Underworld in this months Mixmag

[Liam]

Originally Posted by negative1

i have a lot of catching up to do..
so there's tons of music from them, and
pictures etc, stuff to read..

If it's pictures you're after then you'll find that one and literally hundreds more are Perou's site www.perou.co.uk

[stimpee]

Can we get a higher resolution scan? the OCR software wont recognise the text...

[Jan]

Originally Posted by the mongoose

Somebody get Rick a steak.....he's skin and bones!

hmmm.... steak....
Great interview. Thanks for the link! Perou's pictures are indeed very good.

[GoatSucker]

Originally Posted by stimpee

Can we get a higher resolution scan? the OCR software wont recognise the text...

Stimp - here's a better quality scan - it's about 2.5Mb http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=86782

[stimpee]

Goatsucker: thanks for the high-res scan. It worked a treat. So, here we go. Now this can be saved for entry to the dirty.org/underworld archives. Interesting article.

VIP Q&A

The creators of 'Born Slippy' are back - in stealth mode. Karl Hyde of Underworld tells us how the future is all about digital guerrilla tactics

Words Nick Stevenson

IT'S A MERE 23 years since former Cardiff Art College students Karl Hyde and Rick Smith began their career with music that sounded strangely like electroclash and a band
whose name (Freur) was represented only by a symbol. Since they became Underworld in 1986, their DJ and groove consultant Darren Emerson has come and gone - and, amazingly, this year is the tenth anniversary of `Born Slippy' going massive on the back of Trainspotting. They've recently released two albums of works in progress -'Lovely Broken Thing and `Pizza For Eggs'-as downloads and now they're concentrating on what they call a "physical" record for next spring. When we spoke to Karl - Underworld's frontman, theorist and stream-of-consciousness singing voice - he was locked in Abbey Road Studios working on the soundtrack to the new Jude Law film Breaking And Entering.

You're at Abbey Road. Have you seen the views from the roof? Fantastic! Apparently that's where John Lennon used to go to take LSD - all we do is take photographs.

You're doing a soundtrack -what' s the film about? It's based around the intricacies of relationships, these clashes of culture coming together in what is already a rapidly changing area in London - King's Cross. What's gonna happen to the Cross? It's just gonna become a design gallery for new furniture from Sweden.

Is this the first film score you've worked on? No, we got our name from a film we worked on called Underworld in 1983. After that we did things like early MTV stings and slots, then commercials, then working with Danny [Boyle - Trainspotting/The Beach director].

Being dropped used to be a catastrophe for bands. Now it seems like a get-out-of-jail card. It's bloody marvellous. The website stuff came from our boredom with only being able to release 70-minute soundtrack CDs with a booklet, where you had to argue how many colours you got into it. All that was getting a bit tedious. We needed to do what we did in the early 90s - do it for ourselves, like when we were selling the 12"s out of the back of the car. So we thought, "Let's just go ahead and do it ourselves." We knew that if we tried to describe what we had in mind, it would appear ludicrous.

Do you think we fully understand what digital music means yet? No. I hope not. I hope there is way more for it to go. I don't see us stopping the digital music release of our work because it's so liberating. For example, the live CD from our Tokyo show was accompanied with a virtual release of 1,700 photographs. The fact that a physical release can remain in flux, and expand with a virtual space that's attached to it, makes it more interesting to us. It means that a physical release isn't a done deal, its something you can keep revisiting.

Do you think you'll find it hard to go back to a physical release? Not at all. It doesn't feel right to be only operating in a high profile mass media world. We really have enjoyed the guerilla aspect of what we've been doing. The record company (V2) were very good about it, actually. We saw the contract through, they supported us and we have continued a really good relationship with them. We just needed this freedom and space to go off and do these other things. It's been the biggest buzz. As you get older you start noticing people around you saying, "Oh, music isn't what it was," and you think, "God, something is wrong here if I'm actually involved in a conversation like this!" I must be listening to the wrong people.

What do you do when you're not being Underworld?
Sleep-that's about it. If I sit down in front of the telly I might watch some football but I just get bored and I have to get up and work. We've set up a meeting place online for mates around the world to exchange ideas, so other artists leave stuff and we have a kind of jam thing going. We've started a collaboration with Brian Eno, Adrian Sherwood, the composer Gabriel Yared... I like that there's no business plan. It's like-minded people getting off on each other's stuff, just getting together and seeing what happens.

This is what can happen when you take the money aspect out of it... That's it. To me, that makes good business sense. It's important to leave plenty of space to muck about. The best stuff always came of mucking about.

When did you last go to a club? God, not in a long time. Actually we're about to go off to one in Frankfurt.

Where's that, Cocoon? Yeah, friends of ours run it so we're gonna go and check it out. Sven [Väth], God bless him, he's wicked, He's been a mate for a long time and supported us. We were at the first Cocoon party in Frankfurt in a warehouse. We've known Sven for a long time - but we still hardly recognise him cos he keeps changing his hair.

What was the first Cocoon like? I know Sven had put an awful lot of money into it. It was in a warehouse on the edge of Frankfurt somewhere. I think there'd been fire marshal restrictions so the number of people that could get in had been savagely restricted. I remember little else about it. It's one of those things where the after-party was a blurring filter that just clouded history.

Are you still in contact with Darren Emerson?I haven't seen Darren in a long time, although last Christmas we met in an alleyway in Soho.

Sounds dodgy... But isn't it fitting? It was just before Christmas, big hugs and smiles, and we'd been sending messages back and forth via mates for a long time, and I just thought what a fantastic place to bump into each other.

How will the changes in Underworld affect your live shows? The great thing about the downloads is that we're adding more new material that people know to the live shows. They can expand far quicker than they can when you're releasing something every two years. We've got the show up to about three hours now. The odd thing is that the first time we did the three-hour show last year it was really knackering, but after that it just seemed like anything less than three hours seemed way too short.

And you still don't use a setlist? No. It still confuses the hell out of TV companies when they go, 'When are you going to play Born Slippy and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't even know if we're gonna play it at all".

Download new Underworld tracks from www.underworldlive.com

046 MAY 2006
WWW.MIXMAG.NET

[BeautifulBurnout]

Excellent.

That's all I can say.

[patrick]

hahaha. that article is great! thanks stimp for doing that as i couldn't read it well on the other one (stupid resizing pictures thing)...

anyhow, i think that the last Q&A is great: karl doesn't know i suppose beccause rick plays the track and karls keeps up, it would be hilarious if rick didn't play it once or forgot and karl was like "huH!?"

[stimpee]

Originally Posted by Karl Hyde

"It still confuses the hell out of TV companies when they go, 'When are you going to play Born Slippy and I'm like, "I don't know. I don't even know if we're gonna play it at all".

yeah right, Karl. When was the last time you didnt play it? Hearing the original version at Luxembourg was something else tho...

[gambit]

Damn, still another year away from the new album. Although on the bright side, the movie soundtrack should be out soon. I hope. It has to be if they're scoring it already.

[Bargo]

Originally Posted by stimpee

Is this the first film score you've worked on? No, we got our name from a film we worked on called Underworld in 1983.

Wow, I had no idea about that. I see on the IMDB that it's riding high on 3.8/10 Hopefully Breaking and Entering will fare a lot better.