Same clothes. New attitude

[Welsh Rich]

From The Guardian today, know there's a few fans here...

 

As befits a bohemian beat poet, once dubbed "the best living poet in Canada" by no less an authority than Jack Kerouac, bill bissett's email arrives in the early hours of the morning. It is a little difficult to understand, written as it is in his unique brand of orthography - no capitals, no punctuation, a fairly abstract attitude to the use of vowels - but you can't fault the 66-year-old's enthusiasm for his new role as perhaps the least likely name among the Chemical Brothers' lengthy roll-call of collaborators: "ium veree xcitid abt th chemical brothrs nu cd out ths month iuv herd th track ium on n i totalee love it iuv always admird enjoyd sew much n totalee respektid th chemikal brothrs work sew ium veree thrilld 2 b on wun uv theyr works 4 me its totalee awesum yes xcellent"

"He writes the most amazing emails," chuckles Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands, who discovered a 1968 recording of bissett's poetry readings on the internet, and sampled the poet's voice for the title track of their sixth album, We Are the Night. "That's what I love about sampling, this stuff that gets made and sort of pushed to the side and then it gets reborn."

Today at least, some of bissett's enthusiasm seems to have rubbed off on the Chemical Brothers themselves. This comes as quite a relief: the last time I met Rowlands and Ed Simons, five years ago, the atmosphere was polite but slightly strained. Legendarily no great fans of the interview process - "Some journalists want an insight into the technicalities of making Chemical Brothers records, some want to know what we were trying to express," says Simons today, "neither of which we're particularly good at answering," - they were both wary and rather weary of the press.

 

Simons, possessed of a famously thin skin, was stinging about a handful of criticisms in otherwise positive reviews of their fourth album, Come With Us. They were prickly and defensive about their image as "nerdy squares", and its roots in their background as medieval history students at Manchester University: "We did history and some people treated it as a joke," protested Simons at the time, clearly aggrieved that the topic of their university years had been raised.

 

This afternoon, however, the atmosphere could not be more different. Sitting around a table in a chic Brighton restaurant, Rowlands and Simons still look exactly the same as they did five years ago. In fact, with the exception of Rowlands' hair, now cropped and hidden beneath a cap, they look exactly the same as they did when their debut single was released in 1992 (as Simons once noted, despite the riches accumulated by selling 9m albums in the intervening years, "not a lot of money gets spent on clothes"). But otherwise much has changed. Once inseparable to a degree that some observers found rather peculiar (some observers finding their closeness peculiar was yet another source of irritation last time we met), the duo's lives have, Simons says, "gone in different directions" in recent years. At one juncture in their career, they claimed to have only spent two weeks of the year apart since meeting in 1989 but now Rowlands has relocated to East Sussex with his family, while Simons has remained in London. "We're still good friends, we still come together to work, but we've got that geographical distance."

 

Meanwhile, their mood, at least where interviewers are concerned, seems to have brightened to an almost unrecognisable degree: they are funny, friendly and relaxed. They are also noticeably more comfortable with their academic past. The last book Rowlands read, he cheerfully admits, was a translation of the 14th-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: "I really enjoyed it. You could make it into a great blockbuster: it's got sex and murder and violence in it." Simons happily recalls the difficulties of attempting to keep a straight face while his lecturers read Chaucer aloud in middle English. He is, he says, far more immune to criticism than he used to be. "I don't think I've been thin-skinned for a while. The only thing that's ever baffled me was The Golden Path [the Chemical Brothers' coolly received 2003 collaboration with the Flaming Lips]. I love that record so much, I was so excited, all my friends liked it, then it came out and ..." His voice trails off, and suddenly takes on a familiarly pained tone. "I couldn't understand why people couldn't see that record was great." He quickly brightens. "But I feel pretty comfortable with what we're doing."

 

Perhaps their good humour has something to do with their recent success in locating a particularly rare synthesiser - or, as Rowlands would have it, "a mythical beast" - so aged and enormous that its various parts apparently filled the seller's entire car. Alternatively, it may be the result of their unique place within the scheme of British pop. In 2007, the Chemical Brothers find themselves playing the unlikely role of survivors, the last of the big mid-90s dance acts still standing. Their peers - Underworld, Orbital, Leftfield, Future Sound of London - have either vanished or are operating in significantly reduced circumstances. While the most recent efforts by Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy ignominiously flopped, the Chemical Brothers' last album, 2005's Push the Button, entered the charts at No 1, yielded Radio 1's most-played track of the year in the single Galvanise and won two Grammys.

 

In addition, they find themselves being hailed as a formative influence on a new wave of bands, not least another of their guests on We Are the Night, the Klaxons. The Chemical Brothers' partnership with the chart-topping new rave pioneers was not without incident. "They appeared straight from a gig in Bologna, looking a bit ... sweaty," says Rowlands, "and we thought, 'Oh dear.' Then they said they'd recorded this idea on a mobile phone and got it out and played ... well, I don't know what you'd even call it."

 

"It was sort of humming, wasn't it?" frowns Simons. "Then they decided they were going to sing Arnold Layne by Pink Floyd over the top of the music we'd done. We steered them away from that idea. But they were great. They were so full of energy and confidence and ideas. They'd just had a No 1 album, they were on tour, they were full of the joys of living. One of them was sitting in the living room writing lyrics, the other was singing. It was really cool to be with them."

 

Indeed, the most likely explanation for their upbeat mood is We Are the Night itself. The duo are justly proud of the album, which is, as bissett would have it, xcellent: a return to peak form after the patchily brilliant Push the Button and Come With Us. It pulls off the trick of sounding both coherent and wildly diverse. Aside from bissett and the Klaxons, it features both former Pharcyde rapper Fatlip - last spotted mired in cocaine abuse and accidentally courting a transvestite in the Spike Jonze documentary What's Up Fatlip? - and on the album's heartbreaking finale, The Pills Won't Help You Now, an aching performance from acclaimed Americana band Midlake. "I think the song's about someone in an old people's home," says Simons. "There's a line in it about people robbing you of your fortune, another about relying on other people. We asked for a title, thinking it was going to be something poetic, and he goes The Pills Won't Help You Now. The titles for the album have gone up on the internet," he chuckles, "and everyone thinks it's going to be our big, druggy acid-house classic: 'Yeah, the pill won't 'elp yer nah, mate.'"

 

Despite the quality of the results, the sessions were, according to Simons, "a bit fraught", largely as a result of the duo's "meticulous" working methods, which he is not terribly keen to discuss: "You don't want people to hear the work, you want the record to transcend our intentions and how it was made and for people to have an emotional response." There were, apparently, terrible rows. "If we just started agreeing all the time, it would be time to call it a day," Simons reasons. Rowlands is keen to offer further evidence of the way their relationship has changed in recent years. "We've managed to remove the personal from the arguments now," he notes. "Well, there might still be that personal thing there, but I think now it's disguised. When we started off, they just used to descend into personal abuse, full-out war over a kick-drum sound."

 

"We're sort of entwined in each other's lives," nods Simons. "We did our degrees together, then throughout the 90s, we used to go on holiday together, go out every Friday together, go on tour together, DJ together. That probably wasn't a very good idea." He pauses, then reconsiders. "No, it was a good idea," he decides. "But I don't think you'd want to continue that into your dotage."