In 1995 Underworld owned the airwaves with their zen heat-seeker 'Born Slippy' and its boozed-up, earnestly ironic mantra of "Lager Lager Lager". Even had they retired immediately afterwards, the group would have achieved an enduring place in the annals of electronica with this era-defining epic, as famously featured in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Of course, they DIDN'T retire and have gone on to one of the most thrillingly idiosyncratic careers in dance music. "With 'Born Slippy' we came out with a classic," singer Karl Hyde once told this writer of their genuinely timeless anthem, which actually arrived an astonishing 15 years into the group's history. "We always wanted to write a huge hit. Instead we wrote a classic. I'll settle for that."
"We were reluctant to have it on Trainspotting at all. Danny explained to us it wasn't the film we thought it was going to be [ie. a shallow drugs romp]. He told us what it was about and we were cool with that. Then we were against it being released as a single. We had to be campaigned for that to happen. Looking back, I'll always be grateful to that song. It opened a lot of doors for us and affected our career in a big way."
Twenty years later, the duo of Hyde and Rick Smyth continue to steer a doggedly independent course, with new album Barbara, Barbara We Face A Shining Future capturing the pair at their most experimental and unpredictable (third wheel Darren Emerson left in 2000). We received a reminder of their potency as a live act at Electric Picnic last year. Now they're back for round two at Forbidden Fruit. "Journalists ask why we and other groups from our time - people like the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy - are still doing it, still doing so well," Hyde told me last summer. "My initial reaction is, 'I dunno'. Then you think about and maybe the answer is that we carry some mystique in us. That was a pretty magical time."
"In the early '90s, the government here brought in special powers to close [illegal raves] down," says Hyde. "As we learned, of course, the only way to close close them down was to welcome them to the mainstream and give them lots of cash. We watched the destruction of all that and the rise of the superstar DJ. We were saying, 'You know you don't have to do that -you don't have to be co-opted. You can stay free and do what you want.' That was always our approach."