The Chemical Brothers 'Push the Button' album

On January 18th The Chemical Brothers return with "Galvanize", a full blooded pulsing dance-floor anthem, featuring the vocal talents of the legendary Q-tip.

From its pounding bass to its classic breakdown, it is The Chemical Brothers at their prime.

"Galvanize" is the first single to be taken from the forthcoming new studio album Push the Button due for release on January 25th. Push the Button is an immense and brooding album that looks set to once again revitalize dance music into 2005 and beyond, marking more than ten years of relevance in club-land.

Biography
Glastonbury Festival, June 2000. The main stage is ablaze with heavenly light and thick tumbling smoke. Occasionally the fog is broken by flickering images of stained glass windows, religious imagery, things that seems so out of place in front of a hundred thousand weekend revellers in a field in Somerset, England. The sound coming out of the speakers is an ever-growing loop of celestial noise, at once poundingly heavy and utterly melodic. The field is bursting with spun out people, minds twisted by a day of glorious sunshine. The track being “The Private Psychedelic Reel”, this is a signal that The Chemical Brothers live set is just coming to its close, melting down not fading away. As it snaps to the end, one hundred thousand people are suddenly let go, free to tumble away into the night to try to find something to do that will match the genius of what they just witnessed.

There are ten years of these kind of hazy memories of nights out and days spent still up, vague recollections of dancefloors or venues or festival fields. There are ten years of records and remixes; of live shows and DJ sets. Ten years of monument-sized hooks straddling bone-crushing breaks or pulsing electro crackles; of tranquilliser strength psychedelic voyages through blissful semi-conscious dawn light dream states. Ten years where the journeys morphed from a quick run up and down the country with a box of records into staggering, enormodome world tours, to festival sites the world over, undercover of darkness. It’s been that long since Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons first made a record, the same since they first spun it in a pub in their then native Manchester and decided to take things further. For those years, through Britpop, through fallow years of ‘dance music’, through blues revivals and Pop Idols, Tom & Ed have given acid house a turbo charged refit, they have made modern psychedelic music that challenged the hardened follower as much as the casual listener, the kid on the dancefloor screaming for more or the one who has flicked the radio dial and heard the number one single of the week, something akin to the sound of a heard of digitized elephants stampeding over an army of sitar players. There have been numerous records and remixes and countless live shows and DJ sets in pubs, clubs and stadiums by The Chemical Brothers, arguably the most forward looking, mind-expanding musical force Britain has produced in the last 30 years.

Ten years ago, Tom & Ed (both Medieval History graduates, Tom - Viking long hair, specs, Ed - short hair, occasionally known to grow a ‘fro, both ‘A’ students) had moved from Manchester to London. After starting out playing records in backrooms of pubs, they began working in a bedroom studio under the name The Dust Brothers, temporarily borrowed from the US producers. Initially spurred on by not being able to find enough records with the right amount of ‘boom’, they perfected a sound under laboratory conditions that they tested out on a handful of remixes. More importantly, they were also in possession of a few boxes of the green label of “Song To The Siren”. The record, their first single, sounded unlike anything else around at the time, all whirling dervishes and mighty breakbeats, like a sandstorm blowing up out of the speakers. Even more of a sledgehammer blow was “Chemical Beats”, their second record, which dropped on a largely unsuspecting public at the start of 1994. A relentless acid riff that sounded like an out of control wah-wah pedal, over a punishingly brutal drum loop, it was a record so gloriously hedonistic it was almost as if it carried subliminal control messages that won’t let you go until it hit the run out groove. Added to this, Tom & Ed took things to the next stage with a series of gigs, initially just a 20 minute set that rumbled through night club speakers like a rhythmic earthquake. It was only a matter of months after some unassuming first steps at London clubs like Sabresonic & The Drum Club that they were supporting Underworld and The Prodigy, before taking the plunge and headlining proper live venues on their own.

Through the summer months of ’94, Tom & Ed spent their weekdays locked in the South London studio and their weekends DJing, blasting out the fruits of the last five days labor in a sweat box pub in the center of London. The now legendary Heavenly Sunday Social was lucky enough to hear premieres of pretty much all of Exit Planet Dust. Featuring their first UK top 20 single (“Leave Home”, their first record as The Chemical Brothers), Exit… was a debut album that was as important in the Britpop years as Definitely Maybe, the flipside of the Oasis/Blur coin. As Britpop exploded and washed like a tidal wave over the UK, Tom & Ed were courted by the cream of the Cool Britannia bands to make them over for discerning dancefloors the world over. For years to come, Exit… shaped the way people thought about and made dance music. They were among the first to pull in their peers to work on the records, welding earthy vocals to thundering outer space backing tracks, hand picking collaborators such as Tim Burgess (“Life Is Sweet”) & Beth Orton (“Alive Alone”). Since then, they have enlisted the help of Hope Sandoval, Bernard Sumner, Bobby Gillespie, Jonathan Donahue, Noel Gallagher, Richard Ashcroft and most recently The Flaming Lips and K-OS.

History now makes little mention of the fact that Tom & Ed were the remixers and DJs ‘du jour’, asked by everyone to refit their records, turning down all but the greats: chosen to spin at gigs by a turbo charged Primal Scream, a “Holy Bible” era Manic Street Preachers; to support Oasis at the height of their powers (Knebworth, August 1996). Their remixes smashed down any musical walls put up before them – good time Southern rock ‘n’ roll into block party hip hop (the Scream’s “Jailbird”), ultra polemic turbo punk into electro meltdown (the Manics’ “Faster”); almost anything short of water into wine. Then, as everyone with a sampler and a few breaks records tried to tinker with any old indie band to try to take them to the dancefloor, Tom & Ed were up and away working with artists as diverse as Method Man and Mercury Rev; touring the world to ever growing crowds; holding down a year long Saturday night residency in London (The Heavenly Social @ Turnmills); having number one UK singles.

When it arrived in 1997, The Chemicals second album was hugely anticipated. Dig Your Own Hole (named after a piece of graffiti on the wall outside their south London studio) surpassed all expectations by rewriting the formula on virtually every track. “Setting Sun” had paved the way in October 1996, becoming their first single to hit the American charts, breaking into the Top 40 on the Billboard Modern Rock, as well as becoming their first UK #1. Followed at the start of 1997 with “Block Rockin’ Beats”, the first to chart in the Billboard Top 100 (peaking in the Top 75) as well as breaking into the Top 30 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart, and their second UK #1, it was the most concise version of what had come before and a dancefloor commandment if ever there was one. Ironically that song ended up winning a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental the next year. Elsewhere, the fizz and thump techno of “It Doesn’t Matter” rubbed shoulders with Beth Orton’s lonely blue eyed soul on “Where Do I Begin”; the elasticated funk of “Lost In The K Hole” shared space with the almighty “Psychedelic Reel”. The album hit number one in the UK and rapidly sold over three quarters of a million copies here in the US (entering the Billboard Top 200 album Chart- making it the first British electronic act to crack the Top 20). Tom & Ed’s stock rose, they became recognizable from cover stories on magazines the world over. Their first outdoor festival gig in the UK saw them take on the trenches at Glastonbury on the Saturday night. On one of the wettest years the site had ever seen, they ripped the field apart, tens of thousands of kids losing themselves, getting away from the fact that they were knee deep in mud, taking them up about as high as they could go before the night closed in and everyone headed back to Earth with the almighty crash of bad weather.

Released in the summer of 1999, Surrender was a beautifully hedonistic album that picked up the musical gauntlet thrown down by Dig… and sprinted off into the distance. “Hey Boy, Hey Girl”, a whirling dervish of a record broke down dancefloor boundaries, rocking floors everywhere, from Ibiza to American clubs from coast to coast, places where the Chemicals had previously been locked out; “The Sunshine Underground” was the flipside of “The Private Psychedelic Reel”, blurry dawn light as opposed to all encompassing dusk; “Out Of Control” was like the Best Of New Order with a nuclear missile strapped to it’s underside. This time the list of studio invites went out up north to Bernard Sumner and Noel Gallagher and across the Atlantic to Hope Sandoval and Jonathan Donahue. The calls were returned, everyone turned up, Bernard even going so far as to get a cab down with Bobby Gillespie (whose vocals can be heard on the chorus of “Out Of Control”). Surrender was their second UK number one album. It saw the band take off around the world after initial UK gigs played at painfully loud volume on a mind warping quadraphonic sound system. The tour peaked jointly at Red Rocks, Colorado, the natural amphitheatre where U2 filmed “Under A Blood Red Sky”, and at the Fuji festival in Japan, high up in a mountain range 5 hours drive outside Tokyo. On returning to the UK, headlining Reading Festival, The Chemical Brothers live show is like being pursued by Terminators – relentless, unforgiving, brutal, brilliant, unstoppable. The end of the Surrender tour saw Tom & Ed heading back to Glastonbury for the aforementioned headline slot on the Pyramid Stage, where a day of glorious sunshine instantly laid rest to memories of the mudbath of 1997, paving the way for the meltdown that was to come that night.

Post Surrender, Tom & Ed headed back to the studio and starting testing the water with by returning to DJing. Alternating between the small but perfectly formed (their own sporadic Glint parties at a wine bar in West London) and the enormodome (headlining the Gatecrasher Millennium Eve party at a football stadium in Sheffield, England) they tweaked studio tracks as and when needed, as they had at the Social for Exit Planet Dust and Dig Your Own Hole. When released at the end of January 2002, Come With Us, took a different route to the previous records, cutting down on the co-stars, splicing psychedelic West Coast pop into widescreen electronic soundscapes, welding robotic funk to Nuggets-esque vocal samples. “Star Guitar” at first sounds like a modernist take on Balearic records of the late 80s (“Sueno Latino”, TC 1991’s “Funky Guitar”) but listening back to it now, it washes over you in waves of glorious summer sound, as welcoming as the beach and the blue sea. Elsewhere, “It Began In Afrika” broke into the UK Top 10 and raced to the top of the Billboard Club Play Chart like a demented uninvited guest crashing into a chimp’s tea party - pummelling, angry and undeniably cool. Richard Ashcroft, a long time inspiration to Tom & Ed since the first Verve album, takes the already epic “The Test” and makes it sound like someone on the verge of sanity surfing a tidal wave of sound, a towering riff that always threatens to pull him under.

Tom having just become a father and Ed having just got married, they pared down the touring schedule and decided to get back into the studio pretty much immediately, working on loose ideas that rapidly became forty or so new tracks. Now ten years after “Song to The Siren”, some of their finest music is collected on Singles ‘93 – ‘03. From the rocket powered early singles “Siren” and “Chemical Beats”, almost designed to blow speakers through to tracks ever more strung out and psychedelic (“Star Guitar”, “The Golden Path”), Tom& Ed’s career has been condensed onto one album, less a beginners guide, more a set of records you know you want to hear at that point on a Friday night out, every week. It’s a collection of unarguably brilliant records that step out of dance culture and into uncharted realms of sonic experimentation, taking you to places about as far removed from the back streets of South London or the basements of pubs, even fields in Somerset, England or mountain sides in Japan as it’s possible to journey. Places that you’ll want to go to.

The Chemical Brothers fifth studio album is due in 2004. Better start exercising your imagination now; it’s going to be some ride…

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The Chemical Brothers - Push the Button