The Chemical Brothers Always Make A Point To Have Their Music Be About “Nothing.” With Their Latest, Push The Button, They’ve Flipped That Script

By Brian O’Connor
Photos by Rahav Segev
Published in the March 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 03

It’s only hinted at on “Galvanize,” the single where guest rapper Q-Tip intones: “My finger…is on the button.” We can’t be sure if he’s referring to a piece of recording gear or a doomsday device. But halfway through their new record, Push the Button (Astralwerks), with the martial beats of “Left Right,” The Chemical Brothers erase all ambiguity: they’ve dropped a block-rocking anti-war track, a not-so private psychedelic slice of cinematic hip hop that, from them, represents a call to arms.

There must be something very, very wrong with the world when Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons—whose break beats typically provide a gritty shroud for their acid-house-inspired message of respect and peaceful co-existence—are swinging pointed elbows. But there is, and they are.

“When we first heard the fully developed idea, we were blown away,” says Rowlands of the track, after singer Anwar Superstar added lyrics. “It was a point where we decided, does this live on a Chemical Brothers record, so different? But to sort of deny it, and censor it and edit it and put it away, even though it’s something we connect with, would be denying something that happened. It’s the real world impinging upon everybody. Our records still have that sense of escape, and you lose yourself in the music. But it also takes into account the fact that it’s not 1997 or 1995. It’s a different place.”

DJ Times connected with The Chemical Brothers and talked about life during wartime, the aging face of electronica and the tutorial role of the standard bearers of block rocking beats.

DJ Times: I don’t know why, but I was surprised to hear a record with so much energy and relevance.
Tom Rowlands: Yeah, we’re excited about it. It’s like pulling a rabbit from the hat.

DJ Times: Is that what it felt like?
Rowlands: No, I don’t know why I said that. It’s our fifth album and people assume that you get less creative as you make more music. We just felt the spirit.

DJ Times: “Hold Tight London” seems to be a track with a Chemical spirit, but with a different feel
Ed Simons: That’s one of the oldest tracks on the record, something that Tom had worked up on the guitar. “Hold Tight London,” that’s what DJs on pirate radio and people in general in London say. “Hold Tight London,” suggesting that what’s coming up is a big tune, a big bassline tear-up. It’s pretty inappropriate for the song, but also, for “Hold Tight London,” it’s about people looking out for one another, it’s kind of warm. It’s what a bus conductor says, too.

DJ Times: Mind the gap? Hold tight?
Rowlands: If you’d heard that phrase before, when you hear the song, which is a very emotional sort of song, you get the other meaning of “Hold Tight.” [Croons] “Hold me tight, don’t let me go.”

DJ Times: How did you treat her vocals?
Rowlands: We wanted to keep the purity of her vocals, but we didn’t want them to sound so natural. It’s just experimentation, phasers, reverbs and special boxes—the usual.

DJ Times: Any new special boxes on this record that you hadn’t used previously?
Rowlands: A few new synthesizers, we’re always aware of new technology, and we’re always aware of what’s come out, so it’s always been a combination of using old broken synthesizers and software that’s on the net like a month ago—shareware that does something specific and different—like Pluggo, Cycling 74, all those.
Simons: There’s a great e-bow guitar on that.
Rowlands: Oh, that’s right, there’s one thing that’s different. We bought an e-bow guitar.

DJ Times: As musicians, it’s your job to listen to other people’s sounds. In the making of this record, was there a sound out there that made you say, “Damn, I wish we’d done that”?
Rowlands: I didn’t have that feeling of, “Damn I wish we’d done that.”
Simons: More like, “Damn, we need to make stuff that we find satisfying.” That’s not being critical of other music, but maybe we’re less entrenched in the music around us. The direct influences from other music and musicians is not something that’s really part of us. No disrespect.
Rowlands: When we first started, we’d get exited about music and get excited about hearing those records in that environment. But also, someone wasn’t making the record that I imagined—the record that I wanted to hear wasn’t there. The same feeling now drives us to make music, the fact that no one can make the record that we just made now. So we’re going to make it. We have a very idiosyncratic way of making music. We pull in together all these influences, and all these approaches, and different feels that we have on our records. I don’t know—I don’t get that from other music. For me, that’s a good thing. Obviously, on this album, the fact that we can create music and songs that lets these different vocalists from totally different spectrums make music, at the other end from each other. The fact that we can make a record that holds those two diverse things together and makes them make sense together, we find that exciting. It’s a very melodic record, but a quite hard record, a quite brutal record, a quite beautiful record. It’s all those things at once.

DJ Times: I know you guys will work on a drum track for a year. Any track on this that even satisfied you guys, immediately?
Rowlands: The drums in “Galvanize,” they came very quick in terms of the feel of the pattern. It took a long time to get everything else to work around them, but it was just like, “Don’t touch it.”

DJ Times: Neat strings in the intro.
Rowlands: Moroccan strings that we found on an old CD that we had around. I remember touring America in 1997—it was a CD that we had started listening to. A bit of EQ and compression, and that’s it. Some things take years to try and craft, and some things take 10 minutes. It’s just knowing when that thing is right. Also, something’s not worth more because you spent more time with it. To the person who listens to the record, the labor involved in it shouldn’t matter; it’s just what it makes you feel like.

DJ Times: The most painstaking track?
Simons: Maybe “Surface to Air,” although painstaking doesn’t quite fit—it was a fun puzzle. It was difficult to get it right, particularly the drum sound, but the initial idea, again it was quite early on in the process, something that Tom had played. We were in the studio, mucking around with the sound, and we processed it and it sounded great. There’s a lot in the track, but to make it sound quite simple and emotive and immediate, we did it a lot of times. We get a lot out of solving those problems.

DJ Times: Did you have the luxury of taking your tracks out to the clubs and applying them to get dancefloor feedback?
Simons: We played “Galvanize” and “Come Inside” quite a few times, in Miami in the beginning of the year. The main thing was that we played live this past summer—we played a lot of festivals. We thought we’d have finished the album by then. It got great reactions. It’s just very different listening to them when there are other people around. It definitely shapes your view of the track. You learn a lot about the music. “Surface to Air” had an immediate effect on people. You could tell people were wrapped up in the sound, in the progression of the music.

DJ Times: Did playing it live prompt you to change anything about the track?
Simons: It kind of shaped how it ended up being mixed, yeah.
Rowlands: And how it was arranged. The way we play live, we have the flexibility, we have tracks with lots of different parts, and we have them up on the desk, splayed out on the 12 channels on the desk, and we played live, feeling out with faders how to do it. Sometimes, in the studio, you tend to be very logical about it, look at the screen, “Oh, we’ll have that, then that and then that.” But then you play live you don’t really think about that. You just do it when it feels right to bring something up or change something. It’s just from playing it live a lot and trying different ways to do it, different nights. When we went back into the studio it felt really good to do and we changed the record because of that.

DJ Times: One song on the record, “Left Right,” has more of a cinematic feel than anything you’ve done before. It almost sounds like American hip hop.
Rowlands: From the start of us making music, one of the reasons we did it was to put hip hop and acid house music together. It’s always been a love of ours. The fact that all our records are going around with beats and rhythm and stuff is probably from our love of breaks and hip hop. But, yeah, that “Left Right” is different for us. The main difference I think is the explicit nature of the lyrics, and the fact that it’s overtly…it has a meaning. There’s no confusion. A lot of our music tries to defy meaning and it’s more about feelings. Even though it’s a very emotive song, it’s totally not mincing its words, or what it says.

DJ Times: Life during wartime?
Rowlands: We had the instrumental of it, and we though it was amazing. For us, it had this dub feeling that we had in our earlier records—we used to have these dubby bass lines, and this record has that as well. It’s sort of cinematic, heavy dramatic strings and guitars that we’ve got in there. We just thought that was interesting. And then we have the electronic sounds. We hooked up with a guy Anwar [Superstar]. We didn’t put any meaning on to what it was. It’s a heavy piece of music. We used to call it “heavy sounds” sort of track, because it sounded like it meant something. We weren’t sure what it meant, but he found the meaning of what it was.

DJ Times: Did you guys discuss what you wanted the lyrical content to be?
Rowlands: No. On this album we had ideas for lyrics, you know, ways or titles or something to feed the direction. But with him, when we first heard the fully developed idea, we were blown away. It was a point where we decided, does this live on a Chemical Brothers record, so different? But to sort of deny it, and censor it and edit it and put it away, even though it’s something we connect with, would be denying something that happened. It’s the real world impinging upon everybody. Our records still have that sense of escape, and you lose yourself in the music. But it also takes into account the fact that it’s not 1997 or 1995. It’s a different place.

DJ Times: What’s the world like now in London?
Simons: Unease. There was a lot of anger about the war a couple years ago. But people, on a day-to-day level, pretty much live the way they’ve always done. People have fun together and they get on with life.

DJ Times: Has it affected culture in any way?
Rowlands: I think it just affects you every day. You roll around to the news and every night on the news there’s the fact that we’re involved in this war and it’s difficult to work out why. Even if you switch off and do something else, literally every day you’re reminded of the fact. It wears you down after a while.
Simons: That’s the main thing that “Left Right” is about—the fact that soldiers are fighting this war on the whims of other people.

DJ Times: Are you guys doing any DJing?
Simons: We DJ infrequently nowadays, maybe six or seven times a year. We’ve been totally consumed by making this record. It’s something we enjoy, but no way could we DJ every week. If we’re going to do something, and do it every week, we’d rather play live. But we DJed at [New York City’s] Centro-Fly in March, and we played [Ultrafest in] Miami, which we found to be not really our thing.

DJ Times: The Winter Music Conference?
Simons: Yeah, we probably just didn’t have the best experience. It was very housey—people were getting what they liked. It just isn’t where we are at. It’s interesting to go, but we’re just sort of in a different end of clubbing. That’s for the beautiful people.
Rowlands: It’s a very focused show. Especially when you play a big event there, it’s very focused, a very particular part of dance music, one that we don’t have much connection to. The records we play when we play are not about a very clean, synthetic, very focused sound. Our sound is more about cutting and surprise and change and going up and down and whoop—going wrong and a bit of chaos. So when we came to DJ, it wasn’t what we wanted to hear. Not that one is better—well, one is better. But the main thing when we DJ is we want people to enjoy themselves, and if it’s not just what people want to hear, then that’s fine. We should just go say, “See you later.”
Simons: I can’t see us going back there in a hurry. No disrespect to the people involved.

DJ Times: Where do you go back to?
Simons: In London, the best club is still Fabric, and we like Turnmills, a club in the same area, an underground club that’s pretty mad, great sound system. We’ve DJed there for about 10 years now.

DJ Times: Are you guy still approaching music-making as an 11-7 job, Monday to Friday?
Simons: The big difference now is that we record in Tom’s place. He’s moved out of London. When we work together, we go to his house. It’s quite nice. It’s a beautiful room, an hour outside of London. We’re in the same room together, 11-7, working on music, and I think you can tell in the music that it’s been freshened up. I like to get out of London, and Tom no longer has to drive across London to get to the studio.
Rowlands: It reminds me of how it was to make music as a teenager, when you had stuff up in your bedroom and you do something else and get back to it later. It’s just a more relaxed way of working. It’s not like, you have to go to this place to do it and if it doesn’t work now you’ve wasted another day. It’s a freer way of working.

DJ Times: I imagine the most important piece of gear for your music would be the studio monitors.
Rowlands: In the studio where we mix, the monitors are incredible—the room where we made all our records, basically. Sometimes when the studio is booked, we try and work somewhere else, and it’s just the sound, they’re custom-built, lovely old Neve desk, and we’ve worked there 10 years now. In other places, it’s just not the same. Now, in my room, it’s just a writing room, with a computer and synthesizers and instruments, but we still go to London to actually record and mix.

DJ Times: So because of the freedom of the new room in your house, there might be a drum track on this record that you created in your underwear—that’s what you’re saying?
Rowlands: Well, I wouldn’t quite go that far—always appropriately dressed for musical work.