The Chemical Brothers

How was it in the beginning?

x) There was history.

x) There was Public Enemy, Cabaret Voltaire, My Bloody Valentine, Renegade Soundwave, making big sounds across the universe, tearing up the neighborhood of space, beating up the time of their lives, and there was Bob Dylan, the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, somewhere between sound and word, coming down gently and driven on the sure side of song.

x) 1988. There were two students who weren't from Manchester but who were in Manchester, taking the same medieval history course at Manchester University. There was the music that they listened to when they were growing up, which we know for a fact included Kraftwerk, and very possibly Blue Oyster Cult.

x) Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, who weren't brothers but were both male, and found a love for each other somewhere inside the love they had for music. Ed, born in 1970, loved airplanes and musicals as a kid, and then loved New Order, Tom, born 1971, loved bagpipes as a kid, and then loved Heaven 17.

x) They went north to study, from South London and Kingston-Upon-Times, because of the Manchester music scene. They found themselves at their University, tripping back to the 12th Century, at a time when Manchester was the musical capital of the world--it was right in the middle of a renaissance, it was Detroit, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Liverpool, Chicago, Nashville, Sheffield, beats and minds and history and midnights and grooves and pulses and dreams and speeds were cascading all around them.

x) 1989. Tom and Ed, mixed by Manchester, studying history where things happen because all sorts of things meet in the middle of where they happen to be, looked up at the DJ's like Mike Pickering and Paul Oakenfold. They heard the DJ's bringing music into the capital of the world from over there, out there, somewhere, bringing in music that had European energy, America energy, weird energy, and saw it transform the Mancunian atmosphere.

x) They would dance in fields at four in the morning to music that was punk, dub, African, chanty, trancy, smashed, smashing, psychotic, psychedelic all at once, in the same place, and, lo, they saw that the radical could make sense to the masses as long as it was wrapped around the beat, the beat that could be safe and comforting and warm and friendly even as the noise inside and out was ripping off the top of your head.

x) 1990. It was that point in history when you didn't necessarily have to be in a band to play the music you wanted to play, or be a DJ like some moron on the radio. Ed and Tom sort of formed a sort of group, a partnership interested in an intense mixture of sounds and noises that they wanted the rest of the world to hear, and this group was as influenced by the Hacienda DJ playing records as it was by Cabaret Voltaire making records.

x) 1992. A chronological order that begins when the right pair of them gave themselves a name that was already taken. What were they thinking? Ed and Tom called themselves The Dust Brothers, after the production partnership that produced The Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique. It was like calling yourself Sonic Youth or Swell Maps or Cluster, but then for a while what Ed and Tom were doing was just a hyper hobby, folded inside the mythed up mania of Manchester. They played, at a club called Naked Under Leather, as if they really had something to get off their madchest, hip hop breakdown/breakup/breakthrough, strange house, indie dance fusion, sounds from deep, dark under the ground of the obvious and the logical.

x) "Song To The Siren." Using a random collection of basic technology in the bedroom that became a recording studio, they built up their own sound imagining a looped place where one different thing had something in common with another different thing, which created a third different thing which had something in common etc. There was the industrial, there was the ethereal, and in the gap between the two, at the edges around where they met, there was a chemical reaction where one thing led to another.

x) 1993. The duo passed their exams. They did their first remixes, for Lionrock, Leftfield and Republica. They took their Manchester, and their music, with them down to London, clubbed and mixed and recorded some more, still Dust, still Brothers, still discovering ways to pack destabilizing, anarchic noise over the top of locked, locking beats, still exploring areas where the strange could be deeply satisfying. A couple more ep's, 14th Century Sky and My Mercury Mouth, where the heroic, entertaining and the romantic clashed swords and heads with the harsh, the dangerous and the uncertain.

x) 1994. The Dust Brothers, the two industrious students from Manchester who'd drummed up Chemical Beats, became resident DJ's at the Albany pub in London's Great Portland Street. They were in one way just playing records they liked, but the way they displayed their love for music and their understanding of the way sound could fit together in novel, liberating ways was the equivalent of a band putting together their influences in the way they wrote and played music. Listeners, customers, musicians flocked. Rock met dance, dance met noise, noise met beat, and the illusory division between rock and dance was finally totally shattered.

x) Lawyers for the original Dust Brothers pointed out that this dancing town wasn't big enough for the both of the Dust Brothers, Rowland and Simons were compelled to change their name. Chemical Beats gave them their name, although Ed's grandmother favored The Grit Brothers. The thing is, they were still brothers, despite the American lawyers, and word on the streets, and there was such a word, was so good, it really didn't matter that Dust had become Chemical. People wanted the sound, not the name.

x) 2003. The Chemical Brothers are, more or less, ten years old. A collection of singles and so on is released, and displays the group--are they a group, or just a behind the scenes way of being in full view--as exactly the kind of operation--are they an operation, or simply timekeepers--that would remix both Mercury Rev and Kylie Minogue. A group--or a piece of mind--whose battles were electronic, whose intentions were spatial, whose dimensions were distinct, whose actions were bold.

x) 2005. Just when you thought they must be running out of energy....

x) Push The Button is the same but different, because after all that success, after all that invention and discovery, after all the accusations and suspicion, after the purist dismay that the group--or the fictional group disguised as something real--sold out on the straight road to crossover success, there's still a sound, strapped to reverse sound, that makes you think of how Cabaret Voltaire, mixed with The Pop Group, juiced with Derrick May, might have ended up around 2005.