Underworld

"There were huge chunks of failures."

Eleven albums. Two film scores. Two books. One 18-hour set. One television show. One tragically borne radio show as they sat in for John Peel. One legendary musical crescendo in cinematic history. Relentless covert digital releases and a terrifying roll call of singles. Yet Underworld, one of the UK’s most enduring electronic bands, have toyed with failure more than you would ever imagine.

Their latest album, ‘Oblivion With Bells’, is their eighth physically released long-player and just the next stage in this band’s metamorphic and deep journey. It’s peppered with Hyde’s trademarked, almost unconscious insight and the ever-sleek production of Smith, yet its tone reflects their recent cinematic inroads into film scoring and engagement of other medium away from the dancefloor, which they dominated for so long.

Clash confronted cyber-poet and singer Kark Hyde on Underworld’s epic early failures, their global explosion and their consequent blistering fight to remain in their subterranean world ever since.

In 1983 you started a band with Rick; how would you describe Freur?

We were sending demos to Peel and Eno made on a drum machine… we didn’t know ANYTHING about club music.

Middle to dodgy. The first LP was called ‘Doot Doot’ because that was the name of the EP that did well, it was THAT sophisticated. Freur was very electronic mashed up with guitars and voices. There was maybe the biggest similarity with ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’ than anything else we have done. It kinda reflected all the demos we’d be working on in our bedsits in Cardiff.

How did Underworld develop from this?

We did two albums as Freur then we became Underworld mark 1 in about ’86. In ’89 we went bankrupt with Underworld, then in ’90 Rick found Darren, I went off doing something else and came back and asked if I could join in. There were huge chunks of failures. We were just trying to be pop stars – it was brilliant though. But when the ’90s came along we didn’t want a major record deal, we didn’t want a hit record and we didn’t want to be pop stars. We just wanted to make music for commercials. We didn’t want to put any pressure on the music to make massive money – because we felt that through the ’80s it had compromised our music. People had said to us: “change this and change that and if you do you MIGHT have a hit record”, so we did because we’d been on the dole for so long and wanted to be pop stars but do you know what? We were crap at it!

Why did you change your name to Lemon Interrupt briefly after that?

We were putting out another record as Underworld and we didn’t want to compromise it. This weird fax came through which gave us the name. The word ‘Lemon’ then about 6 foot of music before the solitary word ‘interrupt’ – so that was that. Then we put out ‘Skyscraper’ as a 12” and it took off! We did a few versions of that which were much less vocal and Sven Vath at the Drum Club played it the most vocal and the dance floor erupted. We just looked at each other and thought: ‘wow! That wasn’t meant to happen’. That was the start of all of that.

How did the fame feel when it finally came?

We were really cautious, we’d heard it before: “All you need to do is to write a few more of these and you’ll be mega!” but it’s not what we wanted. (Sighs.) We aren’t interested in writing hits, we just want to produce electronic music we want to play and listen to. We wanted to be left alone. It was amusing for a while then just got a bit depressing. You’d get in a cab and the driver would be like, “Coooor! What happened mate? You were massive for a while there and look what’s happened! You could have been huge.” And you are like, “Hold on! You are taking me home to a really nice house, that I own, in a lovely part of the town, I am happy.” But then people just expect you to want that stardom. It became a burden.

So you never tried to chase the epic chants echoing round Britain every Friday night shouting “lager, lager, lager”?

Not at all. Never. If it comes – it comes. And Rick has produced so many anthems over the years that it’s become difficult to decide what to drop from a festival slot but also introduce new material. In the ’80s we were chasing the fame thing. No doubts. Nope! We tried it, and we tried it more than once we tried it over four albums and we can’t do it. There are other people that can do it very well.

What was your most ludicrous moment at the centre of attention?

What wasn’t ludicrous? We were a joke. Popstars? (Collapses laughing) We were sending demos to Peel and Eno made on a drum machine. Rick and Me would make this electronic music with a voice; that was it, idiosyncratic music. But we didn’t know ANYTHING about club music; we just saw the electronic music which was getting into the charts, that’s all we heard – so it was more pop-electronic. When we got together with Steve at Junior Boys Own and said the “The ’80s were shit!”, he was like: “Oh no! The ’80s were fantastic”, and pulled out lists of history; Detroit, Chicago, clubs, artists… and it was all a bit of revelation. When we discovered pirate radio Acid House it was so like Tangerine Dream and all the music we had grown up with… we realised that was what we should be making so Rick took off and said he wanted to be part of it. He knew he needed to find a DJ he could work with and find his way through the clubs. We knew nobody back then. Things could have been very different.

How worried were you when Darren left the band?

He is a great DJ and it came to the point I think, where it became a little strange for someone as an artist in his own right to be part of a group that was being bigged up in such a way. We started getting treated like a big rock band, to Darren it started looking a bit traditional as it did for me and Rick; the dance events became rock events and lost some of their charm and spontaneity.

How heavy was the expectation on recording without him?

There were huge chunks of failures. We were just trying to be pop stars – it was brilliant though.

We never thought about that to be honest, of course it came up but it was never an issue. For us this whole thing is a journey, we just want to explore and fortunately now, because we have more than one way of publishing our work we could follow the new album up the month after with a download-only piece that’s banging techno. So there’s even less pressure for our big albums to have to sum up Rick and Karl than before.

How long has the album taken to produce?

We’ve been writing in this mode – we call it hotel mode; passing files back and forth electronically since about 2003. The idea was to get a lot of music into a box that we could choose from. And that is what’s happened we had around 180 to 200 pieces written to choose from so far. Some of these formed the three download albums that we have done since the last physical release (‘Hundred Days Off’), some of these went to the 12”s that we released and some of these went to the two films which we had been asked to score.

How much of concept existed around the new LP before you started recording?

There was a body of work that was bigger than what we could get on an album that was getting moved around our core team. We were fortunate that we work in a team with people like Steven from Junior Boys Own, and other friends that we had opened the process up to, they were answering in words and responses: Pig and Dan, Pete Heller were literally taking the music away and tampering with it. People were giving short lists; or Rick was responding to remixes from Pig and Dan and Rick would see a new avenue; then respond. Or Darren Price would do something and Rick again would respond. Larry Mullen, Jr. from U2 took a track and worked on it and that was a good exchange. People were commenting and that’s what we wanted. We wanted to keep passing files back between me and Rick and layering so it wasn’t evident who had done what.

Was it deliberate that you wanted the new LP to be so polished?

That was Rick as a producer following his intuition and doing what he wanted to do. We had even gone back to Abbey Road and recorded a lot of live instruments with fantastic microphones. There it was those kinds of noises that were added to get that rich depth. But that is all part of Rick’s journey as a producer.

What’s next?

We are still putting out physical records, dead set on more digital downloads, more material from the shows in hardcopy, publishing of much more books. I am writing every day and we are taking tens of thousands of photos every year, we have a studio space that’s very creative with John Warwicker from Tomato who was in Freur – scratching with videos on stage in 1982 … so the three of us have stayed together since then. So all our archive of music, video, images, design, radio shows is constantly getting added to and Underworldlive.com will become more and more important and central. There’ll be more webcasts, we jam live and have a chat room, TV and visual content for web-based television, we’ve done the first one at full frame rate for 4 hours with Cocoon and they have come back which we want to do more.

How do you feel when people think of you as a chart dance band?

That’s the tip of an iceberg of a point of view, if you look at the charts then you get what you see but behind that we have done so much more work. If you go to Japan then Underworld and Tomato are synonymous – equally found in an art gallery as to playing to 25,000 people. There’s a wide spread and its taken the last few years for people to see that and get hold of some of this material.

A word on the future of Underworld?

We are happy! We do what we want to do, we work with extraordinary people – Brian Eno came round to the studio the other week and we were jamming… sometimes me and Rick turn round and just look at each other – its so mental.

Latest LP ‘Oblivion With Bells’ is released in October. Check Underworld’s radio broadcasts, TVsShow, digital releases, words and images at HYPERLINK “http://www.underworldlive.com” www.underworldlive.com

Underworld recently scored the music for Breaking And Entering, directed by Anthony Minghella as well as Sunshine by Danny Boyle.

Karl Hyde has written two books, Mmm Sky Scraper I Love You and In The Belly Of St Paul’s.

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