New Albums: The prog’s bollocks - Second Toughest in the Infants review & interview
Select Magazine, Vol. 70 | April 1996
The prog’s bollocks.
Give them an inch and they’ll play for years, but with 'Dubnobass…' Underworld earned our patience. Now they’ve dreamt up what we’ll be hearing after the Disco 2000.UNDERWORLD
Second Toughest In The Infants
JUNIOR BOY'S OWN
Herman’s Head, cold pizza, the all-night garage. Some things only make sense at 4am in the morning. When Dubnobasswithmyheadman' was released in 1994 it became one of the quintessential post-rave come-down albums. From the drip-feed departure lounge of 'Dark And Long' to the dolphin-friendly coda of 'm.e.', here was a debut of free-thinking dub, vocal cut-ups, and techno-pop that felt as true and right as the new dawn itself.
Underworld's debut, 1993's Rez' was effectively their Citizen Kane. An eternally deferred techno orgasm of gob smacking intensity, it sealed their genius while also allowing space for a flabby indulgence that was central to both the 'concept" of 'Dubnobass ...' and their not-doing it-for-the-kids 14-hour live shows. Although the combination of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith's old-bloke art-pop with the Rude Kid savant techno of Darren Emerson helped to usher in a new wave of post-hardcore pop-smart dance, such extravagance was wearying-especially when it came to the crap acoustic noodling near the end.
Ultimately, this fiercely ambitious debut failed to influence the scene to the same degree as The Prodge's more streamlined "Music For The Jilted Generation' would, some six months later. Two years on and Underworld are finally becoming part of the end-of-the-century zeitgeist their sound attempted to embody in the first place. The "lager shouting mega mega white thing" breakbeats of last year's 'Born Slippy' are currently providing the central pulse in Trainspotting's vein of millenial psychosis, and with "Second Toughest ... ', Underworld have crafted a psychotic pop classic that is also in tune with the late '90s sound of urban breakdown. By immersing themselves in the lyrical schizophrenia and junglist dislocation of A Modem City, Underworld have created what may transpire to be the most important electronic album of the year.
It's certainly not music as we've known it. The ideas of 'Dubnobass…' have undergone a tensile stretch test of such rigorous intensity that, aside from the bluesy loopnosis of 'Bluski', every track here is way beyond the length of a Frank Zappa guitar solo with three even clocking in past the prog point of no return - 15 minutes plus. Not surprising, then, that opener 'Juanita' is markedly similar to the improv-Krautrock reverb of such Cope-championed Teutons as Can and Neu! Karl Hyde's hypno-babble of "resonator, decollator ... cancer gatherin outside your window" is coupled with the ‘Autobahn'-style motorik monotony of Darren Emerson's somnambulant sequencers. Around the seven-minute mark, they decide to ruin your speakers for good by flowing into some bass-heavy madness about "listening to the barbed wire hanging". The long distance techno carries on into track two, 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry', a psychtropic excursion through Gerald's 'Black Secret Technology' a Roger Waters folk evening and the considered advice that "Red Stripe gonna save us". Thirty five minutes of blissful breakbeat sophistication and we're not even half way through.
Even this staggering overture is eventually overshadowed. The sub-aquatic sheet-metal tides of 'Confusion The Waitress' has Karl Hyde narrating a sliver of Phillip K Dick insanity drenched in Bad Jarvis impurities: "She said, Ooh, once again the superstar ... Look at the size of it". The range of Underworld's inspiration is breathtaking. One minute you're hearing fragments of US punkers Scratch Acid or early Talking Heads, then an un-earthed Hardfloor are dragging Colonel Kilgore's helicopters into a bass bin of gasping "Ventolin' coughs, gibbering insanity ("David was alone, man/Einstein on top of his housewife") and Chinese puzzle industria. Smith and Emerson's crunching hard-trance adeptly banishes the 'Dubnobass ... 'flab to hone immensely inventive foundations for Karl Hyde's blithering lyrical canards.
By the end of "Stagger"s post-comedown cushion of Withnail, 'Astral Weeks', and 'On The Corner'-period Miles Davis, you'll want to climb back into 'Second Toughest"s industrial flotation tank and start the whole trip again. Underworld have crafted a soundtrack of fucked-up fin de siècle techno hell through sheer bloody-mindedness. By ignoring the insular categorisation of'90s rock, pop and dance, they've re-written the rules on all of it. Although the invention and corrupted genius that infuses this album might lack the impish sorcery of The Prodigy, there's really nothing else around to touch it. The only danger in buying this record is that it could make everything else seem redundant. Go on, dare you.
Soundbite: "Cock of the school."
ANDREW MALE
"THE THREE OF US ARE ALL ACCIDENTS"
Karl Hyde, Darren Emerson and Rick Smith unveil the chaos theory behind the second Underworld LPThe album title
Karl: "We already had a title for the album and then, right at the last minute, Rick went to Wales and, while he was there, he saw a home video of his nephew. So, he's saying, Yeah don't worry about me, I'm second toughest in the infants now. Apparently he's the first toughest now, but that's not as good a title."
'Juanita'
Karl: "Most of the titles come from moments, half-remembered things. Juanita is a girl who works in the office below the design company Tomato. The song doesn't really relate to her, but give it six months it probably will. I bought Alan Bennett's book recently. There's this story about him being an evacuee and listening to conversations on the tops of buses. Brilliant, but I'll never be able to write like that. With me, it's just snapshots. Sam Shepard wrote a book called Motel Chronicles, with tiny little entries like, 'Cup of coffee. Old man in the corner. Green radiator.' That's how I see things. I can't write stories."
'Banstyle / Sappy's Curry'
Karl: "We've got a form book on greyhounds, where we take a lot of our titles from. 'Sappy's Curry' was one. 'Pearl's Girl' was another. We'd sit the book on the music stand and work through it. 'Born Slippy' was another one. That book's been quite good to us.
Darren: "In some sense there's a lot of accident to Underworld. The more you play together the more attuned you are to that. Recognising how things fit together."
Karl: "Sometimes, until Rick puts it all together in the studio, we don't really imagine that it's going to make any sense at all. 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry' is made up of over four different tracks and it wasn't until the finished track that I realised that all of the lyrics had come from the same notebook. These things happen all the time with Underworld. It's not really synchronicity, but we do open up the doors to allow these sorts of things to happen. We're all one big accident, really."
Darren: "You didn't tell me that!"
Karl: "Well, it may come as a shock, Darren. The three of us are all accidents!"
'Confusion the Waitress'
Karl: "What that actually came from was this youth festival in Holland. Rick came up to me onstage and whispered, Bloody sing something! So I just started on a rant, thinking that something would happen eventually and a started putting "She said..." in front of everything. We had it on tape and it was a real blinder, so we transcribed it and did it again. We only find these points of association afterwards. I love that. As far as the lyrics are concerned, I don't have ideas for specific songs. It tends to be reams of notebooks, like random samples from the world around me."
'Rowla'
Darren: "The title comes from a photograph of a street called Crow Lane with some letters cut off. It's effectively a live track and... we just like it. Rick tried for ages to get the order of the tracks right, and then he just rang up one day and said, I can't do it. So I took the job over and, with a couple of guys from Boy's Own, we wrote the titles down on paper, cut them out and set about rearranging them. It worked. Really easy. We left about three hours' worth of stuff off it. We might put out an ambient CD in the summer. There was never any temptation to put 'Born Slippy' on there. We don't work like that."
Karl: "A lot of people have said that 'Born Slippy' was consciously having a go at lager culture, but it's just that I was completely shitfaced when I wrote it. I was having a go at myself. Then we saw it in Trainspotting, and that seemed to be its proper context. Begbie's mental lager culture."
'Pearl's Girl'
Darren: "I love it. This and 'Banstyle' are my favourite tracks. I've been playing it in clubs at the end of the night."
Karl: "I spent a few nights in Hamburg and it actually came from a night on the Rioja, down by the docks. I'm actually shouting, Rioja, Rioja... I'd come from this really great club on the Reeperbahn, listening to lots of classic soul, which is where the "Reverend Al Green" bit comes from. I was sitting by the docks and they have these 'bride boats' there, which people get married on. They go down the river and out to sea. I was just sitting there, Rioja-ed out, watching these boats sail past me at three in the morning. There were bonfires and everything. Completely mental. That's 'Pearl's Girl'."
Darren: "I didn't even know that!"
'Air Towel'
Karl: "What is 'Air Towel'? We should talk to Rick."
Darren: "I'll call him (dials Rick on his mobile phone). Hello, Rick? What's 'Air Towel' about? (bizarre tele-conversation ensues, touching on the stranger aspects of Japanese culture). Was it the Japanese name for hand-driers? No! I remember! It was New York! There was this porno film in the hotel called Fetch the Towels."
Karl: "And we were like, Oh God! No! What can this possibly mean? Nobody could bring themselves to possibly watch it, because of that title. I mean, what's going on there? Towels!"
'Blueski'
Karl: "A Robert Johnson blues riff. They're also on 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry'. I just play them at home, loop them and give them to Darren. We decided to leave this one as it was."
'Stagger'
Darren: "That was the one we were going to leave off the album, but I listen to it now and it just seems so right to have it there. It's a real grower. You could do a really funky remix of it. We also want to do a dub version of 'Sappy's Curry'. It's really weird. I'm listening to a lot more mellower stuff. Tracy Chapman. Very nice when you're doing a bit of decorating."
AM
