Underworld - 'Second Toughest in the Infants'
No. 20 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
After the underground smash of their first album, Underworld hit the studio hard, churning out gobs of innovative music. First they followed up with a series of E.P.’s that wildly remixed earlier singles into some of the most forward-looking techno music on the planet. Dark & Long and Dirty Epic/Cowgirl revealed a band riding a relentless high, epic tracks like ‘Dirty Guitar,’ ‘Thing in a Book’ and ‘Dark Train’ trailblazing a musical language far out into the imagination of the infinite.
A more unsettled blueprint emerged with their interim single, Born Slippy. The title track deconstructed a click-clack breakbeat to devastating effect, its searing synth lines climbing the psychic stratosphere with counterpuntal abandon. But it was the less muscular b-side ‘Born Slippy.Nuxx’ that would bring them their greatest fame. Used as the final uplifting underscore to the Danny Boyle movie hit, Trainspotting, ‘Nuxx’ was actually a piss-take of sorts, its rough rhythms a warehouse swelter of chains and metal riffs, contrasting with its catchy opening chords.
Second Toughest in the Infants capped off this feverish activity with a coolly controlled, slow-burn album of broad artistic ambitions. One might call it a maturer sound, the stealth runner to the beating heart epic of Dubnobasswithmyheadman. But it can more accurately be described as Underworld comfortably settling into their role as techno supergroup and genre grownups. The offbeat title is a sleight of hand, derived from studio maestro Rick Smith’s nephew, who was six years old at the time commenting on his fisticuffs at school: the “second toughest” sentiment paralleled Underworld’s own path — a path through cities and distant lands.
Cruising in, their second longplayer engages right off with the flanged breakbeats of ‘Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love’ — weaving and winding into a croaking groove, spinning out to mesmerizing piano and rapidly firing waterfall high-hats. ‘Banstyle / Sappy’s Curry’ ricochets to soft drum ‘n’ bass rhythms in a jacuzzi of warm, hushed melodies, frontman Karl Hyde singing, “Here come the Marines / As if that hurts,” before twanging to his guitar in a psychedelic country music and dub stylee.
Throughout, Hyde’s voice warps and wends, hushing and howling. As he had proven on Dubnobass, techno was the perfect canvas for the human voice — less in terms of lyrics — for the future was coming in too fast to make out all of its wild shapes — but in terms of its random access memories, its rapid-fire digital sparks, its torrents of wise-ass memetic bits. At the edge of his voice on the tide of precise rhythms was the infinite, the madcap, the unpredictable. It was where he could be free.
“The trouble with most singers is they feel that, because they have a voice, they only have one voice,” Hyde told Muzik magazine, while revealing that he was still busy as a session guitarist — rubbing shoulders with the likes of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. “They forget that as children, as babies, they made the most amazing diversity of sounds. To me, the human voice can very easily compete with a sampler, it can make lots of different noises, it can sing pure or gritty or whatever. My approach to singing is to not think about it too much.”
And a quarter into the album’s 16-minute opening on 'Juanita', Hyde answers the acid house revolution not just with his voice but with a three-stroke guitar riff. It clangs five times. As the MDMA-fueled 1990s ticked its hands past noon — his scything electric guitar echoing over the wind from Romford — Hyde, Smith and DJ Darren Emerson’s humble East London digs — its elastic and electric waves from Hyde’s guitar strings lapped against lake shores and river fronts — over oceans and across the private dimensions of electro-shocked dreamers. “There is sanctuary yonder,” their high synthesis seemed to strain yet say, a beacon to the lost and the estranged.
“I’ve always loved playing guitars with machines because I like to be able to see the human,” Hyde told Urb magazine’s Todd C. Roberts in 1996. “If the machine is smack on, you can wander all over the place. Your humanness is glaringly obvious. I love that. Meandering in and off the beat.” As Hyde recounted to me years later, that inter-link between man and machine had long captured his imagination: it even restored his dignity in a particularly tough guitar session for Terri Nunn’s solo album of 1991; discombobulated by a more traditional rock producer, at Ocean Way studios, unleashing his guitar handwork to a machine beat, he played a fast funk that astonished the room, locking on, and returning back to the glaringly human.
On ‘Juanita,’ on and off the beat, on the other side of that ocean, his voice reports back from the shore with timeless longing: "Walking in the wind at the water's edge,” he sings into the wind. “Comes close to covering my rubber feet / Listening to the barbed wire hanging!” So that one looks up at the overcast sky — searching for a winged thing catching rays — fleeting just as the eyes connect — elusive like the future. It is an attitude, a link that recedes into the future: we sleep awake again. Dreaming of love, of reconnecting, it is rave’s energy breaking up into infinity.
Voice or not, pure or gritty, two bruisers on Infants charted two different routes to that infinite energy. Like ‘Born Slippy,’ the breakers ‘Rowla’ and ‘Pearl’s Girl’ got their names from a book of greyhound racing dogs. Like their namesakes, each one picks its pace up patiently, its muscles, bones and sinews of percussion building up to an unstoppable rhythm: ‘Rowla’ growls with rough synth riffs, scratching with blades of static while Hyde gets busy on the hulking ‘Pearl’s Girl,’ slinging his sly and abstract Englishman raps over pulverizing beats and surging walls of sound. Hands down, ‘Pearl’s Girl’ is Underworld’s most explosive yet elastic anthem, a hurricane of sustained breakbeat wizardry — the strike, storm and poetry of lightning.
It reinforced a cybernetic freedom with a kind of Romford working-class faith, stray dogs, broken glass, restless circuits, and grit — connecting the “water on stone, the water on concrete, the water on sand, the water on fire, smoke...” It captures Infants’ gentle yet explosive power in fractal frames. Tied to rhythm, Hyde’s words reflect an era of immense creative energy when anything seemed and was possible. The music on ‘Pearl’s Girl’ floods Hyde into a rubber-band room of breakbeats: fierce, elemental, tempered — a madness that alone sees the truth. The speed of light crackles in our fists. And then — we snap to: ”Old man Einstein, crazy in his attic / Wise room, sun room, shadow room / Night transmitting cars across the room,” Hyde raps. “These things sent to dance across the room.” Live, his dance moves were cool in the jazz sense, and yet mad in the rave sense, a synthesis of others’ movements and yet wholly himself — rave as one. “I'm watching from your bed, returning to you!”
Combined with ‘Born Slippy,’ the two toughest tracks on the album comprise a sonic bravado that marked the years of 1994 through 1996 as perhaps the most exciting in techno’s breakbeat evolution — from Goldie’s Timeless to The Chemical Brothers’ wily run of remixes to Underworld’s electro-ecstatic freak-outs. Perhaps nothing captured this better than the contradictions that tugged the underground into the overground. From journalists and the masses mistakingly misreading Hyde’s “lager, lager, lager!” shouts on ‘Born Slippy.Nuxx’ as an ode to hedonism — in fact, it was more a cry for help from Hyde who had suffered from years of alcoholism — to the American band Fun Lovin’ Criminals taking a cheap shot at Hyde, over Republica singer Saffron, of Nigerian-British-Chinese-Portuguese descent — and who was also once the front-woman of early rave sensation, N-Joi — the eras, styles and worlds of musical superstardom flashed and collided with the authentic and the super adept…
“As the band left the stage, Huey swung a punch at Karl — but missed,” reported the New Musical Express. In a comic scene, the rag described how FLC’s frontman Huey Morgan, Brian “Fast” Leiser, Deejay Punk-Roc and their bodyguard got the short end of the stick. The band best known for the hit ‘Scooby Snacks’ were no match for the techno legends. An eyewitness claimed the “bouncer was really embarrassed, he’s a British bloke who weighs about 17 stone, and was there to help out if it all got a bit much for Fast. Thing is, Karl Hyde is only about 5ft. 5ins.” Rock beating its chest.
Hyde is in fact closer to 5ft. 10ins., but his beguiling persona proceeded him. He, Smith, and Emerson were riding on high and untouchable at the time. Such was the bewitching mystique of the toughest infants — techno making off with rock’s mojo. Like a precognition of their own reinvention road — Emerson would drop out of the band just a couple years later — Infants infused the Underworld mission with the visions and commutations of a techno hobo. Backstage drama aside, the band pioneered the wild west of the electronic frontier, giving it a soul and an infinite humanity, at the heart of tomorrow’s shattering and dizzying machine universe.
Of course, they were not alone in that great yonder. Others had broken through. Underworld looked to and fro across time and consciousness. The great difference was that they stood bestride multiple worlds through multiple eras and teachings; and they moved between and with the rhythms of those worlds. “The way improvised jazz is like deconstruction — taking a motif and running with it — that’s like a remix,” Hyde told Roberts while they stood on a highway. “These forms, for me there was like a link between Miles Davis at his best and the great improvisers, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker and to DJs. Really good DJs, they go in with a box of records and improvise their sets…that idea of when things go wrong is when you bring out your best stuff. The thing Miles said is, ‘Concentration but be completely free.’” And it’s freedom creating the space for magic to flow that turns concentration into inspiration.
You can hear it in the DJ flow that Emerson and Smith bring to Infants epics like ‘Banstyle,’ which is the Jamaican patois word for bold and risk-taking — the way Smith’s bright yet hazy synth keys flit and zip over its jungle rhythms, jumping off in a kind of dolphin dance in between Hyde’s words — flipping and swimming in surprising tucks and weaves; rippling and rippling as if it was the surface of a dream, the dreamer emerging out of the depths of sleep. “It’s got to be a first time,” Hyde remarked. “It’s got to be the very edge of our emotions again.” It is that willingness to dare, to take leaps of faith, but with inspiration, that turns every second into resurrection.
West of West, the Sun goes round. In Roberts’ 1996 story, he joined Hyde as he journeyed on the road through Arizona. As Underworld’s star rose, they would help ignite a bigger electronic wave later that year in California at 1996’s Organic music festival — setting the stage for and then leading the charge at the first Coachella. Recorded in one live take, the album’s closing song ‘Stagger’ slows then grows. Organic piano keys and stop-start drum kicks drift under shimmering synths. A sorcery of edge and emotion, it staggers like a cowboy on a trusty robot horse.
“Stainless steel between the fingers, straighten!” Hyde sings, as if he’s drunken. “Piston leaning ponytail, lick Colonel Sanders’ fingers … The naming of killer boy … Everything's going west, nothing's going east, straighten!…” A truck tire flat, a dog in the door window — Hyde and Roberts waited on the highway for a tow: “He points to two blinking lights off in the distance. We watch the glow of one, then each. Strange Morse Code from beyond. Hyde lingers, staring at the horizon. It’s as if Hyde takes cues from the full moon.” The sun and moon like a clock, new futures beckon.
Hyde had been obsessed with the American West for years, going back to his childhood and come to dark fruition during an itinerant living in Minnesota and Los Angeles in the late 1980s to early ‘90s, and as he took his road trip across the U.S. in 1996. Balancing out the sound and fury of the time, his intimate takes on ‘Confusion the Waitress,’ ‘Air Towel’ and ‘Stagger’ explore mellow techno shot through smokey diners, coffee cups, and flying saucers. Weird and sleek all at once, they round out Underworld’s convincing bid for blues of the future; and in case anyone missed the tab, ‘Blueski’ hits it home with a sweet tangle of steel guitar strings ringing from Hyde’s lonesome fingers and hands; just like the album’s blue painted artwork.
The 20-year reissue of the 1996 album included a ‘She Said’ mix of ‘Confusion the Waitress’ that took it even further, riding to the skids and slides of synth desires, like Depeche Mode’s ‘Stripped’ hauling ass on a Harley. Previously unreleased gems also reveal the band was on a feverish search for new rhythms and moods: 'Bug' moves to a snake-hissing groove deep in an electro swamp, smiling from a rocking chair as the languid funk of 'D'Arbly St' struts under the same full moon as Aphex Twin and Stevie Wonder, woozy and virtuoso; jungle rhythms spring on 'D&B Thing,' its cold Wendy Carlos synths dripping from icicles; 'Bing Here' bounces in a hypnotic repose; and 'Bloody 1' zips bullet trains by in the midnight distance; not to be missed, a 'Liquid Room' live recording from Tokyo in 1994 of ‘Born Slippy’ astounds with its late gearshift into swift skittering riffs and zero gravity weaves — a peerless wake.
Underworld’s second album sealed their reputation as the artist’s artist as well as reliable fan pleaser.* It encapsulated their functional and experimental approach to music: if it grooves, it moves; if it kinks, it thinks. It also offered a cockpit view of their wanderer ethos, their fragmented poetry, their hope and loathing. It was an optimistic zeitgeist, for Infants has weathered the tumults of the 21st century, with its gauges clocking in for the next ten thousand years and for millennia onward.
The following Pearl’s Girl E.P. would bookend this heroic phase of Underworld’s career, as they shifted gears into the bigger stage of their ascent. Dreamy tracks like its ‘Oich Oich’ and ‘Mosaic’ put them on the quiet edge while ‘Cherry Pie’ was an aching beauty of cosmic proportions, its liquid electric melodies touching the beyond — it’s one of electronica’s most gorgeous afterworld moments.**
Second Toughest in the Infants, and its brethren, showcased one of electronica’s greatest bands at the height of their powers. ‘96 was a heady time, filled with studio innovations, live inspiration and sheer creative brilliance. Looking back now, Infants is as timeless as the horizon. It’s the infinite infant.
Track Listing:
1. Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love
2. Banstyle / Sappy’s Curry
3. Confusion the Waitress
4. Rowla
5. Pearl’s Girl
6. Air Towel
7. Blueski
8. Stagger
*Underworld in fact put out two albums before Dubnobasswithmyheadman when they were developing a synth pop and funk sound. That incarnation is referred by the band as Underworld Mach 1, whereas their techno rebirth they refer to as Mach 2.
**Many of the Pearls Girl E.P. tracks actually first came out on Pearls Girl singles, and also included experimental renditions, like the electro-robo-techno of ‘Carp Dreams…Koi’ — perhaps a song title allusion to the band’s love affair with Japan, where they were warmly received — ‘Deep Arch’ — with its bubbling psychedelia — and ‘Deep Pan’ — with its slow building dub-electric cross-hatching riffs.
‘Puppies’ is the other clear standout from this side-blitz. While the alternate ‘Tin There’ played to the faster, more trance-head set, ‘Puppies’ is an elegiac number that soothes under Hyde’s almost Satanic vocals, his voice distorted and lowered into sub bass ranges — a side of Underworld that has always given their music a powerful practically Black Sabbath edge, seeping and flashing in at their most psychedelic. Building up into a vigorous rhythm, ‘Puppies’ is Underworld in miniature. It would conclude their 2000 live film, Everything, Everything, used in its end credits.
Again, following somewhat in the footsteps of Future Sound of London, Underworld’s singles coalesced into multiple innovative Extended Plays. Their Dark & Long E.P. of 1994, originally split into two DJ-friendly vinyl singles (‘Chapter 1’ and ‘Chapter 2’), contained some of the best techno ever recorded. ‘Dark Train’ is renowned for its climactic appearance in Trainspotting. ‘Spoon Deep’ is a flanged-out whirlwind of dance floor elevation, fusing the sounds of their classic ‘Spoonman’ with their locomotive bluesy techno chugger, ‘Dogman Go Woof.’
‘Burts’ is also another stunner from those first heady salvos. It is faster but undertows with a fluent bass-pulse groove that seems to roll over the metronome like words off the tongue, accented by a sped-up melodic line that seems to boop and beep like a telephone key sequence at hyper-speed, zipping by as waves from a darker gothic synthesizer wash over us and its visceral jacking beats.
There are the masterful uses of Hyde’s laconic guitar over the dubby grooves of the ‘Dirty Guitar’ and ‘Dirty’ remixes of ‘Dirty Epic,’ years later reimagined live and then rereleased as ‘Dirty Club.’ The ‘Irish Pub in Kyoto Mix’ of ‘Cowgirl’ stretched out its blistering synths to a hypnotic daze, while ‘Winjer Mix’ leaned over the void — its breakbeat rhythms levitating over a wind-swept abyss.
But perhaps their greatest offline triumph was ‘Thing in a Book,’ a surfing tidal trance beauty that builds and builds over the course of 20 minutes. You can hear Smith riding the groove live, threading melodies and keys as if straight from heaven. Propulsive too, but patient, it is the secret door for any Underworld initiate.
If I may, I will share a more recent testament (2023) to this period of Underworld’s timelessness. Driving over the Mauna Loa volcano national park in Hawaii, I once played parts of Second Toughest in the Infants as I drove my aging parents, my daughter, my wife, and my brother, over its high plateau and down into a truly breathtaking sunset. ‘Thing in a Book’ was our perfect bonding soundtrack.