After 30 years at the helm of Underworld, you’d forgive Karl Hyde and Rick Smith some fatigue. However, in 2010 the duo is more energised than ever. The buzz is largely down to the eighth Underworld album due in September, which saw the elder statesmen of dance music teaming up with producers as diverse as High Contrast, Paul van Dyk and Dubfire. From the five-track sampler inthemix has heard, this will be a defining album in a career not short of highlights.

A few days ahead of We Love Sounds and Winter Sound System, inthemix met Karl Hyde at his Sydney hotel for a face-to-face interview. The evergreen frontman is as gracious an interviewee as you’ll find, which may come down to the fact that he’s enjoying himself immensely right now. Over 25 minutes, we talked about Underworld’s new lease on life, the unending thrill of playing live and why his relationship with Rick has endured.

I wanted to start by asking you about where the inspiration came from to work with people like Dubfire and High Contrast on Barking?
Over the years, we’d grown up around remixes. Rick had often said what a pity it was that we were hearing these things after the album was finished. On this record, we wanted to have that magic where people present their point of view on your writing. It was phenomenal. It was also good to have time to not just give people our music and have them send back their version, but go back and forth three or four times until you ended up somewhere completely different. There have been some great fusions on this record.

Scribble was certainly a great way to introduce this new album.
Well, we’d been playing the track You Do Scribble in the live set for a couple of years; that drum & bass vibe that Rick had introduced to Underworld way back with Pearl’s Girl when we first went to drum & bass clubs. You Do Scribble had been going down really well live and we’d been a fan of High Contrast’s music ever since the second album.

We’d been bigging him up on our own radio show, and he was making this beautiful, euphoric, positive drum & bass. It was the first I’d ever heard that sounded uplifting and positive. And this was the opportunity at last to work with Lincoln, and he was up for it too. He was wanting to break out of a drum & bass-only mould, and try different song structures. It turned out he was not only Welsh but a really great bloke, and a musician who thinks about song structures in a musical way, so it was easy to have a dialogue with him.

Having known how Rick works for so many years now, how is it to bring another person into the studio with you?
It’s really positive, because it reinforces the thing that Rick and I do the most. Our point of view is that we want to collaborate and have conversation with people who are making music today in 2010. That’s really very exciting for two people who’ve been working together for 30 years. It’s the premise in a way of Rick’s version of Underworld at the beginning of the nineties, which was to go out and find a 17-year-old who had a contemporary point of view and could bring that to the party. And we have experience and points of view, but you can’t be on it with everything all the time. It doesn’t matter the age, we could work with older people who have far more experience than us. One of the beauties of working in Underworld is that you’re making a choice about what you want to introduce to the sound, then going out there and finding the people that do that from their heart and hoping they want to jam and collaborate with you.

On the album sampler I heard, what stands out is a sense of euphoria and celebration.
We’ve always liked celebratory music. The notion of people coming together to celebrate in a joyous fashion has been core to Underworld since the beginning. Consequently, big chunks of our music don’t make it to the live show because they’re more cerebral or internal or for driving your car at night. On this album, I think Rick had quite a clear idea that it would have a positive, euphoric, uplifting thread through it. It was drawing on music we were testing out on the road, so it was music we already knew was going down well in the live set. There was nothing contemplative about the music; it was music of celebration.

A lot of this record is versions of tracks we’ve tried out on the road for the last two years, on and off, which is common to the way we work. But it’s quite unique in the sense that it brings together an almost entirely euphoric vibe. I really like it. We were in rehearsals a few weeks ago and it felt like a completely different group. That’s exciting after 30 years, to feel like we’re about to take out a completely different group…except I recognise the people.

I know that the Underworld live show is largely improvised; how much room is there for rehearsals, then?
We don’t get a lot of rehearsals. Rick was still finishing the album, so [onstage collaborator] Darren [Price] and I would start off learning the parts, trying to remember what we’re supposed to do and in what order. Then Rick came in and we worked together for three days, just enough so we had a clue about what was meant to happen. Then we’ll go through it again in production rehearsal again on Friday night here in Sydney. For the first few shows, we will want to try and play songs in a way that we can predict and then once you’ve done that, you can start taking it to pieces. It’s no good to walk in and say, “Hey, anything can happen!” from day one, because then you’ve got chaos. But once we’ve nailed the tracks sounding how we want, we can start improvising.

So this tour is a good testing ground?
It’s a fantastic opportunity. And for the whole production as well: the projections and lights and sound system. It’s the beginnings, the first baby steps, of the production. We threw away the production we’d been touring for three years and went, “Start again”. We’ve done that every season – thrown it all away. Things that we know sound and look great, you’ve got to throw away and start again to bring a freshness to proceedings.

Is the thrill of playing live still what it always was?
No, it’s better. Yeah, it is, and isn’t that a strange thing? Back in the eighties, it was boring. Really boring. I think in those days we couldn’t see the potential in jamming and improvising and responding to the moment. We just tried to trot out the same performance and got scared about changing things. If something worked last night, do it again tonight. That makes it really dull and makes you want to give up, which is pretty much what we all felt towards the end of the eighties. Oddly, it was the tour we did here in ‘88 where we felt like we were trapped in the wrong group. We were hearing acid house on pirate radio back in the UK, and experimenting with it here in the live show and feeling, that’s where we want to go. Not this group that is playing in a really restrictive way.

When I spoke to you on the phone a couple of weeks back, you said playing live now is like the opposite of growing old.
Yeah, yeah, it is, isn’t it? It’s a funny thing. There’s an immense energy that comes off the audience and the music. Someone was asking me earlier about the state of my heart, and it’s a good question. It’s one I often ask myself halfway through a show, when I’m up the scaffolding or wherever I might be. And I think, “Am I really supposed to be doing this at my age?”

But there’s an energy from the music. There’s a lot of times when we’ve gone to the stage just feeling completely drained, thinking, I have no idea how I’m going to get through the first five minutes, let alone an hour and a half, or three hours sometimes. Then the groove kicks in and three hours later you’re coming offstage going, “Oh, come on, let’s do some more!”

So the reason things are better than ever now has as much to do with the feeling of the shows as the feeling within the unit of Underworld?
Yes. We know that the reaction we’re getting to this album is so positive and doors are opening to us that haven’t opened to us for a long time, because of the music that we’ve made on this. You can also feel that what we’re tapping into is really good. ‘Good’ is not such a great descriptor, but it is to me; ‘good’ goes deep. There’s a lot of positive energy about the music and also, as you say, we’ve tested it out in front of audiences.

Read on for Part Two of our extended interview with We Love Sounds and Winter Sound System headliners Underworld.