Fusing moody electronic textures, well calculated beats and stream-of-conciousness lyrics, Underworld has been a mainstay on the international dance scene ever since DJ Darren Emerson first hooked-up with a couple of former new wave pop artists known as Karl Hyde and Rick Smith.
Peaking with 'Trainspotting Anthem' and 'Born Slippy' in 1995 while losing Emerson more recently (to concentrate on solo projects) the duo still maintains a reputation for quality dancefloor-igniting material.
You've also played some of the other, non-UK Creamfields haven't you?
Yeah! Buenos Aires in 2006, that was a mental crowd.
This year there are thirteen global dates for Creamfields including new territories like Chile and Romania. What do you make of that?
It’s amazing. There’s a different energy at those places. It’s a bit like how it was here ten years ago, maybe. In the UK, it’s moved on, matured and mutated into all kinds of musical styles. Then you go to some places – like South America or Europe – and we look at each other and we’re like, “wow – this is what it used to be like”. And it’s great to have the opportunity to re-live that.
Are we more cynical?
No. I’ve never really experienced cynicism on the dance scene. It’s just that it’s been around here for a really long time and become something else. It’s just newer in some of those places. They’ve heard it on the radio and caught some of the DJs and there are people there that have waited a long time to experience something like this. There’s a freshness and an enthusiasm that comes from people finally having what they dreamt might happen. It could be too easy to say “well, we don’t have that” but then we play sets in the UK and are completely bowled over by the energy. It hasn’t gone away.
But your reputation now precedes you. Surely that’s changed the way that you’re received?
We’ve never been a group to let that interfere with being ‘in the moment’. We’ve never felt the pressure to become Underworld: ‘the idea of Underworld’. And Rick and I plus the team we have around us are all experienced in pulling each other down as soon as anybody begins to demonstrate some kind of ego. The great thing about dance music when we came to it at the end of the 1980’s was it was ego-less and it was all about the crowd and not the person spinning the records. We like to try and continue that: which is why we’re never announced when we come on stage. So you won’t hear [adopts exaggerated American TV introduction-style voice] “Here! To-night! Those legends all the way from Essex, England! Heeeeere’s Underworld!” Instead, we just wander on and segue into what the DJ is playing.
While you know what the source material is, the tracks themselves are open into interpretation, aren’t they?
Yes. But the music comes first. The music tells the singer what to do and when to shut up. I want people to hear the groove first and then be thinking that there’s some kind of voice in there and, if they like it, maybe the listener might finally be thinking “there’s some kind of singing going on there”. I like the idea of that journey of discovery.
Is it unsettling when you perform and people sing along?
At first it was. Because we were inspired by club culture, we expected that people should have been dancing. I wanted to tell them to stop all that singing. Now it’s a cross-section of people that come to the shows and I’d imagine that most people are getting the words more right than I am.
The “lager lager lager” chant from ‘Born Slippy’ must be one that comes back to haunt you?
That’s the only lyric that we ever felt the need to explain. Now I’m fine however people want to interpret it. If it’s simply a celebration of alcohol to them, then that’s okay. If they want to consider it as one man’s reflection on years of destruction and getting wasted, than I’m fine with that too.
