Over the course of the past decade dance music has gone from being based around illegal underground parties to firmly planting itself into popular culture. From the use of dance music in the media to corporate branded super clubs, it’s acceptance owes a great deal to key crossover acts which have paved the way for their peers to follow. There from the early days of the modern UK dance scene have been Underworld, a group that have defied tradition and proved that if you’re open minded and willing to evolve, career longevity is indeed possible. Underworld have just released an anthology entitled 1992-2002 chronicling this decade of change and in doing so reaffirming their importance to the scene.
Funnily enough it was during high school, a period in which I thought ‘techno’ sux, that I first discovered and loved Underworld with their album Underneath the Radar. The band disbanded shortly after but the two key players, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, remained. They kept the name, teamed up with a young 18-year-old DJ by the name of Darren Emerson and the rest is history.
An opportunity to speak to Karl Hyde is one you jump at the first given chance. Speaking from his home in London he is charming, friendly, polite, open, insightful and quite willing to answer and explain any aspect of the bands career. Having ummed and ahhed before hand as to whether to raise the question, after the cheerful beginning to the interview it feels appropriate to ask him about the bands earlier incarnation and why it’s no longer referred to. Hyde is both comfortable and open but is quite clear there are no intentions to revisit or remix the past. “That’s part of a band that doesn’t exist anymore and stopped existing at the end of the 80’s and had an approach to music that passed with the 80’s. The Underworld that we’re talking about in this anthology is the one that started in the early part of the 90’s.”
But it was during this early phase of Underworld that the seeds were being sown for what was to follow. Whilst caught up in the 80’s Pop Music Industry the minds of Hyde and Smith had always been elsewhere, aligned with a scene they didn’t yet know existed. “At the end of the 80’s, actually throughout the 80’s, mine and Rick’s passion was for Kraftwerk and dub reggae. Whenever we didn’t have a record deal we kind of made this ‘machine’ music. It’s just that we didn’t know about a dance scene throughout the world in the 80’s so it manifested as pop. At the end of the 80’s we started to hear acid house. In fact it was on that Australian tour at the end of the 80’s that we were starting to mess with acid synths and introducing them into the band. We were hearing acid house on pirate radio and that really fired us up and made us feel like we were trapped in the wrong band. When that all went belly up Rick kind of said “I’m just gonna do what I’ve always wanted to do and that’s make music for making people move, I’m going to make this machine music”. The dancefloor was a place where you didn’t need radio, press and a record company. If you had enough money to press it to vinyl you could get it on a turntable and if people danced to it you could press up some copies and they’d buy it. And that’s what happened.”
Running in tandem to Underworld has been Tomato Design, a company set up by Karl and Rick as an outlet for their artistic talents. In addition to the stunning audio visual work that’s been done for Underworld’s live shows (check out the Everything Everything DVD) Tomato has also done extensive work on TV commercials and film credit designs. Hyde agrees that Tomato has helped balance the creative processes for both he and Rick and been instrumental in Underworld being able to do what they wanted to do without compromise. “When the first TV commercials started coming in to Tomato and they started making these really beautiful images for TV and asking us to make music we were very proud to be a part of that. It’s something Rick and I wanted to do back in the 80’s and that is affect peoples living spaces by making 15 seconds of some kind of beautiful sound with some beautiful images. Here we were doing it and it was providing us with the finances to put food on the table and also not have to compromise our music by signing a record deal. It was great, we could go and make the music that we wanted to make, we had enough money to live and consequently the band had lots of momentum and was selling lots of records before people started coming to us and saying “we’d love to sign you”. By then it was too late because we were up and running with Junior Boys Own (JBO).”
Take a look at the track listing of the anthology and you are reminded of the importance of Underworld over this past decade. Anthems like Rez, Cowgirl and Born Slippy are still played and remixed today to huge response everywhere. But as Hyde explains it was not the band itself which felt the need to bring out the Anthology and tell the tale. “The anthology was put together by Steve Hall from JBO. We saw his passion and said go ahead with our blessing and tell us the story. His story was that these are seminal tunes. Not only in our development but in the development of the UK dance scene. A lot of them were very important tunes in expanding the picture that was quite an underground scene to becoming something that was major global.”
A familiar aspect to many Underworld tracks is the vocal delivery of Hyde. From the hypnotic Mmm Skyscraper to the frantic rambling of “lager, lager, lager” in Born Slippy Hyde has a style that is distinctly his own. A style born from their changing approach to music with the evolution of the band. “Well I suppose the inspiration came from the fact that if we didn’t develop a different attitude I wouldn’t have a place in the band. The old fashioned idea that the singer is louder than the band, that the singer is on top of the groove and that all the words are precious. That the singer’s got something to say from beginning to end and he wants everyone to hear it, so much so that he repeats it a few times. All that became kind of nonsense because we were working in a genre where the groove was most important. So instead of the drummer coming last, the drummer now came first and the singer came last. It was very liberating because not only did it do a 180 degree about turn with the ego of the singer but it also meant the singer was now being led by the drummer and was in a supportive role to the drummer and that really freed me up. We experimented for a long time; things like Dirty Epic, Dark and Long and Mmm Skyscraper I Love You were the first ones of this way of working where tunes became a journey and went through different stages rather than having a traditional verse/chorus format. The way that I collect words and write my narratives is about journeys through cities and my state of mind as I collect these images. It meant that Rick could chop whole chunks out and it didn’t matter.”
With their DVD Everything Everything becoming somewhat of a ‘must have’ release in any discerning dance music lovers collection fans may be asking what the difference between that and this Anthology is as both are may be viewed as more or less best of collections. “A live set is a kind of heightened experience when you’re there in front of a lot of people and exchanging energy like that. You just get to a heightened state where in the studio it’s the opposite – you get deeper and it’s less physical and so there’s a whole separate group of things going on there. In many ways people assume an anthology is a collection of work about the end of something and the beginning of something but to me and Rick the Everything Everything album was the closing of a chapter. That band will never exist again. It was great that Rick could make that document of the way the band was. So really we kind of did that a couple of years ago with that release.”
And so brings up the topic of the departure of the third member of Underworld Darren Emerson (up until 2000) and the effect of his departure in both the studio and the live show. “The live show got a lot easier. We were already booked to go out on tour with the Everything Everything album so we kind of had no choice but to go out as a two piece. We found as a two-piece, for the first time ever, was very liberating. We’ve played together for 23 years now and it’s kind of like a second skin when you see each other and work together. Apart from the occasional times where you could do with a couple more pairs of hands there’s a kind of an understanding and empathy where you often don’t have to look at each other to know what the other one’s going to do. The only change in Darren leaving was the same as the changes that happened with previous members of Underworld leaving, you no longer had a friend around, a particular closeness with somebody and the dynamic they brought as another human being which wasn’t there anymore. Musically we weren’t affected.”
But Hyde won’t rule out having a third person in the future should the opportunity arise. “Three people are great because you can’t have a consensus. There’s always going to be someone saying something completely different, which is great. And you can’t have stalemate either which is fantastic. Why not, but at the moment the team we’ve worked with for the past ten years – JBO, our management, the crew (some of whom we’ve been with for 18 years), they’re people we rely upon to keep us grounded and keep us moving on and that kind of becomes the third member from time to time. Steve Hall from JBO kind of plays the part of the third member when he comes in and gives us his opinion on his music.”
Ten years as Underworld as we now know them has seen plenty of change in the scene around them, something which they’ve been very much aware of and adapted to over time. A tad reminiscent Hyde looks back to a decade ago, at the same time very much aware of the benefits of now. “It got massive. It started off as illegal raves for ten to fifteen thousand people which was fresh and exciting. People had ideas and they did them. Yeah there were a lot of crooks around creaming off a lot of money and stuff. Then it became mainstream and it lost something. It became bigger and lost that spark and vitality, that “I’ve got a mad idea – let’s do it. See that mountain, I’m gonna put a gig on that mountain. Why? Because it’s a great mountain.” Then it became about amalgamating into traditional organizations, which of course had a down and an upside. The down was that the freshness was watered down. The upside was that they actually became more organised and you had good toilets and good catering and things were taken care of like health and safety, which perhaps weren’t an issue in the early days. Then it did become just too big, certainly here in the UK, and it became about lists of names rather than something that was great, something that was really great for 200 people. It turned into something that was billed as being the greatest thing on earth for tens of thousands of people and kind of lost it’s magic. The magic now is in the smaller places. That’s how it works; it’s the places with the magic that survive.”
So where does the magic exist now, is it still around? Hyde seems to think so. “I still love pirate radio. I still love listening to John Peel on Radio 1. I like listening to World Music. I kinda hear it in World Music where it’s unfettered by having to get into the charts. It really excites me. Dance music as you know takes on many forms and doesn’t have to be machine music. It can just be clapped rhythms for example.”
So what of Underworld in the future? Hyde sure hopes so and divulges that the secret is in keeping themselves stimulated and always welcoming opportunities for change. The Underworld of the future sees Karl and Rick furthering their interests in as many of their current projects from publishing books to Internet based projects. Hopefully amongst all that there is still plenty of room for releasing more albums and touring.
To remind yourself just how influential Underworld have been in the past decade of dance music make sure you check out Underworld – 1992-2002 which is available now through V2 at all good music stores and online retailers. Check out ITM’s review HERE.
