The Chemical Brothers - ’Dig Your Own Hole’
No. 14 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Who is this doin’ this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’!?”
It could’ve been one of the biggest letdowns in music history. In 1997, the music industry in the United States was abuzz about “The Next Big Thing” from the UK following the fall of grunge and the growing popularity of rave music showing up in commercials, on college radio, on MTV’s late-night Amp music video show, and on movie soundtracks in everything from Mortal Kombat to Trainspotting. The hopes of every jaded music critic looking for a lens into this nebulous nocturnal netherworld of circuitboard madness rode on the talents of two unassuming blokes in London by way of Manchester: The Chemical Brothers, the original architects of rave-rock mayhem.
Would they whiff? Based on the strength of their debut album, 1995’s Exit Planet Dust, most music heads believed Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons would meet the “moment”: “Tom and Ed” were steeped in Haçienda club nights during Britain’s ecstasy romance, the hip hop bravado of the 1980s (they originally named themselves after Beastie Boys producers The Dust Brothers), and the Beatles-soaked rock of their native England. As it were, “the brothers gonna work it out” was more than just words.
By 1996, following the bruising and snarling E.P., Loops of Fury, they re-calibrated their sound a bit so it could more easily transfer from the dance floor to radio waves. This meant losing some of the bombastic bass and explosive beats of their early run, epitomized by their second E.P., Fourteenth Century Sky, its title an homage perhaps to their shared love for medieval and renaissance history; it’s calling card was the acid roar meltdown ‘Chemical Beats,’ party-pumping dance music for the raucous.
“I like noise, feedback, distortion: big, crunchy sounds,” Rowlands explained to Mixmag in 1994. “It’s the same with hip hop. If you listen to someone like Kenny Dope’s hip hop records, the drums are so extreme they sound completely fucked up and distorted. You may think it sounds awful but it didn’t happen on its own: someone had to turn that knob up to eleven. That’s what we like: brash, dirty, fucked up music.”
The Chemical Brothers attitude was perhaps best exhibited on their greatest DJ mix, 1996’s Live At The Social, Volume 1, which ranged through the dub and hip hop of Meat Beat Manifesto and Davy DMX to Crooklyn Clan and Eric B & Rakim, leaping forward, with their bass-dropping, bass-thumping remix of Lionrock’s ‘Packet of Peace,’ backspinning into L.A. breakbeat act Metro’s ‘To A Nation Rockin’’ — the message received way out West — which the b-side of their Block Rockin’ Beats single, ‘Morning Lemon,’ realized with panache — ricocheting and whipsawing.
When the media started buzzing about techno music potentially taking the lead in American popular music culture, along with Underworld and Orbital, the Chems were the most logical choice, their “noise” a potential fit for brash, rock youth. Consciously or not they also carefully tuned their antennae so that “brash, dirty, fucked up music” might go farther afield, smartly dialing back the “dirty, fucked up” just so. As a result, 1997’s Dig Your Own Hole was intelligent, sharp-shooting “synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin” music aimed right at the gatekeepers of cool.*
“Over dinner, two forty-somethings, both bald and somewhat conservative, could be overheard imitating the unique techno sound for their friends,” wrote Tamara Palmer and Todd Roberts for Urb magazine that March, reporting a trending music industry trope rippling through Los Angeles a month before Dig Your Own Hole hit the public: “‘Chkchkchkchkchk,’ one sputtered, recreating the unmistakable rapid fire high hats while his buddy played the derivative acid line ‘Eehoheehoheehoh.’”
The genius of The Chemical Brothers though, was that they had changed the vernacular of that synthetic psychedelic sound by slowing it down, stretching acid into a rollercoaster or snowboard ride through the octaves. With ‘Leave Home,’ the opener to Exit Planet Dust, they had caught rockers’ ears — and offered something far more electric than grunge’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ from just a few years before. Besides, Kurt Cobain was gone. In Nirvana’s place was what sounded like a motorcycle screaming down the open highway, “Eeeeeeeyowwowwwowowww!”
So it’s both not surprising, but also very clever, that Tom and Ed Chemical took that rock guitar-sounding acid howl from ‘Leave Home’ and slowed it down even more, and deconstructed it into something halfway between hip hop and rock and techno. “Back with another one of those block rockin’ beats!” went the first salvo. A simple twanging bass guitar line bent the pop mind into the interminable space of techno, its hilly slip-sliding riffs and squawking artillery blasts bopping the head into rave mania, and its breakbeats twirling hips and launching the body into its stark, strobing crossfire.
A month later, Mixmag ran a similar report from New York City, hiring an American journalist, Darren Ressler, and one of its best underground photographers, Joseph Cultice, who did shots for Urb as well. “Funky acid mayhem” is how Ressler described The Chemical Brothers’ new song, ‘Block Rockin’ Beats.’ Interviewing Tom and Ed in Manhattan’s trendy Union Square, Ressler pinpointed the cultural intersection that they were crossing. “The Chems knocked down the walls between genres,” he declared, “marrying hip hop beats with shards of techno and acid house.”
And he took it a few key steps further, capturing the American contradictions, between rock-ism and rave-ism. “For American rock kids who could remember the ‘Disco Sucks’ campaign, for whom ‘dance music’ represented pure evil, this was a vivid musical dream come true,” he wrote. “Whether they knew it or not, these two Brits had dramatically altered American dance music,” he observed, noting that electronic dance music, what would be marketed as “electronica” in the 1990s, penetrated the American Midwest and South, from radio to bars to nightclubs.
Several months later, in October 1997, following The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land, covered with great fanfare in their August issue the same year, Rolling Stone at long last ran a deeper dive on the “electronica” phenomenon, with another story on The Prodigy as well as a profile of The Chemical Brothers. Its senior editor David Fricke spent multiple days with the duo, peeling back the veil on their sound, noting their methodologies — digging for records with “pictures of people drumming,” to then sample, or going to New York City to buy crates of records before they produced albums, the heavy use of echo and delay as “a kind of microsurgery” — belying earnest endeavors by the rock press to understand techno’s mysterious ways.
“Electronica” had arrived. And while the American masses still couldn’t quite get it, not even with The Prodigy’s mainstream wallops, across MTV, and even less with Roni Size / Reprazent’s Mercury Music Prize-winning drum ‘n’ bass double album New Forms — the seeds had not just been planted, but the weeds whacked and the lawn mowed. So with Daft Punk’s Homework, all of these bands’ spirited efforts sank into the collective psyche, seeping into the skulls of Gen X’ers and Millennials, ready to sprout a thousand EDM festivals and Daft Punk’s triumphant reign ten years forward.**
For it was Dig Your Own Hole that cracked the crust of that earth. The album’s title had a both funereal tenor — six feet under graves, its stark black and white cover art a glorious contrast of youth and death — and a gutsy F-you D.I.Y. attitude, as in dig your own foxhole. Was this a war on the past? Or was it flower power for the future? Taking the title from graffiti scrawled on the stone wall outside their Orinoco Studios, where they recorded the album, they were also self-deprecating about it too. “The sheer force of someone going up to the wall and writing that,” Simons told The Face magazine that April, 1997, “for us it’s about freedom, be what you wanna be.”
Yesterday ever knows, for The Chemical Brothers unlike many other electronic artists took that free thinking and probed the past as much as the future. Given their interest in the Middle Ages at university, there is a deep strain of retroactivity to their musical evolution. Mixmaster Morris, the ambient DJ guru, suspected they were really rock reactionaries in disguise. But few could argue with their love of rock given the pedigree of their tastes, from The Beatles to The Stone Roses. The chemical chain reaction of MDMA with the reefer-rock of jangly Help!-era Beatles onward — the slowed down double-drum stick rattle of Ringo Starr’s snares and kicks, and the searing soul of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s riffs, provided a template as unconscious as it was overt, bringing echoes of the British Invasion into focus.
Back in Europe, for months, The Face’s Sylvia Patterson carefully built her cover feature story about their rise, profiling a sharp line between underground and fame, between bravado and humility. “Exactly,” Rowlands echoed Simons about the album’s subversive title. “That might help people with their album review: ‘They certainly have dug it. And it’s six feet deep!’” The stylized photos even cast them as a ghoulish, inky-eyed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while she cast their younger years as earnest, studying Chaucer and digging through Manchester’s influential Eastern Bloc Records store, earning them the name along with a third student pal, The Three Blind Mice.
That nerdy aspect of their persona, eyes buried in books, buried in music, is exquisitely mined over and over again by Patterson. She captures it with their ease of embrace in Sweden’s Stockholm, where their heady but raucous music galvanized the city’s university types, trading in beer for pear Schnapps. The discipline of sneaky but transgressive is carried throughout Dig Your Own Hole in the form of tunnels, and yes “holes,” as in ‘Lost in the K-Hole’: for the wily video of their first single ‘Block Rockin’ Beats,’ they appeared in the cavernous arched Camden Stables in north London, where clubbers are shown getting down as two ravers, escaping what look like a murderous, corrupt police force, reach an end run of a car chase — and are shot.
“Tom and Ed are standing at a just-constructed mint-blue bar area, waiting to be filmed,” Patterson documents of their “on-set” escapade following a major camera malfunction and the crowding of extras following a subway tube derailment. “They have been approached for obligatory autograph duties once in five hours. We find them midway through their ‘three-second cameo — three more than the last one!’” they explained to Patterson. “‘We can do this, though, ‘cause that’s all we ever do, stand at the bar with our girlfriends and gossip.’” Once again, dark, stark contrast.
While the album’s first section was a battling bash of drum-kit workouts and aggro funk-rock psychedelia — not for the faint of heart, but for the wicked — the album’s title track, ‘Elektrobank,’ and ‘Piku’ rumbled like a boxer through the wasteland of ‘90s music genres, punching them all apart. Of course, the album’s mid-shiner, the Noel Gallagher-featuring ‘Setting Sun,’ was at once crass and brilliant — Gallagher was open about his acid house days in Manchester, so the chemical marriage of the Brothers with the Oasis brood made a kind of synthetic sense. Besides, Oasis’s Definitely Maybe was Tom’s favorite album of the ‘90s as he later told Mixmag.
For ravers, it perhaps made less sense on paper. At least Stateside, most ravers disliked Oasis. But the song itself had a Beatles-esque magic to it, something the Brothers plied more and more over time, beginning with their legendary live mix of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ — The Beatles classic — to close their shows. ‘Setting Sun’ was equal parts professional rock nostalgia and demented acid hurricane. It was a compelling ‘60s mirror of the ‘90s, or was it vice versa? The Beatles’ Revolver, evolved? The reversed sitar jangles. The Ringo rolling drums. The acid yell.
“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” sing The Beatles, in their psychedelic classic. “It is not dying, it is not dying … Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void … It is shining, it is shining … That you may see the meaning of within …” Taking their lyrics seriously, The Chemical Brothers were trying to see — and that Gallagher maybe couldn’t quite reach such heights wasn’t necessarily a serious liability. For some things were best unsaid, and the rave moment, and how the chemicals flowed within or without, was a mystery best left to a purer sound; Gallagher’s lyrics remarking, “You're showing your color, like a setting sun!”
Because there was a convergence of Tom and Ed’s sensibilities with not just the decade’s Brit Pop invasion, but with alternative American tastes. Mixmag noted how even Nirvana’s former manager was jumping in on the electronica frenzy. “A&R men who once chased after post-punk bands dressed as gas station attendants are now being told by their bosses to scour the country for electronic acts,” wrote Ressler. Magazines like Time, Newsweek, People and Entertainment Weekly followed suit.
More light was needed then — at the end of such tunnel visions, at least in 1997; never mind that many such gatekeepers were not ones to cheer rave in the first place. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde indeed. Maybe, definitely, like the two ravers who were shot by the police in the ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’ video, The Chemicals were onto something far more radical. The song’s bass line was a masterclass sleight, a real dazzler, slipping The Crusaders’ funky ‘The Well’s Gone Dry’ into the urgent forward motion loop of Pink Floyd’s ‘Let There Be More Light,’ the new rave synthesis of Black and White.
Three years after Dig Your Own Hole, they would give the world Surrender — its extraordinary album cover showed some hippie or raver with his arms flung to the sky, surrounded by other fellow travelers sitting behind in wait, under a cavernous tent, or train station, or some other some such arc of freedom. ‘Let Forever Be,’ ‘Asleep From Day’ and ‘Sunshine Underground’ took the ‘60s connections in new directions, as Come With Us and Push The Button would continue the progressions with more dynamite anthems, like ‘It Began In Africa,’ ‘Star Guitar,’ and ‘Galvanize.’ As the Guardian music editor Alexis Petridis, who worked for Mixmag in those days, proclaimed, they were essentially “the best rock and roll band in the world.”
And yet running underneath, the last stretch of Dig Your Own Hole practically overstated their allegiance to the electronic music tribe. ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ and ‘Don’t Stop the Rock’ sounded like repetitive hard techno taunts at the rock crowd. Perhaps they’re why the album was only going to penetrate so far. It was “too weird” for some while being played by respected Detroit techno DJs like Carl Craig and Derrick May. And it could have all fizzled there as too tripped out. But the best was yet to come: contrasts of time and style, of night and day and the dance of planets ever at play.
‘Get Up On It Like This’ whips things into a higher gear, a scratching, wiggling acid funk number built to get the legs jumping again. ‘Lost In The K-Hole’ is the album’s deepest groover, a strutting beauty that floats down underground while its chiming melody circles to the heights in a halo of wonder. Extending their sensitive side, Tom and Ed partner with folk singer Beth Orton on ‘Where Do I Begin’ — its title and lyrics a question of sorts of where “I” end and “you” begin, a fitting metaphor for all the fusion in this alchemical affair. Fittingly, Orton was the folk singer who gave William Orbit’s ambient dance hit ‘Water From A Vine Leaf’ one of electronica’s earliest crossovers. On ‘Where Do I Begin,’ she provided a quiet intimate ballast — an Ouroboros logic.
Which brings us to ‘Private Psychedelic Reel’ — the climactic conclusion to Dig Your Own Hole — perhaps their finest moment. Taking a page from Revolver-era Beatles, it uses sitars and swirling seagull sounds to stirring effect. It’s an epic head trip through rock’s sweaty and sexy heritage, casting a spell in the prog traditions of Yes and Pink Floyd but anchored by rave’s sublime auroras of sonic light, horns calling through the pre-dawn darkness to the rising sun overwhelming in its glow and earth-shattering in its final projection on the third eye, into a future that takes us back to when the world was young. Watching it unfold in an over-the-top symphony of rock and techno —making the heavens cry — one cannot deny the Chemicals delivered the goods.
“Music’s one of the least scientific things,” Simons told The Face, waxing more philosophical about the music. “It’s one of the few things that’s closest to magic, something that’s not really there, that can’t be empirically shown. It’s like being a goalkeeper. If you take away the ball, it’s the most ridiculous thing you can do, pelting yourself on the ground. And without music, look at what you’re doing when you dance — putting yourself in these weird shapes that you never would in real life. I think it’s wonderful. In that way it’s magic.” A magic not unlike being brought back to life.
Soon after, bands like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and U2 asked Tom and Ed to produce their albums or remix their singles into anthems. But they were not keen to let rock jump onto the techno bandwagon. The Chems were just making good music, with a nod or two to the mainstream. They had made their point: the real magic was deep within. “The Next Big Thing” was not some mirage. Because in the hands of the Brothers — yesterday, tomorrow, and today, blazed in a wide open darkness.
Track Listing:
1. Block Rockin’ Beats
2. Dig Your Own Hole
3. Elektrobank
4. Piku
5. Setting Sun
6. It Doesn’t Matter
7. Don’t Stop the Rock
8. Get Up On It Like This
9. Lost In The K-Hole
10. Where Do I Begin
11. The Private Psychedelic Reel
*The sample of rapper Keith Murray’s line “Who is this doin’ this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’!?” from his ‘This That Shit,’ is repeated memorably with wicked abandon on ‘Elektrobank,’ the third song on Dig Your Own Hole.
The third single from the album, Elektrobank, also featured several notable mixes, remixes and b-sides, including a sharp remix by the original Dust Brothers — from whom The Chemical Brothers first took their name — a full-on storming “Full Length” mix of ‘Elektrobank,’ a psychedelic funk monster, and ‘Not Another Drugstore.’
**Rolling Stone deserves some credit for taking electronic dance music more seriously once the trends were looking up. It wasn’t that they hadn’t covered or reviewed “rave” artists in the past. But the overall posture was still heavily anti-techno, not in its actual copy per se, but in its lack of relative coverage of both the rave culture context and its radical music. That lack of vision probably held back the music’s mass adoption, though ultimately, in truth, that aversion also did rave a big favor.
Techno was still underground music, and while much of the rave journalism both in Europe and the U.S. was mostly self-promotional, while Rolling Stone brought some level of gravitas to popular music journalism in general, by 1997, it was thoroughly a mainstream publication, like Time or People or Entertainment Weekly. Which is why the tone of the article is equal parts serious and jaded. But that has its advantages too. For example, the bit about records with “pictures of people drumming” being helpful to their process, reveals the band’s pragmatism and self-deprecation.
Even so, its journalist on The Chemical Brothers assignment, David Fricke, clearly knew the background and foreground of electronic music, tacking on the primer “A Brief History of Electronica,” where he broke down its roots, trunk, and branches, in solid detail. On Rowlands and Simons, he also got some fresh biographical info that the dance press had missed or never bothered to ask (being fixated on the music):
We learn that Rowlands and Simons came from middle class backgrounds, if not upper middle class, with parents in important positions of influence, from film and documentaries to the legal defense of abused children. This seemed to afford The Chemical Brothers possibly enough supplemental income to buy so many records while in college which fed their friendship and their musical self-education.
Fricke also reported on Rowlands’ guitar playing chops which helps explain synthesizer sounds run through fuzz boxes and guitar pedals, creating the band’s signature sound. He also gets two solid quotes, that hints at a much richer lode to mine, that dance magazines took for granted but that the rock press struggled to capture or convey authentically — the fact that rave was as genuine as rock:
“That’s the thing,” Simons told him with pride. “We were friends before we were in this band. This all happened without us really trying to make this happen.” As it were, their rise really began out of their love of DJing together and pushing each other’s tastes by playing ace records together, as they switched DJ duties back and forth.
“When I was 19,” he tells Fricke of his raver days, “I spent the whole summer dancing out in fields to house music with 20,000 other people. If I hadn’t, I wouldn't be sitting here now. It changed my life completely.” And so it would take Daft Punk, to in a way re-simulate the rave experience anew for the masses, disguising rave’s more primal and visceral power with the hooks and fun of pop, rather than the grit of rock.