UNDERWORLD;
UnderWorldLive.com
Techno / Trance / Electro / Alternative
In these days of endless band reformations, avalanches of reissues and shamelessly repetitious 'creativity', too many artists are willing to sign away their soul for a little extra time on the career clock. Too many of them see artistic expression not as an end in itself, but as a shortcut to celebrity and are obsessed with their destination, rather than engaged by the journey. Too few of them, frankly, are like Underworld. An incredible 27 years after their birth in Romford, Essex as a trio and 15 years after they pressed up their debut single (500 copies of the Balearic twofer, 'Mother Earth'/'The Hump'), Rick Smith and Karl Hyde are still enjoying the ride, grinning like kids as new vistas unfold before them. It's been a long and exhilarating trip - and it's not over yet.
At its peak, the landscape of UK dance music was changing quicker than you could say 'white label', but a few features were reassuringly ever present - one of them was Underworld. What distinguished them was their ability to instil a deep soulfulness and empathetic humanity into even the most anthemic club banger. To that end, they fused together elements of techno, dub, trance, Krautrock, drum 'n' bass, ambient house and even blues, complementing and contrasting not only sounds, but emotions, too, tying them together with Hyde's frequently prescient, often opaque but always strikingly poetic lyrics. The colossal 'Born Slippy' thus packed a heart-rending existential ache along with that thrilling, jackhammer pulse and - immortalised as it was in Danny Boyle's Zeitgeist-busting movie 'Trainspotting' - became a soundtrack for a generation. Small wonder it's long since passed out of Underworld's possession and entered the canon of British folk music.
In 2002 - following the departure of DJ Darren Emerson and the release of their live LP/DVD, 'Everything, Everything' -Underworld delivered their first LP as a duo, 'A Hundred Days Off', which spawned the Ibizan track of that summer, the flickering and luminously lovely 'Two Months Off'. A year later, DMC Records engaged Smith and Hyde to curate one of their 'Back To Mine' compilations and the pair treated their loving public to a selected anthology ('Underworld 1992-2002'). Then, it all went quiet in the Underworld camp. At least, that's what it might have seemed like to the inattentive listener.
In fact, the very opposite was true. If there's a single explanation for Underworld's longevity and fecund creativity, it's their appetite for change and, over the past four years, they've been busy breaking acres of fresh artistic ground, much of it in cyberspace. In November 2005, Smith and Hyde launched their digital 'Riverrun' project, delivering on-line (as three separate works to date) brand new music direct to their fans, thus short-circuiting the relentless write/record/tour/promote system and allowing them to respond much quicker to their creative moods. They also started broadcasting a web-only radio show - inspired by their time spent sitting in for John Peel at the BBC in 2004, while he was away on the holiday from which he tragically never returned - and have been looking at making content for television. Last year, Underworld produced a four-hour show live from Frankfurt's Cocoon club with Sven Vath, the first of what they hope will be many broadcasts.
"It's deeply exciting," enthuses Smith of the pair's on-line radio enterprise. "It's the immediacy, the freedom, the focus - listen, don't just look at eye candy - and the way it opens up the imagination. John Peel's imagination had resonated with us ever since we could both remember, so it was a curious way for things to come about." Adds Hyde, "His death was deeply traumatic and something we've not really got over yet. There's still a feeling that somehow we've gone into a parallel universe without him, but the people that were around John started turning us onto independent labels and introducing us to new artists who we then started to correspond with, so now we have this regular flow of records across all genres coming into us, which we can introduce to other people through the radio show. That's what John passed on to us."
