Veteran UK electronic act Underworld want to rip it up and start again. They've just returned with their first album in six years and it sees the duo cutting loose from expectations. Alan Corr meets frontman Karl Hyde
High up in the beautiful and ornate Victoria Suite in London’s Renaissance Hotel, Underworld’s feral and wild-eyed frontman Karl Hyde is talking about David Bowie.
“What are my feelings about Bowie . . . ?” he says slowly, repeating my question. “OK, this is gonna sound weird but a number of years ago, I had a dream about him and I just knew I had to see him. I told Brian Eno we had to go to New York NOW to see Bowie and Brian just giggled. I said, `you’ve got to do something! Something is going to happen to him, there isn’t long’ This was two years ago . . . “
Hyde trails off not out of sadness (he thinks the death of John Peel was a greater loss to music anyway) but in wondrous admiration at Bowie’s final act.
“When he passed, it didn’t upset me. It really made me smile actually,” he continues. “I thought Bowie, you really are the real deal. You timed that well. Your death is now a work of art. You’re back on top and you will stay there forever now. No one’s gonna top that and it really made me smile. His greatest work now was his death.”
As one half of abiding and brilliant British electronic duo Underworld, Hyde is in a very good position to comment on the passing of Bowie and on the various contortions of English pop and dance over the past three decades.
Hyde and Smith in studio:“This album is about this - forget Underworld, cut loose, enjoy being together again,”
2016 marks his 35th year with Rick Smith, his musical partner in Underworld. They’ve always been the ultimate danceniks but underneath the chaos and beauty of the music they make, they have also always hummed with a far more cerebral and inventive approach than many of their contemporaries.
In person, Hyde is not quite what you might expect. Today he is dressed in his uniform of striped Breton top, sharp dark blue jeans, whiter than white trainers and with his neatly-shorn peroxide hair, he is a spruce and youthful-looking 58 - half Essex (via Worcester) wide boy, half studio boffin n the Eno mould.
Twenty years ago, Underworld secured their reputation with a run of albums including dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest in the Infants, records that featured their fair share of dancefloor bangers but which also nodded to the more challenging side of electronica.
Underworld have just released their seventh studio album and it goes by the decidedly Underworld title of Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future but this is no cut and paste randomness - the title comes from one of the last things Rick Smith’s late father said to Smith’s mother on his deathbed.
For Hyde the new album is all about, as it were, scrubbing the dance floor clean; he and Smith went into the studio with a rip it up and start again attitude. “This album is about - forget Underworld, cut loose, enjoy being together again,” Hyde says. “Bring together all the things we did in the past for a few years with other people, the philosophy are we’re starting again. If you turn up at the studio with nothing, that’s fine. Let’s pool our experiences.
Underworld live: They play Forbidden Fruit, Dublin on June 5
“We started with nothing and there were no plug-ins or anything, no hardware," Hyde continues. "Rick had a shit load of synths and I had a shit load of crazy guitar pedals. Different guitars every day, stuff to trip myself up. For a while it was like we were two naughty boys flicking two fingers to ourselves. I think our management and the team around us never realised to what extend we really were savaging Underworld - Underworld is dead. Long live Underworld.”
Talking to Hyde is a bit like being stuck in an Underworld song and pinning him down is impossible. He speaks in long articulate and entertaining tracts, which spool off into free association and collide with other ideas. Just like the snatches of shouted conversations in a club at fever pitch, it is Hyde’s monologues that have been Underworld’s defining feature but ask him what he is actually singing about and well, he doesn’t seem to be too sure himself.
“When Rick and I got together to talk about the record and to hear what his thoughts were, he said don’t focus on stories. He kept saying, `you are enough’. I keep a daily diary and I have done every day for 16 years and it includes photographs. Rick said think about the photographs - you wander around and you see stuff, you choose stuff, you make all these selections, you’re an artist so make your selections and write - that’s enough.
“My discipline is to go and write in a café for an hour every morning so I’m in a café at 7.30am every morning, seven days a week. Rick said, just shift it, do the same thing but just shift it. You’re in a room and you’re looking around the room and you’re making choices, like you always did only it’s just shifted slightly and you’re not writing down overheard conversations and you’re not writing the story of walking through the streets of Soho - you’re gathering fragments which describe where your heads at by what you’ve collected together.”
Despite Hyde and Smith's clean slate approach, Barbara Barbara is prime Underworld - a kind of mix of nocturnal prowling and hazy sunlight. It rejoices in thunderous drums one moment and serene mediation and elegiac strings the next. If Rah features vintage sounding house piano and drum machines, Low Burn’s features a gorgeous orchestral backdrop, and there is lysergic eastern exotica on Motorhome.
Barbara Barbara crackles with a kinetic energy and that jumble of syllables stretched out or contracted, is a kind of Tourrette’s syndrome of social commentary, psychobabble. street-preaching and Eno’s approach to cut and paste techniques.
“Eno? He gets everything from me! Hahahaha,” Hyde jokes, dissolving into laughter once more. “The truth is that when Brian and me work together, it’s really strange - sorry, we’re getting slightly off topic here - but I’ve grown up with Brian’s philosophy, I’ve grown up reading everything he ever wrote about working in a studio. We’ve known each other for twenty years now and we’ve worked together for most of that time but when we get together in the studio, we’re like, `yeah, I know . . . I know’.”
Hyde: “I’m analogue - I love the act of writing. It’s meditation.”
In 2014, Eno and Hyde recorded two albums in quick succession on Warp Records. Someday World, which featured songs with Will Champion of Coldplay, John Reynolds, and Eno's one-time bandmate in Roxy Music, Andy Mackay. Eno and Hyde followed that with a second album, High Life, which was a more experimental set that drew its inspiration from Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and Fela Kuti.
“With Brian, it’s like I’m meeting another part of me. He’s like my twin and why’s that?” Hyde says. “Well, because I’ve read everything he’s ever written and I’ve based my philosophy on his teachings. He’s gone there before me, he’s ten years ahead. Both of us were working on video at the same time - me in art school and him in New York - and they were very similar things to what I was working on. Quadraphonics and synths in the seventies and I was really getting off on what he was doing.”
"All I’m concentrating is working on this new album. My brain can’t think of anything else from trying to remember the words!”
Hyde has been busy since Underworld’s last release, 2010’s Barking. Aside from working with Eno, he and Smith have developed an app that synchronises motion technology, and Hyde also released his debut solo album in 2013. But Barbara Barbara is Underworld’s first new music since they contributed to the soundtrack to the Olympic Opening Ceremony in 2012, an event that was conceived and directed by their old working partner and friend, Trainspotting director Danny Boyle.
On the table beside Hyde is a large and battered black hardback notebook. He picks it up and I can glimpse scrawls of notes and even the occasional diagram. It gives me the tantalising idea that Hyde connects those seemingly couplets verses like circuit boards. There is method to his madness, after all.
“I’m analogue - I love the act of writing. It’s meditation,” he says, cracking his shark-like grin again. “I might start off in a crazy dark place but then I think I don’t want to live like this and it starts to shift and then I’ll get bored and then I’ll start writing abstract. I’ll start writing sculptural things like black and pale blue, and wood with knots . . . and I’ll think, that’s not a lyric and then I’ll go for Pete’s sake - shut up! How do you know that’s not a lyric?”
There is little time for nostalgia even if recent single Exhale sounds like Hyde is unleashing his inner raver. He is also active again with Tomato, the mysterious design collective he formed in 1991 with Smith and John Warwicker, his former band mate in pre-Underworld act Fruer.
That air of mystery still hangs over Underworld after all these years. “One of the things that worked in our favour was that we didn’t have loads of big hits that tied us an era,” Hyde says. “What worked for us was that we embraced the fact that we were an indie band that swerved a lot of opportunities to become what a lot of our contemporaries became. We swerved a lot of opportunities to make more money.”
“36 years on, we’re enjoying and loving working together - working with Brian Eno, working with Danny Boyle, working in theatre and lots of stuff behind the scenes that we haven’t even announced yet . . . “
Like Trainspotting 2? “Who knows?” So, is there talk of you being involved again? Hyde cracks another shark-like grin: “Who knows? All I’m concentrating is working on this new album. My brain can’t think of anything else from trying to remember the words!”
It was Born Slippy that captured a moment for Underworld and an era for everybody else. That crazed banger summed up the heady chemical rush of the mid-nineties and went on soundtrack Trainspotting’s fetid and scuzzy atmosphere.
“You know,” says Hyde. “When Born Slippy was re-released after the film came out, I remember getting into a cab in Romford - and they talk very straight in Romford - and the cab driver said to me, `Ere! Ain’t you that Born Slpppy bloke? What went wrong?’ He’s just picked me up from a very nice house in a very nice part of town and I’m like, `What went wrong?’ and he says, `You could have been The Prodigy!’”
Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future is out now. Underworld play Forbidden Fruit, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham on June 5
