Outstanding As Usual On Their New CD, "We Are The Night," The Chemical Brothers' Block Rockin' Beat Goes On. America—Where Are You?

Published in the July 2007 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 20 - Number 7
By Jim Tremayne

New York City—All the Chemical Brothers ever do is make great records. From their breakout bomb track “Song to the Siren” to its crossover pinnacle “Block Rockin’ Beats,” from ace collabs with Noel Gallagher to its much-licensed “Galvanize,” Tom Rowlands and Ed Simon have rarely made a misstep when it comes to quality control. Nearly 15 years on, they’re one of our great production duos—for dancefloors and beyond. Of course, whether or not America pays attention anymore is another story.

“Their moment,” of course, came in the late-1990s, when the music establishment tired of its post-grunge icons and took a hip tip for a minute. Their 1997 classic Dig Your Own Hole had hits on radio and MTV. Along with “electronica acts” Fatboy Slim, Underworld and Prodigy, the Chems were discovered by rock and rap fans who found their melding of enormo breakbeats and techno flourishes irresistible. Nonetheless, by 2001 “rock was back!” So the White Stripes, The Strokes and The Hives began to dominate stateside airwaves, and The Chemical Brothers—despite terrific Euro hits like “Let Forever Be,” “Hey Boy, Hey Girl” and “Star Guitar”—were mostly ignored, somehow relegated to cult status. The mainstream saw them as an exhausted fad, their sell-by date expired.

Around the world, however, the Chems remained festival favorites—their bring-the-studio live show remains an unrivaled psychedelic experience. Their albums and singles charted highly—between 1997’s Dig Your Own and 2005’s Push the Button, the duo scored four consecutive No.1 albums in the U.K.—and their increasingly rare DJ sets became must-see events. They never stopped what they were doing and they kept doing it better, their sound evolving with the times.

Their new album, We Are the Night (Astralwerks), is testament to this. The group’s best effort since 1999’s Surrender, the CD showcases its requisite dancefloor bombs (the minimal-cum-breakbeat “Saturate” and the pulsing whopper “Burst Generator”) along with some welcome collaborative surprises: the bumping single “Do It Again” (with Ali Love); the elegiac nugget “The Pills Won’t Help You Now” (with Midlake); the nervy “All Rights Reversed” (with The Klaxons) and the goofy party-starter “The Salmon Dance” (with Phatlip).

I caught up with them at the Astralwerks offices in lower Manhattan. We discussed DJing, the new digital frontiers, America’s dancefloor amnesia and their crafty new album. As usual, Simons and Rowlands were thoughtful, upbeat and humorous, even curious about the state of the New York club scene—a good hang. Welcome to DJ Times cover No. 5, fellas.

DJ Times: Alright, what’s up with “The Salmon Dance”? Are you guys gonna have the next dance craze?
Rowlands: You can see we’re edging into “The Macarena.” [laughs] We’d been working on the instrumental for quite a while and, for us, the groove was kind of…wrong. It was weird, but with cool beats, so we were imagining a rap on it. We loved records like Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde and we wondered what Phatlip could do with it, and he sort of did it justice in the strangeness department. It totally reminded us of Digital Underground or De La Soul, something weird, this sort of acid hip-hop, a humorous psychedelic thing. We were dancing around the studio—it just had this infectious thing about it.
Simons: It’s psychedelic hip hop. It’s a skit—it’s fun. It’s different from anything we’ve ever done. It seems to be going down very well. We’ve always wanted a track that had a dance attached to it.

DJ Times: I really like that tune “Saturate,” which sounds like you guys were in Berlin and said, “We like this minimal thing—but only for about 45 seconds…” That drop is pretty huge.
Simons: [Laughs] It’s kind of got every kind of music in it. It’s got big psychedelic rock drums, it’s got that minimal riff, almost a dubstep feel to the main groove and that German click to it. We didn’t start out to make it that way, but that’s how it turned out. We played it in a club the other day and I’ve never seen such a reaction to a drop…
Rowlands: Oh, come on…
Simons: [Laughs] Alright, I’ve seen a few, but it was quite a reaction to a record. We put it out as a “Battle Weapon” and we had DJs like Andrew Weatherall playing it. I walked into the studio and Tom had that little motif going…
Rowlands: It was just that feeling in the studio of “this works.” Our ideas are keen to what’s going on [in the clubs] and obviously these things filter into how we make records. But we don’t necessarily want to make records like other people do—we want to make them how we make them.

DJ Times: Well, no matter what you come up with, it always sounds like the Chemical Brothers.
Simons: We don’t slavishly follow the records that other people are making, but we are inspired by them, while doing our own thing.

DJ Times: Coming into this record, what were some of the club records that you were digging?
Simons: I liked “Doppelwhipper” by Gabriel Ananda. I like Matthew Dear’s records—the Audion stuff. We’re really reticent about name-checking—but we respect these artists and we play these records when we DJ. Also, Abe Duke, the guy who remixed our “Galvanize,” we’re very keen on him. Also, Ewan Pearson is still making great records.

DJ Times: You’re still making “Electronic Battle Weapons” vinyl.
Simons: Yeah, we make dance tracks and press them up as a 12-inch and they don’t have a name on them. Everyone knows it’s the Chemical Brothers. When we started, we had the aim of pressing up 700 copies of a record to get them to people who loved dance music, whether they were DJs or people who hang out in record shops. It’s just a slab of vinyl. We’re not keen to get it on the radio. We just want a direct relationship with nightclubs and DJs. Just doing that series just divorces us from all the machinations of the Chemical Brothers—the albums, the shows, the videos. It’s still important to us. It’s where we started with “Song for the Siren,” with 800 copies pressed up and distributed to DJs. While the music world has completely changed with digital distribution, there are people who still hang around record shops every Friday afternoon to get chunks of dance music to groove to on the weekend.

DJ Times: Getting back into the newer tracks, “We Are the Night” sounds like Ian Curtis crooning from the grave.
Rowlands: Really? The sampled voice is Bill Bissett, this Canadian beat poet, reciting “Ode to d.a. levy.”
Simons: The inspiration for that track was a crazy show we did in an anarchist squat in Bern, Switzerland, which had a certain history. We could only set up the gear in certain places because the squatters declared it free—it was a pretty crazy place and it had been going since the 1960s. So we tried to imagine the music as groovy, hippie, electronic, squat-party music, but updated to now.

DJ Times: And “The Pills Won’t Help You Now” with Midlake really recalls Brian Eno. It’s got that delicate melody, but by the time you hear the song twice, it’s really stuck to you.
Simons: It’s a powerful, emotional piece of music. We got a really great vocal and we had to come up with a production to do that justice.

DJ Times: You’ve become well-known for your collaborations with people like Noel Gallagher, Beth Orton and others. What’s your process there?
Rowlands: It always starts with an idea for a song and then, when we’re working on it, you have to imagine someone singing on it. And then the next step is to find someone who we think will enjoy it or will connect with it, or be inspired by it. We experiment and get in touch with people. Sometimes people come in with a full-formed song with verses and chorus worked out, and then other times people come in with an idea that doesn’t really work—then together we try to make it work. With the Klaxons [on “All Rights Reversed”], we had a day to do it because they were on tour and it was a now-or-never kind of thing. We just thrashed it out—they’d have an idea, then we’d have an idea and we’d piece it together until we had it done.