. The presence of a genuine frontperson, instead of the all too common soppy-girl-brought-in-to-wiggle-about-a-bit-type thang, obviously has something to do with it. A highly energetic frontperson, at that. The chances are that Karl Hyde will have broken at least one bone before the year is out. There's also the fact that the band perform without the help of a DAT. Everything is played totally live. What's more, they never rehearse. The result is pure, spontaneous combustion.
"I'm often shocked by some of the noises we make when we play live," says Rick. "I'm always thinking to myself, 'Shit, where did that come from?' It's dead exciting. Dance groups who just use DATs don't know what they' re missing. The thing about playing live is that the sounds are gone straight away. You can't touch them, you can't grasp them - you'll never hear them again."
Karl: "Even if an idea works well, we never try to repeat it for the next gig. Why play safe? You're better off having a go at something which might f*** up. A lot of the time I haven't a f***ing clue what's going on at gigs."
Rick: "It's very annoying and upsetting when you do f *** up, but a few minutes later it' ll all come together and you'll be so touched by a certain moment that you want to scream This is it! Oh God, this is it!' at the top of your voice. Either way, those emotions are sometimes so personal that they mean nothing to anybody else. It's a very strange feeling."
NOT as strange as the Experimental Sound Field events which Underworld have hosted. The basic idea of these "happenings" is to place speakers and giant projection screens around the outside of a field, and for the group and anything up to three DJs at a time to play in a tower in the middle. Their first Sound Field took place at the 1992 Glastonbury Festival and, on the Saturday, turned into a 15-hour jam. The audience never numbered less than 5,000. "Being in the middle of the field meant we were in the middle of the vibe," says Karl. "We were feeling and reacting to the surges of energy from the crowd. It was amazing. It was like going out there and dancing with them."
Darren: "Half the time, the crowd didn't notice if it was a DJ or the band they were hearing. That happens quite often. I think that's a big compliment. I know there's lots to see at an Underworld gig, but the last thing we want is for everybody to stop dancing when we come on." Rick: "After years of doing standard, rock-lype gigs, Karl and I find club audiences really refreshing. The people get off by themselves, and are happy with their own interpretation of what they hear. They don't need to focus on someone else's ego. They're as much the stars as the people on the stage."
"DUBNOBASSWITHMYHEADMAN" is more than a headrush of sound. It runs its arcing rails beneath lyrics so raw and emotional that their oblique meaning only serves to render them more disturbing. "Mmm ... Skyscraper" features lines like "I see pawin' dogs sniffin at the wind for something violent they could do", and "Dirty Epic", which veers from the subjects of phone sex to the midnight train to Romford. The latter also boasts the painfully sad words "She said 'You don't ever touch me any more this way” This sort of harsh, slanted imagery wouldn't out of place on, say, a Lou Reed album.
"My first inspiration was Lou Reed's 'New York' album!" Karl's gleeful admission jumps out like a manifesto for the New Eclecticism. "It took me a long while to work out how to write lyrics like that. I eventually realised the only way to do it was by observing people in cafes and pubs and picking up on the things that they said. It's far more interesting than worrying about writing a perfect piece of poetry or some silly, catchy phrase.
"I write lots of stuff when I'm travelling. I write all my ideas in notebooks. God knows how many I've filled up over the years. Journeys by train and aeroplane are brilliant sources of inspiration. I remember flying over New York and looking down and thinking, 'It's a beautiful thing'. So that's exactly what I scribbled down. And when the captain said, We're 30,000 feet above the earth', I wrote that down as well. Those words then became lines of 'Skyscraper’
"Most of the rest of 'Skyscraper' came from stuff which I'd collected wandering round the New York streets over the course of a week. I got some of it out of The Village Voice and Screw magazine, and other parts I wrote in an alleyway in Greenwich Village at four in the morning. When I got back home, I cut the various lines up and then made a montage. It's a kind of Cubist way of writing. What I'm trying to do is paint around subjects instead of focusing straight in on them.
KARL'S lyrics will shortly be published in book form, along with a selection of the hundreds of photographs he has taken and graffiti-type sketches he has drawn over the last few years. They may not make Underworld's songs any clearer, contain some fascinating ideas.
The books have been assembled with the help of the group's friends at Tomato, a London design collective of which Karl and Rick are members. Tomato were responsible for the Guardian TV advert starring Stereo MC's "Connected", and the latest Reebok ads They've also put together numerous Underworld videos, most of which are visual blitzkriegs of super-fast scratched images and shapes. The band themselves don't get a look in.
"Every time we go to Tomato somebody'll say, 'We've done you another video'," beams Karl. "I love it. We don't even have to bother about looking through showreels or reading storyboards, and we never have those Will they understand us' worries." "Yeah, but how the f *** do they get them shown on MTV?" asks Darren. "I mean, they're so in yer face."
ARE Underworld the future of dance music? In terms of producing a new groove blueprint, the answer is almost certainly no. Underworld's sound is too broad, and far too obviously the result of the Karl Hyde/Rick Smith/Darren Emerson coalition-a unique meeting of minds - for anybody to realistically consider emulating.
Simply, unlike the soundalikes which emerged in the wake of De La Soul and The Stone Roses and, during the last two years, Nirvana, there will only ever be one Underworld.
In terms of honing a new approach in dance music, however, the answer is a resounding YES Underworld are not the first group to create a sound which works both at home and in a club, nor are they the first to take dance music live. But they are the first to deliver the goods so clearly, so powerfully, so stylishly, so innovatively, so consistently. And they are the first to deliver dance tracks which can be regarded as SONGS. No matter that they' re not songs in the conventional sense of the word. What is more, the undeniably human qualities of Underworld blow away the belief that dance music is an amorphous, faceless mass of computer boffins. Once and, hopefully, for all.
The focus is now sharp. Razor sharp.
'DubNoBassWithMyHeadMan' is out on Junior Boy's Own
How Do They Do It? 12 things you need to be as good as UNDERWORLD
●The animal magnetism of IGGY POP
●MARTIN SCORSESE'S taste for tension
●The seamless electro-streams of KRAFTWERK
●JAH SHAKA'S towers of dub
●The radical adventures of KARL-HEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
●ARTHUR RIMBAUD's poetry and pathos
●THE (self-explanatory) EXPERIMENTAL SOUND FIELD
●The serenity of BUDDAH
●MILES DAVIS' haunted beauty
●The ultra-modern designs of TOMATO
●WILLIAM ORBIT'S clubbed-up cool
●The grandeur and folly of CANARY WHARF
