Underworld - ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’
No. 1 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Thunder, thunder, lightning ahead, hummm.
Will you kiss me dark and lonnnnggg?”
So whispers Karl Hyde at the beginning of Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Underworld‘s loopily titled audio odyssey and breakout techno album of 1993. Prior to its release no one had heard anything like it, with its blend of sawing analog synths, and surreal cut-up poetry, its rush of futuristic rock and breakbeat rhythms. By the time it soaked into DJ sets and the listening press, Underworld were underground superstars.
Formed by Hyde and Rick Smith, old mates from Cardiff Art College in Wales, Underworld had already made a run at musical success in the 1980s. Originally as the band Freur, they penned the new wave gem ‘Doot Doot’ in 1983. They even toured with the Eurythmics as an industrial funk outfit. But with each turn they found themselves with little money and diminishing prospects. Dropped from Sire precipitously in 1990, their tour a disaster, they split — they were finished.
In the aftermath of failure and a dead dream, Hyde cut out a wayward living as a session guitarist, first at Prince’s Paisley Park studio in Minneapolis, working with Berlin’s Terri Nunn. His “lightning ahead” lyrics came from his longing nights on the Minnesota prairies with thunder-heads afar. At wit’s end in Los Angeles, the ecstatic sounds of Manchester’s Haçienda scene crossed the Atlantic from his home afar, the grooving dance rock of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays rekindling his soul, from ‘Fool’s Gold’ to ‘Wrote For Luck.’* When he later moved to New York City to tour with Blondie’s Debbie Harry, he had absorbed acid house, searching for its voice, catching more words of dislocation from taxi drives to flight intercoms.
“I write lots of stuff when I’m traveling,” he explained to Melody Maker in January, 1994. “I write all my ideas in notebooks. God knows how many I’ve filled up over the years. Journeys by train and airplane are brilliant sources of inspiration. I remember flying over New York and looking down and thinking, ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’ So that’s exactly what I scribbled down. When the captain said, ‘We’re 30,000 feet above the earth,’ I scribbled that down as well. Those words became the opening two lines of ‘Skyscraper…’ Other parts I wrote in an alleyway in Greenwich Village at four in the morning…It’s a kind of Cubist way of writing. What I’m trying to do is paint around subjects instead of focussing straight in on them.”
On a parallel track back in England, Smith had teamed up with Darren Emerson, a young DJ who knew the ins and outs of dance music but who loved The Beatles as much as Frankie Knuckles. Smith had reached rock bottom, nearly penniless, but had saved Underworld’s equipment and little studio after the dissolution of their previous incarnation as a rock band. Emerson saw all of that history and journey as a strength; he dug Smith’s explorations in ambient sounds, the band’s love of dub reggae, their devotion to Kraftwerk and Brian Eno. When Hyde returned, they fused his wordplay and guitar licks with their electronics, using techno as the canvas for their chimera music, the great escape from a heavy past — their blues of the future.**
For inherent inside his voice and his chords was the human spirit fighting to survive.
In 1992, they played a legendary 18-hour set at the Glastonbury Music Festival in the Experimental Sound Field, freewheeling from a tower stage placed in the middle of a blissed-out crowd, using Pink Floyd’s quadraphonic mixing desk, and a cyclotron of speakers blasting them all to a new frontier. Underworld could write songs but they were first and foremost composers who knew how to jam live with power to the people. Dubnobass perfectly crystallized this expansive, blistering dynamic. Resurrected in many ways similarly to how Joy Division became New Order, Underworld’s despair and defiance made their story a light in darkness.
It was that razor’s edge that made their sound and their spirit so thrilling and life-affirming, because it was shaped by hardship and lived experience, from failings to triumphant rebirthings. Smith and Hyde, buoyed by Emerson’s wide-eyed eclecticism, were fiercely committed to that independence, finding a new home in the British rave scene where anything was possible, a feeling Hyde years later would say that songs like Future Sound of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ underscored. “It’s very annoying and upsetting when you do fuck up,” Smith told Melody Maker as he tried to explain the special magic of performing electronic music live, how it unlocked the spark of creativity that fueled their rise. “But a few minutes later, it’ll all come together and you’ll be so touched by a certain moment that you want to scream.”***
Twenty years later, they would recount to journalists how precarious their lives had been, how much they were living right up to what felt to them like the end of the line. Smith movingly recounted to Dorian Lynskey for The Guardian how he broke down in tears in 1990 over the lack of money and prospects. He was banging his head against a wall he feared had no other space on the other side of it. And yet it was that intuition that there was something out there beyond rock and beyond dance that might hold a key to a brighter future that somehow led them to the breakthrough of Dubnobass. Part of that was letting Hyde’s voice and guitar — his blues — into the techno fold.
“It was frightening for me, moving into a genre that didn’t welcome frontmen who played guitar,” Hyde admitted. “If Rick hadn’t been open-minded enough to let me back in and work with what I gave him and tolerate this loose cannon, there wouldn’t be any of this.” Why did Smith let rock make its way back into the wires and energy of he and Emerson’s electricity? “It was born of a feeling of obligation, respect, kindness, neediness perhaps, and started to become something that was obviously interesting,” Smith reasoned. “The absence of things is sometimes truly inspiring because you just see space. ‘Why isn’t anybody trying to do this?’”
First on vinyl, Underworld’s manifesto ignited dance floors across the globe. The outtake single ‘Rez’ added to the buzz, an instant anthem of instrumental youth music and an unforgettable merry-go-round of sound. Its every point sparks perception of a holy electric fire. Like an invisible city, it resolves into a three-dimensional matrix with waterfalls of flame and angels glorifying, illuminating the labyrinths deep in the man-machine. Everyone who knows ‘Rez,’ remembers where they were the first time they heard its oscillating strings of zipping fire; as one of the earliest techno albums to hit the compact disc format, Dubno flashed onto discmans and car stereos with equal heat. It was a headphone epic as well as a cool night drive into cities and horizons.
With Dubno, the energetic magic of ‘Rez’ was spread across a whole album, yielding inventive cuts of what sounded like a glorious bonfire burning down the history of pop music. Hyde’s lines like “Whiplash Willy the motor psycho” and “Here comes Christ on crutches” were both humorous and dark, weird and enigmatic, floating on above synth riffs or crashing through a haze of textures — impressionistic images painted onto the wild sonic shapes conjured by Smith and Emerson. Yet always striking through was Hyde’s human voice, pulling it all back in, as the slash of a guitar then flashed like meridian lights on the windshield of a car. Here was street music, homeless and homesick music, techno country music, rock inside out music, future music.
‘Dark & Long,’ ‘Mmm Skyscraper I Love You…,’ ‘Surfboy,’ ‘Spoonman,’ ‘Tongue,’ ‘Cowgirl,’ ‘Dirty Epic,’ ‘River of Bass,’ ‘M.E.’ — each song was bold in its own right and yet an essential part in a seamless nocturnal symphony — from the gothic traverse of ‘Dark & Long’ and the monumental Manhattan-to-Tokyo hymn of ‘Mmm Skyscraper I Love You…’ to the pounding waves of ‘Surfboy,’ the demon vertigo of ‘Spoonman’ and the winter quiet of ‘Tongue,’ to the London on the Thames dreaming of ‘River of Bass’ and the sweet goodnight of ‘M.E.’ — Dubno bottled the pre-millennial tech-euphoria zeitgeist with the underbelly of desperate city living. By the time one got to the romantic ‘Dirty Epic’ and stood at the pearly gates of ‘Cowgirl,’ Hyde frantically repeating “I’m invisible, and a razor of love,” you were no longer listening as a bystander. You were dancing in the storm of rave’s great transcendence.****
“We have a very guerrilla approach,” Hyde told David Prince in 1994, describing how the fusion of live instrumental playing, DJ fluidity, dance music’s “energy curves” and Hyde’s cool-to-mad origami rave moves, fed their artistry. “That’s the way we look at it. We turn up and we plug into any situation and just take it as it comes and respond very quickly.” This static-to-signal electricity from humanity to technology and back again, was their gift back to rave culture. Or as Prince connected the dots: “Words become beats become pictures become thoughts become movements become… Visual music to which everybody can relate to.” Which is rave’s transference.
“We have a whole set of hand signals and we just run with it,” Hyde explained, revealing the human core of anthems like ‘Cowgirl.’ “For my part is very physical. You can look at us — there is a performance element in there — but also the performance stresses that we’re just part of a larger band which is the majority of people who have come to have the experience. We are there to experience the people as much as they are there to experience us. It’s a conversation.” And it’s a transformation.
“Everything, everything, everything,” Hyde sings to the futuristic hoedown of ecstatic rhythms before leaving you dazed in a cloud of sparks and pinball melodies. It’s as if lasers went off in your head, ricocheting all about you and completely reshaping the world at the same time. Was it prog dance rock? Was it art techno for the masses? Was it pop music for the next millennium, its post-modern poetry raining down through an electronic ether — meteors igniting the mind and spirit?
Dubnobasswithmyheadman was all those things, and more. It was the beatnik jam session of a new generation, shattering windows with crosstalk and hums, midnight trains to edge lands, down in the gutter, up in the air, a scream to a hush in the blues of the matrix. It’s one of the greatest albums of all time.
Track Listing:
1. Dark & Long
2. Mmm Skyscraper I Love You
3. Surfboy
4. Spoonman
5. Tongue
6. Dirty Epic
7. Cowgirl
8. River of Bass
9. M.E.
*The Stone Roses were especially impactful on Hyde. As he told me in 2014, “The Stone Roses playing ‘Fools Gold’ was like a call home. ‘This is your music. This is the music of your tribe here.’ Even my British friends who were living in L.A. just didn’t get it. They just fogged it off as irrelevant … To me, it was one of the single most exciting pieces of music I’d ever heard. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m European. I need to go home.’”
The Happy Mondays’ influence on rave culture is perhaps less appreciated as time goes on, but while The Stone Roses made a bigger impression in America, in the UK, The Happy Mondays synthesized acid house with indie rock in bolder heady fashion. The Manchester madmen perhaps made one of their greatest legacies in their Paul Oakenfold collaboration-remix of ‘Wrote for Luck,’ the trippy ‘W.F.L.' version, which along with Andrew Weatherall’s remixes of The Happy Monday’s ‘Hallelujah’ and Finitribe’s ‘101,’ and The Stone Roses, presaged Underworld’s breakthrough.
**Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan was perhaps the first to use the term “blues of the future” to describe the electronic and rock hybrid of DM’s groundbreaking single ‘Personal Jesus’ and the general sound of their flawless album, Violator.
Coming out in 1990, in many ways Violator is a classic electronica album, as much as Dubnobasswithmyheadman. However, it was less of a break with the rock past than Dubnobass, and like The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses and The Happy Monday’s Bummed — all seminal, important works — Violator was still guitar-driven music, owing to its songwriting emanating from Martin Gore’s acoustic guitar demos. Underworld’s earlier albums — 1988’s Underneath the Radar — very clearly demonstrates this line between rock and techno, before they crossed it.
U2’s Achtung Baby is another important landmark of the time, coming out the year after Violator. Recorded in Berlin, it captures a heady moment in time after the Berlin Wall had fallen and as acid house and dance music echoed through Europe. Bono and The Edge were particularly influenced by these currents, as were Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton in suit. Mullen later became good friends with Underworld. While Achtung Baby represented a rock band going into a more electronic mode, the followup to Depeche Mode’s Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion moved even deeper into blues and rock roots. U2’s own followup, Zooropa, in retrospect, is decidedly electronic and rave-influenced, moving in the other direction.
One other core intersection to this confluence of blues and electronica are some of the characters involved with these evolutions in sound and emotion. I will highlight a couple more: the producer for Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion was Mark Ellis AKA Flood, who also worked on Achtung Baby and Zooropa; Brian Eno, the godfather of modern ambient music was also a critical figure in the U2 story — as he was with David Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” of electronic-inflected albums in the 1970s. Bowie’s oeuvre was of course a major influence on Depeche Mode, U2 and Underworld.
Underworld’s makeup was more even in terms of its songwriting. Most of its compositions were germinated by Rick Smith on synthesizers and drum machines. And with Darren Emerson’s DJ perspective as core to their sound, Dubnobass was more anchored in the underground pulse of the acid house revolution. With Karl Hyde’s vocals, poetic framing, and soulful guitar — he and Smith were heavily influenced by Sly & The Family Stone — it was the contrast of these often generational forces, jacked into the machine, that fed their fire.
This is the slight difference between the “Madchester” records of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, even of New Order. Dubnobass is more resolutely techno, more spaced out, more matrix-ed. By the early ‘90s, electronica was distinctive, even within the rock echoes of Underworld. This was thanks to the longer, deeper, stranger imprint of the New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even the Dallas dance scenes on English musical consciousness; rock ‘n’ roll, disco, hip hop, electro, reggae, house and techno, all fused together by many innovators: Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Juan Atkins, Grandmaster Flash, Ron Hardy, Afrika Bambaata, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Blondie, Arthur Russell...
Which brings us to the blues — blues of the future, blues of the matrix — rooted in the African American experience, the use of the banjo and then the guitar, but played with the polyrhythmic emotion of the drum — liberating the “human in the machine.” It’s a long winding story, sometimes dark, often uplifting, mirrored in its humanistic journey and hence the music itself — the DNA of a profoundly transformational future.
In one other little connection tracing these musical evolutionary expressions, in Depeche Mode’s famous 101 documentary that followed them on tour across the US and ending at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California, in one of the early scenes when the production is screening fans to join the tour bus, on one of the sign-up desks, cassettes are being given out, including Underworld’s Underneath the Radar.
***Many critical songs, each containing their own kind of magic, came out of this period before, during and immediately after Dubnobasswithmyheadman. Best found on the 20-year anniversary reissue, the dreamy house of ‘Eclipse’ and the ecstatic ‘Spikee’ show off the astonishing range of their Lemonworld renaissance (the somewhat humorous studio name for Underworld’s antics belies its brilliance).
Other gems include the magical wave of ‘Thing in a Book,’ the trance classic, ‘Dark Train,’ the trippy techno of ‘Burts’ and ‘Why, Why, Why,’ the bluesy flange of ‘Dogman Go Woof,’ the Prince funk groove of ‘Minneapolis,’ the melancholic ‘Most ‘Ospitable,’ the deep breakbeat whorl of ‘Cowgirl (Winjer)’ and the slick country psychedelia of ‘Dirty’ and ‘Dirty Guitar,’ each part of a stunning ‘90s oeuvre without compare.
Their remixes from this era are also remarkable, from their swirling galloping reinvention of Drum Club’s ‘Sound System,’ to their deep house strut on 108 Grand’s ‘Te Queiro’ and their aquatic-robotic take on William Orbit’s ‘Water from a Vine Leaf,’ to their Balearic chill on Mental Generation’s ‘Café Del Mar,’ and most impressive of all, their deep heady Lemon Interrupt remix of Leftfield’s ‘Song of Life.’
****Fun fact, the title Dubnobasswithmyheadman not only plays on the genre name “techno” with “dubno,” but Hyde told Uncut magazine in 2014 that it was his misreading of Smith's writing on a cassette tape box of the album’s masters.
Turning it a few more ways, it is also a play on “don’t fuck with my head, man.” From one angle, one could read “dubno” as “dub no,” as in “Dub No Bass With My Head, Man” — that is, don’t fake or cut or splice the dub from some other less authentic source. From a second angle, it also reads like “Dubno bass with my…” meaning, dubno is a musical style you want in your head, as in “yes fuck with my head my friend,” but in a good way of course. It also just sounds like a fun casual phrase.
If you want to go deeper on the Cubist angles of Underworld’s word games, I also captured some of the stories and explanations behind the album’s lyrics in a sidebar piece to a deeper dive feature in 2014 on the history of Underworld’s rebirth and Dubnobasswithmyheadman, the first in a trilogy of articles on the band.