Three decades after their inauspicious start, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons think the spirit of 90s rave culture, as captured on their new album, can help help Brexit wounds
In a west London pub on a Wednesday lunchtime, the Chemical Brothers are taking a break from preparing for the smallest DJ gig of their recent careers. Twenty-seven years since they began playing records together as students in Manchester, under the unfortunate and short-lived pseudonym the 237 Turbo Nutters, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ forays into DJing usually take place on the grand scale of their spectacular festival headline sets. Such huge gigs have become useful circumstances for road-testing new material: the pair knew they were on to a winner with Eve of Destruction – the bizarrely effective blend of apocalyptic 2019 paranoia, early Chicago house and disco samples that opens their new album, No Geography – after playing an early version to a vast crowd in Europe. “We’re always searching,” as Rowlands puts it, “for that feeling of intensity and … waaaaah!”
But, in a few days’ time, they are returning to their roots: the days when, Simons says, “we would be crammed in a tiny booth with people everywhere, no barrier, so people would just wander in and start cheering and screaming at you”. They are DJing for a grand total of 250 people at the Social, the central London bar/venue run by the record label Heavenly. As part of the efforts to save the venue – then under threat from rising rents – they offered to play the same kind of set they played 25 years ago at the Sunday Social, the hugely influential club night also run by Heavenly, in the basement of the Albany pub on nearby Great Portland Street, where the pair were resident DJs. The preparations have brought their own challenges. “I’ve been going through the old record bags that we used at the time, pulling out a 12in, then going to digitise it so we can play it again and finding I can’t because the record’s literally got a boot print across it,” says Rowlands, frowning.
Related: The Chemical Brothers: No Geography review – revitalised back-to-skool anthems
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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