Chemical Brothers Part 2
What’s the reception been on the live dates that you continue to do with the new material?
Ed: Really good yeah… We played Surface to Air which is the last track, and Come Inside. You’d hope with dance/electronic music that you don’t need to have heard the music before to get a reaction. You know, if you go to a club you’re not expecting to hear lots of music that you know… there should be something about that music that causes a reaction and excites the ears, or makes you dance or be interested in the music, without it triggering a familiar feeling, or that “ I know this so I like it” mentality. So we’d be worried that if we played music and people didn’t just go with it.
Tom: In a way it was a really important thing to us to finish this album, and playing live really reminded us that people feel connected to our music, and we still do too. We can go out and play and still believe, and people were coming and it was an exciting thing and we felt like “we can do this”. Playing live really just cemented that, especially when you’ve been in he studio for a year and half. It gave us a real pick-up that people were listening, and it was fun to do – like when we first started.
The Big Jump…
Ed: …good track… (they both laugh)
Tom: It’s just an interesting combination of sounds; it doesn’t have any deep significance. It’s quite a raw, tight sound – it’s not layered. I suppose it’s quite different from the usual songs we make.
Left Right - Has anything been influential to you in making this album outside of the music?
Tom: That’s the most overt, in-your-face song we’ve ever done. We were unsure whether it could be a Chemical Brothers song because it was so strong in what it was saying. But it seemed stupid not to put it on the album because if you haven’t been affected by what’s happened in the last three or four years you’ve had your head in the sand. Even with ‘Galvanize’, with the feel of the album it is like an album that stands up – it has it’s moments of bliss and escape, but it feels like a raw album, even though it’s a political song I believe in everything it says. Even though we’ve never talked about those things before in our music, it felt exciting to do that, to be so overly in your face. But on a wider note it may have fitted in with a record that didn’t shy away, that was very up front. And we didn’t want to get into this idea where a band get on to their fifth or sixth album and just fizzle away, especially with the general media view of how dance music is. The whole idea was the album to be proud of what it was and not hide away.
Do you think people will be shocked when they hear it?
Ed: I don’t think people will be shocked – I think it’s an unassailable viewpoint.
The whole album feels edgier – would you say you’re edgier as people?
Ed: I don’t think we’re edgier as people, I think that we’re quite content as people....... |
About Petrol Records
The Brothers Gonna Work It Out...
