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Decks and
vortex
Mirror: So
what’s the Electronic Battle Weapons series? Ed Simons: When
we first put out records, we’d press them up ourselves and take
them around to sell to record shops in our car. Then we signed to Virgin,
which has been very good for us, but sometimes we still make records
and put them out as Electronic Battle Weapons. They often end up on
the albums, but they’re just 12-inch, well-produced mixes of some
of our songs. It’s a way of bypassing the record company and getting
our records straight to DJs. It’s nice to have these collectibles
and it’s a good way to get our music out without people forming
a bias because they say Chemical Brothers on ’em. M: I read
that you guys have considered Bob Dylan and Outkast as collaborators.
Are these just ideas or have you approached them? ES: We love
Bob Dylan, we’re obsessive fans and we listen to him a lot together
so we thought his voice would be good on a record but we never saw it
as something that’s likely to happen. It would top our ultimate
wish list because we’d just like some of those fantastic lyrics
on our album. We sent Outkast some music and they came and saw us DJ
and they were quite into it but this was just before “Miss Jackson”
blew up and they became this huge, huge band, so that never really happened.
We’ve always wanted to make a hip hop record and have a great rap
on one of our tunes, so we’re still looking for a good MC. M: How about
that Australian fan who sends you tapes? ES: Yeah, we just got back from Australia but he never showed up. He just sends the most foul-mouthed Australian rants over our songs, just absolutely demented, out-of-time rap, but he’s a good guy, I’d like him to make himself known. He hasn’t sent us a tape in a while, maybe he’s lost interest. He’s probably rapping over Basement Jaxx songs now.
Diamond in the
rough M: What’s
this I hear about a David Lee Roth tape? ES: I’ve
never seen this fabled article but our management vouches for it. Basically,
David Lee Roth wanted to do something with us, so he sent a video of
him dancing to our songs and hanging out with a load of his weird mates.
It’s pretty on-the-edge, there’s all these people shouting,
“G-up, Vincent! G-up, Vincent!” God knows what it all means. M: Yeah,
really. But I see you’ve worked with New Order again on a song
from the Manchester movie 24 Hour Party People… ES: Yeah,
we produced “Here to Stay” for them. I just saw the film last
night and it’s pretty mad seeing an 18-year period condensed to
an hour and a half. It’s fragmentary impressions of a history that
I’m actually very familiar with because that’s a real favourite
era of music for me. We were students in Manchester and we used to go
to a lot of clubs there. The main inspiration we drew from that is the
feeling that you can do things, you can make records, you can become
a DJ, and you can put on your own clubs. M: And you
can have expensive visuals by Vegetable Vision, right? How would you
describe them? ES: Well, I’ve always got my back to ’em, but I’m told they’re good. No, they’re great, you have to see it, really. It’s about where those songs take you and how they make you feel, but it’s their interpretation. We have lots of visual interpretations of our music. Certain people do the sleeves for our albums and singles, other people do our videos, but Vegetable Vision emphasize a sense of movement and intensity with a huge screen of visuals that just suck you into the vortex of our music. : With Pete
Tong and James Holroyd at Metropolis on Sunday, April 14, 8:30pm, $45
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The
pop-psychedelic niche that the Chemical Brothers have forged in the
electronic mainstream is the backbone of their latest album, a distillation
of previous LPs that has Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands asking listeners
to Come With Us. From their Balearic beginnings DJing around England
in the early ’90s to their big-beat blowout later in the decade,
the brothers Chemical have refined a signature sound and emerged as
familiar faces in a genre that generally de-emphasizes individuals.
The Mirror spoke with Simons about Vegetable Vision, Party People and
chillin’ with Bob Dylan.