Brothers in Arms

I hadn’t expected to speak to Tom Rowland. It’s Wednesday afternoon and the spectacled Chemical Brother has spent the best part of the week confined to his bed. Originally due to leave press duties to his other half (Ed Simons), Rowland has sufficiently recovered to take my call. He doesn’t sound well, though.
“I’ve been shitting and getting sick a lot over the last few days,” he says with bizarre enthusiasm. “I’ve had gastritis, one of those stomach gas things.”
“That doesn’t sound too good,” I reply, trying hard not to develop a mental picture. “Maybe we should press on and talk about the new record.”
The new record is Push The Button. It’s the Brothers’ fifth and arguably best album and as you’d expect, it’s packed to the brim with interesting hooks, infectious melodies and beat-based innovation. The Brothers haven’t lost their knack for inspired collaborations either. Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess and A Tribe Called Quest vocalist Q-Tip are two of the more established names who appear on the record, though it’s the lesser known talents of Anwar Superstar, The Magic Numbers and Anna Lyne who provide the most inspired and memorable moments.
“I think we approached this album with a different kind of perspective,” offers Rowland by way of explanation. “We wanted to experiment with different things and different people.”
In the past the duo have tended to work with iconic figures, like Bernard Sumner, Richard Ashcroft and Noel Gallagher. Not this time.
“In working with established musicians like that we usually have an idea of how the track will turn out,” Tom resumes. “We have a feeling of how the collaboration will sound before we even enter the studio. But on this record we worked with people that we either saw live and got really excited about, or heard great demos of. It was an open attitude we had. It didn’t matter that they didn’t have a back catalogue of great music.”
One would imagine that working with an unknown talent is easier and less pressurised. Rowland disagrees.
“It’s not easier,” he insists, “it’s just different. Different in that we weren’t worried if it was going to work or not. In that sense there’s maybe less pressure. It was just an attempt to make something happen and it not be a disaster if it didn’t. It was experimental and we really responded to it, as did they.”
The pick of the collaborations is ‘Left Right’, an intense, raw, in-your-face anti-war song which is the group’s most surprising track to date.
“It’s so different to anything we’ve done before,” agrees Rowland. “I mean the music’s not that different but the sentiment and explicit direct nature of the lyric is.”
Unsigned rapper Anwar Superstar, brother of the acclaimed Mos Def, provides the lyric, which contains such lines as: ‘What’s the difference between Bush and Saddam, Fidel Castro, Osama Bin Laden/It seems to me they’re on the same team/Their hate only leaves the innocent’s blood stream.’
“We got together with him after hearing a demo a friend passed on,” continues Ed. “We had the instrumental of the track and it seemed kind of heavy and stirring but we didn’t have an explicit meaning to it. We didn’t come to him and say we wanted this sort of heavy anti-war type of song. He took the instrumental and was inspired to write those lyrics. The lyrics are all his.”
After the track was finished though, Simons and Rowland debated whether they could use it.
“We wondered, ‘Could we put this track on a Chemical Brothers record?’ As I said it’s so different and direct. But after thinking about it we thought that to try and deny this thing, to try and pretend that what he’s rapping about hasn’t happened and that you don’t agree with what he’s saying, is totally wrong. It had to be on the record and I think that it’s an interesting twist. The way it works on the album is it leads into the track ‘Close Your Eyes’ which is very emotional, but emotional in a different sense. The two pieces work together really well.
More then any of their previous output, Push The Button sounds like a record of these times. Right through there’s a sense that the album could only have been made in 2004. Even the title, and the album’s lead single, ‘Galvanise,’ have an apocalyptic feel to them.
“I think that this record, especially our writing, has been affected by what’s going on around us,” Tom agrees. “It feels like an album that, as you say, can only be made now in recognition that the world isn’t the same place it was in 1997. It isn’t like making a record back then.”
He pauses, deep in thought.
“Obviously our music has never been like a conscious reaction to things going on. But still when you come to make music it comes from certain spurs and certain impulses even if they’re very vague. I mean, even something like ‘Chemical Beats,’ which you may think has no meaning, has meaning. I remember at the time having a sense of frustration, just general frustration of sitting at home in my mom’s and being bored. Frustrated that things weren’t happening and that tune came out of that. So even something vague feeds the music.”
If Rowland acknowledges that the world has changed since 1997, he’ll also accept that the mainstream appeal of dance music is not what it was. The days of the superstar DJ and the superclub are over for now. Previously huge selling artists like The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim have had lacklustre years and there’s a distinct lack of new innovative dance artists pushing through to the mainstream.
The declining public interest doesn’t bother Rowland though.
“When we started making music, clubbing and dance culture was a sort of fringe thing. It didn’t affect how we made music then and it doesn’t affect how we make music now. We’re more concerned with what we’re doing than how the media perceive what we’re doing.”
He laughs at the suggestion in certain sections of the industry that the dance genre is in a state of terminal decline.
“The idea that dance is over and everyone is listening to rock is not really how music works,” he says. “It’s just a change in trends. Just because someone likes Franz Ferdinand now doesn’t mean they throw away Leftism. If anything people seem to be a lot more open minded now. I think they’ve got bored of insipid dance music, which is crap. There’s so much of it. With the clubbing thing the experience has changed. It’s just not as exciting, but saying that, you still find people who are really into it.”
In light of the declining interest in their contemporaries, is there a worry that Push The Button won’t be received well?
“I don’t think so,” says Rowland immediately, “but we did sort of worry how it will be received when we were working on it. We spent a lot of time on stuff like the track listing and making sure it had that album feel. I think though, that there’s a place for this record. There’s nothing like it around.”
Rowland is also critical of the records he heard in 2004.
“I’m still excited by music but I heard very little that gave me that ‘wow’ factor. That sense of wishing I’d written that album or whatever. In a weird way that lack of excitement from new music is sort of fulfilling when you’re making a record yourself that you think is exciting.
“Much to my discredit though I haven’t yet heard the new version of Brian Wilson’s Smile. I’ve only heard the bootleg versions of the original, but I didn’t think it was quite as good as Pet Sounds. The other night I watched that programme on BBC about the making of Smile. Did you see it?”
Rowland lights up when I say I did.
“It was really interesting. He was so weird. The part when they were doing the rehearsals and he was sat there so bored. That guy Darien from The Wondermints is amazing. If you had someone sitting there like Wilson was, so uncommunicative and not saying what he liked, you’d piss off. It was shocking then how he veered from that state to this real enthusiastic mode.”
Rowland stops. As he begins to speak again there’s a sense of mischief in his voice.
“You just wondered what kind of chemicals changed for him to suddenly become, ‘Wow, we’re doing it!’ It was amazing how he suddenly shot up from real low to this.”
With Push The Button out at the end of the month, a return to playing live is next on the agenda. While it has its thumping dancefloor moments, the new record is, as a whole, much more subtle and melodic then previous outings. It’ll be interesting to see how the material fits into the duo’s typically energetic and fast paced shows.
“Some of this record we would never play live,” Rowland admits. “It’s not all music designed to captivate a field of 20,000 people. Some of it is quite introspective and not suitable for that environment. But then other bits of it suit being played live. We’re looking forward to seeing the live response to it.”
In fact, it’s performing live that Rowland enjoys the most.
“That comes from the inclusive process of making dance music and always DJing,” he concludes. “You don’t make records in this isolated place. Especially if it’s a sort of dancefloor record, much of the enjoyment you get is thinking ‘Imagine this in Glastonbury at four o’clock in the morning. It’s gonna rock, isn’t it?’ There’s that feeling of how it will sound with other people in the room, and that’s one of the things that keep us going.”

The Chemical Brothers play The Point Theatre, Dublin on March 16 with special guests The Secret Machines. Push The Button is released on Virgin Records on January 21.