Underworld, Underworld: Echoes from a Shining Future
From June 2015 to April 2016, the British techno legends Underworld performed a series of acclaimed shows in California, from the Hollywood Bowl to Pomona’s Fox Theater to Coachella. Part of the “We Face a Shining Future” project produced by photographer Chris Molina and myself, this essay and a companion photo diary reports on these events, explores in depth the band’s new album Barbara Barbara, We Face A Shining Future, and delves into new corners of the band’s evolving story. Produced just before Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, it is a window into the enduring optimism and perseverance of Underworld’s music.
“LET’S DANCE!” he yelled to the crowd.
Could have been Prince. Could have been Bowie. But the unmistakable kick drum left no doubt. It pounded like a steam train as the rainbow chords of ‘Born Slippy’ bounced off giant hanging cubes and the shirtless bronze bros of Sahara Tent. Like the snake eating its own tail, we were pushing through the past to get to the future. Once again, Underworld were taking us there.
“Drive boy! Dog boy!” Karl Hyde sang as everybody went for it, his voice echoing all the way to the back. “Dirty numb angel boy, in the doorway boy… And tears boy… You had chemicals boy… Acid bear boy… Derail!”
Angels. Chemicals. Derail. Those words could have described the scene. The vibe at Coachella was elemental and even feral. The desert wind howled and dimmed festival lights with dust. The Ferris Wheel loomed motionless over the grounds, too dangerous to run. In a night of ghosts, bodies angled and shoved. Young emissaries of EDM bumped to rhythms that pulsed long before they were born. And the smell of vomit mixed with the smell of pulverized grass as a sea of people reached critical mass.
Out there and in here, the world wobbled on its axis. Perhaps it was inevitable we would hit a glitch, jumping tracks: the crackle of electricity; the algorithms of division; the edge of human traffic… Born slippery. Into chaos. Into confusion. Into madness and violence — the collision of humanity and technology, locked in a new global trance.
Minutes earlier, like a distorted image right out of Hyde’s lyrics, a buff macho chemicals boy convulsed right in front of me, snapping and bringing up his fists, crouching like a caged animal, his eyes darting with cartoon rage, his madness echoing through my head.
“Step the fuck back!” the boy barked at me. “Get back! Get baaack!”
Sahara boy. He and his girl had cut in front. I was trying to get back to my photographer, Chris Molina, for us to go back to get some crowd shots from the rear. What grenade went off in this poor kid’s head? Was he on steroids, “roid rage”? I stared back at him. OK, kid. It’s 2016. Year of the Trump. I wanted to smack him. But I shrugged, and let it pass.
The gods were messing with the techno veterans too. It was Underworld’s third Coachella. Brexit was just two months away. It had been over 13 years since the band’s last festival appearance here. And at the beginning of their set that Friday of “Weekend 2,” something went awry with their microphone processor, swallowing Hyde’s voice inside its circuited box.
For several minutes Hyde had struggled to get his vocals going, the opening loops of their song ‘I, Exhale’ devoid of the human breath and its growl. We were in a vortex and it was getting choppy — the invisible waves. Hyde, musical mastermind Rick Smith, and touring member Darren Price, struggled to find the disconnection and right the mothership.
But it was far from over. One of their technicians fiddled for a fix, the band talking over the abyss. Time fractured, ricocheted in our heads. Karl pointed to the problem. Rick studied the console. This derail, was live.
“Let’s fight the good fight together!” Karl improvised to the crowd. “We fight evil technology, which we’ve come to love sooooo much!”
Fight, we did. The mic fixed, on came the honky tonk jangles of Underworld’s ‘Push Upstairs,’ the smash of whiskey glasses to a swinging robot groove. ‘King of Snake’ flashed to green laser beams and its barking Psycho knife stabs, the sound of Elvis Presley and Giorgio Moroder colliding in the clouds. Picked up at a Los Angeles warehouse guerrilla-style, 13 criss-crossed lasers were used just once to blast everyone’s neurons.
Then ‘Low Burn’ came with the fever, its string odyssey caressing the steel rafters above, the youth pressing in for their rocket ride. The dark halfway point of Underworld’s latest album — their interstellar 9th, Barbara Barbara, We Face A Shining Future — propels forward across ice planets and sparkling galaxies, mournful to ecstatic to falling in love.
Like its cover art, which depicts a 1960s style Barbarella peering through dust-smudged glass, we crash land on what 1990s techno stalwarts Orbital once called the “Planet of the Shapes” — as in Planet of the Apes (shapes and apes) — its droning didgeridoo re-anchoring us to humanity’s cosmic yet earthly beginnings. “Time, the first time,” Karl sings, “Blush. Be bold. Be Beautiful. Free. Totally. Unlimited.”
‘Low Burn’ calls to mind another sci-fi film with apes, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 magnum opus 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ultimate showdown between Man, man’s creation the Machine, and the Creator — or that black Monolith shape-y thing, however you want to see it. In the testy context of Sahara, it was a figurative breath of fresh air. God, exhale.
“The film that changed my life forever was 11 years old seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Karl told me last year — for the band’s 20-year anniversary tour of 1994’s alternative mystic, their landmark album Dubnobasswithmyheadman. “That was the end of everything — and the beginning of everything else…. going out and buying the [musical score] and playing [the composer] Ligeti over and over and over again. I built my first installation in a wardrobe. All that atonal music was unbelievable, and that changed my life. Growing up, as a kid, it was the big screen. It was cinemascope.”
The new album, like the flipping of a vinyl L.P., from Side A to Side B, is of two minds but one monolithic panorama. It’s concise too, like many L.P.’s from the pre-digital era. The first side is more energetic, preaching to the cosmos with the gospel of the drum, evoking 2001 meets Route 66. It’s the sound of unrest in space. The flip side drops into bending radio waves and Latin American guitar webs, Beatles-esque refractions, and electro soul resonant of New Order and Arthur Russell. It’s peace in space.
As a whole, the album takes stock of Underworld’s long impressive career, from their ’70s youth imbibing John Peel, punk, dub, Kraftwerk, Hawkwind and Krautrock jams, to their own new wave funk, acid house trance and perfect techno ballads — a prism into a century of music and beyond.
Performing live has also been central to their fire. It was in the fraught crucible of remaking their music with their audiences, along for the improvisational ride, that made them, along with the band Orbital, electronica’s first truly great live acts— a burst of light in darkness.
It’s because it requires trust and perserverance, a dynamic bond that constantly tests and tempers Hyde and Smith’s know-how, instincts and emotions, that their music always feels alive. It is alive with possibilities — contrasted with sensitivities — truly evoking and embodying joy, pain, fear, courage, despair, exuberance, kindness, repentance, forgiveness, madness, brilliance… It’s the taking of these emotions, putting them on center stage, that makes Underworld’s music a spectacle — a spectacle they weave and project bravely into the past, present and future of our own experience.
Key to understanding Underworld is seeing them live in this way, and not just in their big festival or big stage context. They excel in smaller settings as well, far from the Saharas and the stadiums. Their more intimate shows are where one can experience Underworld closer in. It’s in these moments that Hyde has often expanded their full persona, whether it has been his standing on top of Smith’s banks of synthesizers, to deliver the blistering oration of ‘Moaner,’ his famous voice-only ‘Confusion the Waitress’ in Everything, Everything (their live DVD and album from 2000), or his live delicate, extraordinary guitar work on ‘Trim’ (on John Peel and rare versions).
That warmer, quieter side has always given Underworld a more human dimension. ‘Santiago Cuatro,’ with some elements recorded in 2009 during a tour stop in Santiago, Chile, sounds like an eagle daydreaming, floating on a sky-breath over the Andes, Karl’s resonant guitar picks shooting lasers across Rick’s hazy soundscapes. Like many of Underworld’s other instrumental meditations, from ‘Blueski’ to ‘To Heal,’ it’s a necessary pause before the destination. On Barbara Barbara, the journey is the destination.
“We had some days off, and the crew all went white water rafting and horse riding in the mountains, and left Rick and I in the hotel room, and we were just jamming on our laptops, writing and exchanging stuff,” Karl told Chris for the Scenestar in 2009. “Rick went out into the streets recording sounds and working them into the tracks we were creating.”
“I also went walking around too, writing lyrics and hooked up with a bunch of artists, a community of printers who make really beautiful art and kinda hung out with them in bars,” he said — opening a window to his journalistic process. “Which is kind of a strange thing to do for a non-drinker these days. But hey, what’s a boy gonna do but wander the streets of Santiago late at night with a notebook and camera? I just don’t know; there was just something magical happening at that time.”
On Barbara Barbara, that sense of discovery pervades as if we are floating shipwrecked onto a distant shore: ‘Motorhome’ is ‘Santiago Cuatro’s’ ideal companion, overlooked by some critics in a hurry, it sounds like we’ve entered Underworld’s boyhood church, a kaleidoscope of stained glass memories, picnics on strawberry fields, winks at teenage wastelands, gratitude for the simple life, smiling at every happy dawn.
It’s as good as anything we’ve heard from Boards of Canada, The Beta Band or Beck, but walked in — the journey made, the promise kept. “What don’t lift you, drags you down,” Karl repeats, his background hums circling like sleepy honey bees. “Keep away from the dark sides… Keep away from the dark sides…” Traveling and resettling is one of the great themes he often explores, but it’s not just about going to distant lands in person; the call and journey of ideas is just as important — the waves cast that reach the other shore.
“We’d been to a radio station in Salt Lake City, on the first Underworld tour,” he told me of their ‘80s adventures in 2015 — describing his fascination with pirate radio. “And this guy had this bunker in Salt Lake City with a big mast, and he got out this world map. And people from Cardiff, Wales, from where we were from, and all over the world had heard this guy, people on ships out in the North Sea. It was like, ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ That’s what I’m talking about — these radio waves going out to the world from this bunker.”
The bonus song ‘Twenty Three Blue,’ from the album’s Japanese edition, evokes the dark sides of ‘Motorhome’ distorting in that heady bunker. A fine cousin to the classic ‘Back in the Fears’ from 2005’s RiverRun Project, it growls with a subterranean groove, striding in an endless android dream of electric wolves and sheep. Its electric guitar howls and moans, murmuring in a noir trance. No bass drops. No fault lines. “I hesitate,” Karl speaks, sounding like a psychic retracing a murder mystery. “Do you feel the cold of winter?… Between the trees… Time moves slowly on the island… Rippling, rippling, rippling… Bill the dagger. Bill the digger… Crystal dust on the flat bed… Foot steps engraved… Breathing upstairs…”
From the thunder and lightning of ‘Dark & Long’ on 1994's Dubnobass and the hazy static slashing of ‘Rowla’ on 1997’s Second Toughest in the Infants, to the scathing blaze of ‘Moaner’ on 1999’s Beaucoup Fish and the eerie bopping groove of ‘Luetin’ on 2002’s A Hundred Days Off, to the heavenly signals of ‘Faxed Invitation’ on 2007’s Oblivion with Bells, the wobbling dubstep of ‘Hamburg Hotel’ on 2010’s Barking — and the interstellar dreaming on Barbara Barbara, ‘Twenty Three Blue’ and its brethren span worlds.
You can see lightning bolts flashing in the night. Time and distance collapsing with a single word. “Breathing.” Sounds casting strange shapes and shadows. “Rippling.” Webs made of guitar strings. Static on the radio. Dust on the vinyl. Flip the record. Turn the dial. Dream away the darkness. Lasers in the brain.
Technology is making us psychedelic, crossing wires and speeding up waves. We’re here one minute, gone the next, in an endless data transfer. Our memories are dropped into the primordial soup of a robot dreamtime.
If music is a kind of spirit or spiritual language — from Latin American cuatro guitars and electric Fender Telecasters to synthesizers, samplers and software — then we’re accelerating and whipping up the ghosts in the machine and opening the gate to a psychic electronic underworld.
An underworld that echoes with ever more reality. That’s not superstition just in the traditional sense — we now inhabit a system that defies human physics and even cognition. Coders tell computers how to think. Writers program people with stories. Artists bring those stories to life. But the machines of tomorrow promise apparitions of thought and sound.
It will begin all over again, going faster and faster. Language and mathematics in all its forms — from bodies to words to electrons to ones and zeroes — will give shape to experience, to knowledge, to things we’ve not yet seen. But the question — and the quest — remain the same.
Its velocity has reached the point of escape. Mass delusion. God-like algorithms. A virtual reality un-reality. Mind control. Hysteria. Liberation. Disillusion. Disintegration. Underworld brings these tensions into balance. They consciously send the human ghost into the machine to play and to counter, to echo us back into contact with the past, present and future.
One of the best impulses of their output since the ’90s — despite their talent for speed — has been a desire to slow us back down. Songs like ‘Luetin’ and ‘Best Mamgu Ever’ remind us that thought is no stranger to dancing, but its primary driver — moving our bodies and our imaginations at the pace of reason versus the screech of the modem or the speed of broadband.
The week before they returned to Coachella, Underworld held forth at the newly re-minted Fox Theater in Pomona, a way station to Palm Springs. With a full two hours to play, they took us into deep waters with Barbara Barbara’s ‘Ova Nova’ and ‘Nylon Strung,’ a one-two anthemic punch that mirrors Dubnobasswithmyheadman’s ‘Dirty Epic’ and ‘Cowgirl’ — but wiser.
Both songs are patient and majestic. Played live, ‘Ova Nova’ wades into the shallows. Karl’s guitar strings bob up and down, lapping waves. His singing urges with a timeless ardor, kindred to the outsider soul of Arthur Russell’s ‘Wild Combination’ with a hint of the earnestness of Tears For Fears.
“Children, children,” Karl sings, “A choice, a quest, facing all that jazz…” In join female voices, repeating “And you and I, and you and I…” He leads on, “Liiiii-I-ife! Change it!” Its groove gently builds to a glide. “Change your life, change your mind” meets “it’s a paradox of choice,” keeping it human scale, a quiet compassion opening up to a blue sky.
It’s wisdom in rhythm — calling out to “everybody, everybody, everybody…”
Next, ‘Nylon Strung’ works even more miracles. Its title references the harmonic signature of Karl’s guitar. It picks things up. Its wires beat like wings that move the air that turns to oceanic waves. Rick floods the earth. Live, its bass line resonates inside you, pushing in through your rib cage. We’re floating in the deep end yet light as a feather.
“Open me up,” Karl calls out, “I wanna hold you, laughing… Laugh my heart out!” Its strings of life soar as a caterpillar bass line circles back, buckling and pulsing into a kind of Jupiter moth, taking its bittersweet time. Its harmonies group us in the highs; its lower groove mirrors us below.
Then like two clever ornithopters — winged aircraft that fly like birds — the melody and the groove chase each other off land, roaming the clouds over the face of oceans, building slowly to a release that reaches for a new continent, a new civilization, a new world.
It’s love in rhythm—trailing with “carry me, carry me, carry me…”
Bringing it full circle — singing backup on ‘Ova Nova’ and ‘Nylon Strung’ — Rick and Karl’s daughters, Esme Smith and Tyler Hyde, bind generations in a chorus that echoes into the sunset. Different every time, it keeps on changing, changing, changing while giving, giving, giving…
This perch is not just more hopeful, it’s happier too. While Underworld’s highest moments have often gloried in a dystopian raver edge reminiscent of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, drawing in spirit from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, these newer works are far brighter. They call to mind the lyrical futurism and the impossible avionics of Jean “Mœbius” Giraud’s otherworldly designs in Airtight Garage and Tron.
They cut long graceful curves. They’re both more present and far-looking— dreamy and romantic but assured — resting a fragile future in worn hands. Taken as a pair, ‘Ova Nova’ and ‘Nylon Strung’ are as equal to greatness as anything the band has ever committed; both songs follow a migration pattern that navigates from the deep core of Underworld’s organic beginnings and cybernetic dreaming to an infinite magic horizon.
That pattern is as much about the blues and soul, as it is circuits and synths. In a reflective mood at the Fox, the audience absorbing ‘Ova Nova’ and then ‘Nylon Strung,’ the band proved the point with a crushing rendition of fan favorite ‘Jumbo’ (1998), coasting from Louisiana waters up through the Mississippi Delta to an ecstatic blues groove.
Black-lit by summer dreams of Ibiza and London’s Soho jet set, it roamed. The sound system pushed its supple bass to the back of the room, everyone riding: “The dark moves fast past the window. The dark on the other side of the locked door… My thumb’s on a Tetris keyring, moving in brilliant timing… Tiny wires in her ears, slide into the city… Click…Click…Click… Telephone breath between us… You disconnect from me…”
Later they took us into a ’90s rave chill room with ‘Dirty Club,’ ambient molecules afloat with glorious echoey guitar. A special live hybrid of 1994’s classic ‘Dirty Epic’ and its grooving remix ‘Dirty Guitar,’ ‘Club’ melted away the walls, taking us back to a time when the underground restlessly danced and dreamed. As the journalist Dorian Lynskey once described Dubnobass, it was the “sound of a city talking to itself after dark.”
“Connector in, receiver out,” the lyrics go. “I’m so dirty. And the light blinds my eyes…I was busy listening for phone sex. Coming through the back door…And we all went mental and danced…”
They gave us ‘Eight Ball’ too, an even softer anthem, welcomed with roars from the audience. Composed in 2000 for Danny Boyle’s Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film, The Beach, it slaloms to a cascading bass line, swinging the hips for several patient minutes before releasing to Karl’s uplifting visions of accidental beauty.
“Today, I saw a man, using an empty whiskey flask as a walkie talkie,” he sang, the crowd singing along. “Today, I saw a man with a flaming eight ball tattooed on his arm. Today! Today… Today, I met a man who threw his arms around me… And I’ve given. And I’ve given…”
Receiving the signal consciously or not, was Underworld’s opening act Bob Moses. Part of the “Canadian Invasion,” or perhaps Inversion — along with Deadmau5, Chromeo, Grimes, Purity Ring and others — the duo has helped usher in a North American surge in fresh electronic styles. Though I hesitate to call any of it “EDM” — if only because that label has become hopelessly mired in the semantics of industry politics and reflexive haters — they’re part of a mass adoption of electronics and computers in making music, period. And yet its always what artists do with tech that matters.
Getting tribal with their ‘Like It or Not’ and the deep house blues of ‘Tearing Me Up,’ Bob Moses were an inspired choice for Underworld — bridging the cross-talk between generations and continents — their live rendition of ‘Far From The Tree’ was especially powerful, band member Tom Howie’s heady chants swirling like night birds caught in a strobing spotlight — a flock of echoes headed over dark delta wetlands toward the dawn.
As if hearing the call, Underworld responded with one of the most interesting performances of the night — a fusion of Underworld’s ‘Ring Road’ from 2007 with 1992’s ‘Minneapolis,’ which was one of their earliest songs as a reformed techno band. Built on Karl’s funky guitar licks, it’s an homage to Prince and Paisley Park, when Karl was a session musician there, scratching out a living in Chanhassen, Minnesota, watching thunderheads roll in on the prairies, inspiring the lyrics to another Underworld classic, ‘Dark & Long.’
It was a fusion of distant worlds and times. ‘Ring Road’ explores a hectic everyday scene in Romford in outer London pre-2008 Great Recession, near their home county of Essex. “There’s a blue sky over me, but the fear is on me,” Hyde slings — describing working class people embattled by suits and dodgy development schemes. “Get in, get out, get what you want, get out. It’s the short term. The long term can look after itself. Unless you happen to be living here…”
Derided by some critics, ‘Ring Road’ is an idiosyncratic lament. It takes time to register. Written in 2007 a year before the Wall Street meltdown, it was in fact prescient. Underneath, at the Fox Theater, years after the free fall of the world economy, the uptown beat and bass line of ‘Minneapolis’ levitated its bright organs, its notes reminiscent of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition,’ sparking up the motherboard, giving sly high words righteous flight.
“I got my back to the rail at the end of the alley,” Hyde reports, seeing things ignored, chronicling the swirling of forces and rhythms that tug and pull his beloved London in tricky new directions. “By the by-pass, you just might see me. Scratching. All these things. Inking it out… Deliver us from temptation.”
Combining the English blues of ‘Ring Road’ with the Upper Mississippi soul of ‘Minneapolis,’ Underworld were reconnecting rock and techno’s roots, putting circuits back into the delta of a wider electric stream.
It’s what Karl calls, “the Essex groove.”
Flipping the record, delivered the long term. It was in humble Essex outside London, home of their Lemonworld studio, that they reinvented themselves. When Underworld crashed on the rocks in the late ’80s, Rick could’ve moved on without Karl. They were being drawn to the acid house revolution in the U.K. at the time, and that culture was reflexively hostile to traditional rock and singers. The electric guitar was verboten.
Yet Darren Emerson, the young DJ who Rick had enlisted and would be part of the band for ten years — a major fan of the Beatles and Frankie Knuckle’s vocal machine soul — was open to interesting things. So they made Karl’s humanistic presence and contributions alternative distinctions.
“The industry told us to get rid of the singer if we wanted to make dance music,” Karl told me in 2014, recounting how their hellish crash and then rebirth in the ’90s almost “killed” them. “They told us to get a drummer if we wanted to keep the singer. The industry completely had it utterly wrong.”
That flip side to what would work in popular music — the contradiction that mystified the industry and the underground alike — is a human story above all. Smith’s wife, who was an “Essex girl,” came from a musical family, and she would be critical in urging Rick and Karl to reconcile their past.
“We were in Essex, a town called Romford, and that is really where the people who lived in the East End of London who were bombed out in the Blitz, places like Romford was where they were moved to,” he explained to me of their home base and its hardy roots from World War II. “There is this very powerful strong sense of community — entire streets that were moved out to these dormitory towns and there’s a powerful sense of can-do spirit.”
Retransmitting that Essex locus and logos in a colloquial code that reads romantic and pragmatic at once, he says: “There was a kind of, ‘Yeah we can do that.’ ‘Have you ever done it before?’ — ‘No, but we can do it.’… The attitude: ‘Well if you got a problem, we’re going to put the kettle on, and put a cup of tea on, and I’ll call my mate who’s got a van.’… There was always a solution, and this very powerful energy that’s down there — that was positive, extremely positive in the face of any kind of adversity you like.”
“And that was an important catalyst, an important place for us to be making our music — for us to be without money, for us to be in debt, for us to be in fear of losing our homes, for us not to be able to feed ourselves …. It was never too much problem down there: ‘Nah, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about that. Everything’s going to be fine.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Ah my mate who knows somebody who can help you, and it’s going to be alright.’”
“It was the people of East London who gave us their love, their support, their fellowship, and they took us into their tribe, and that really was the energy behind Underworld,” he concludes.
But for a band with such natural creative instincts, they also needed a revolution by DJs and abstract Black musicians to create the moment they had been waiting for all their lives. They were in the dark until a bright blast came back from America in the form of Chicago house and Detroit techno.
“We were attracted to certain things,” he says. “We were attracted to machine music. We were attracted to human and machine music. We just didn’t know where there was. We had friends like the Thompson Twins who were clearly being influenced by the dance music of America, and they were our mates and even they didn’t tell us about club culture. Can you believe we went through the whole of the ’80s not knowing about club culture?”
“And yet, there it was,” he says, retracing his once disbelief into true belief.
Disco in the form of acid house had finally been so deconstructed — acid dripped until all that was left was a burning smoking electric core — that a new frontier had arrived. Human Resource’s Belgian hardcore techno boast, “I’m the one and only dominator… I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher,” was nothing like John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever.
And yet they came from the same family. Underworld drew those lines through their history and their being. They are not rock. Nor are they rave. They are both. And neither. All at once. They are Underworld, and that is something in many ways far stranger and even more profound.
Language and its power is at the heart of that koan. Karl, who reinvented the concept of a rock “frontman” by blowing it up, was something no one had ever seen before. “I used to play Iggy Pop live concert footage because he was the real deal,” Hyde told me in 2013, recounting his stint touring with Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in 1991.
“There was a bunch of really good people on that tour,” he recalled fondly. “I’d stand on the side of the stage and soak it up. And years later of course, I regurgitated some of that stuff — mashed up with James Brown, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Prince, go-go dancers, and everything else I’d ever seen with people throwing themselves with great abandon.”
“It all became part of my vocabulary as I moved on stage,” he added.
That aggregation led to its own freeform style, which in some ways was no style. His dancing is like live experimentation or unending riffs on an echo. It’s like feeling the “electricity run through you…woohoo!…hallelujah!” — as he sings on ‘Peggy Sussed.’ As a writer, he absorbed what was around him too, lightwaves and sound waves, on airplanes and trains, in cities and streets, countries and geographies, in fields and on dunes, Sun and Moon.
“I’ve always been an observer of people,” Karl told me back in 2013. “I’ve always listened in on conversations and amalgamated them into my lyrics and documented the topography of the places I’m going through.” The timbre and elasticity of his voice — caught and echoed in countless directions by Smith — fractals out all those peoples and places.
From the earnest deeps of his singing on ‘Dirty Epic’ to his deep prayers on ‘Faxed Invitation,’ Hyde’s voice ranges from the boyish hopes of a bard run ragged, to the elfish wiles of a street poet escaping the crushing emptiness, to the world-weary baritones of a nervy Elvis. Brian Eno lovingly bared Hyde’s soulfulness on ‘Slummin’ It for the Weekend,’ while Peter Heller escalated his woohoo’s to the heavens on his immortal remix of ‘Peggy Sussed’ — Hyde’s voice spilling like ink into deep down places.
Karl’s pen is his compass and his gaze. It has kept him alive, each scrawled letter forming the sharpest edge of an Essex groove: “Vague stories,” is how one of my old raver friends, Mark Trance, once described it — “with dreamy landscapes and fleeting images from the corner of your eye that slip away when you look directly at them. Kinda like the future.”
Our future is haunted by the alienation of the past tied to the hope for connection in the present. Like the figure in Joe Higgs’s reggae song of struggle, ‘Steppin’ Razor,’ Karl moves through space and time, often the “dirty” back and forth between the environment and the inner self — the “razor” tempered and honed through the crucible of lived experience.
Higgs’s reggae songs and stories similarly track the sights and sounds of his Jamaica, Trench Town’s “vibrant sound that is to be heard in the ghetto,” as he once described it — the “confrontation of sound.” It’s this confrontation and fractured-ness — the propulsion and the reception — that helps give Underworld’s music an exhilarating howl and a bittersweet humanity.
“I’m like a stepping, walking, cutting, flicking, jumping, chopping, walking,” Higgs’s ‘Steppin’ Razor’ goes — the song also an inspiration for one of the alternate recording names for Underworld. “I’m dangerous, I’m dangerous… I’m like a flashing laser and a rolling thunder, I’m dangerous, dangerous…” Borne from a humble childhood in the Black Country of the English Midlands, like Higgs, Hyde zigs and zags through time’s broken landscapes.
Sometimes, they are like garbled signals that come in and out of phase or focus, a razor cutting through the waves — it’s that bunker in Salt Lake City with a big mast transmitting over the Rockies and across the Atlantic. It’s the flashing laser and the rolling thunder, the “stepping razor.” His words are not as easy to recall as say Bowie’s because they’re more distorted — one could accuse Hyde’s lyrics and defocus-focus poetry as too arty for its own good. And yet, it immerses you — making you the focus — not Hyde.
Like a knife, his stream of consciousness cuts through the city and the night. And when you look directly at it, as Mark says, it flashes by. Certainly much of it, intentionally, glides over us, as impressions along side. But like Picasso or Monet, the more warped, the more it’s like time travel. Like seeing over the tip of a wave into another dimension. Like a ship in a storm.
“Looking out the window of a moving vehicle has always been like a film to me since I was a little kid,” Karl says. “Traveling with my dad at night, and the windshield becomes a movie screen. You’ve got the dashboard and the radio dials and it’s all these magic lights — you turn the radio on and it becomes the score to all the things that come through the windshield.”
It’s like he’s tuning the radio to receive a higher message. And like the windshield, he filters reality with a wide lens too. Each word or phrase is a scratch or etch on a panoramic photographic plate. Light escapes through the negative cuts in the darkroom, washing the image into focus. All of his songs back-project in this way onto the mind, teleporting us to a more conscious place and a more even perception. Like cinemascope.
Since 1999, he has been journaling publicly via his daily blog, including daily photos of his travels and haunts. I Am Dogboy: The Underworld Diaries, a book memoir of Karl’s life that builds off his continuous wordplay, comes out later this year on Faber & Faber. In 2013, he also put out an excellent solo album, Edgeland, and produced a companion documentary film about London’s northeast perimeter along the River Thames, called The Outer Edges.
“Words can evoke pictures,” he says of his synesthetic gaze, the flare of the collision of the senses into moments of brilliance, the scan lines of a video screen mixing with the stripes of his shirts, and back out to the restless sea, crashing and crashing. “Words like photographs can reignite memories, like a smell. But for me, words open up these worlds, little notations. ‘Do you remember the blue jacket?’ ‘Oh!’ — and a whole summer opens up.”
That’s how reality feels, a blur with punctuations and bursts of awareness. Echoes. Pattern recognition. He often repeats words that are like echoing questions that morph into affirmations, rippling… His lyrics are not fully comprehendible just like the future is not fully comprehendible.
Neither is the present for that matter, or the past. It’s constantly unfolding. That’s why it works. We used to think we understood the world. Then came computers, the end of the Cold War, 9/11, a global economic meltdown, and much more. A baffling ocean. Confusion trumped enlightenment.
This is the context that Underworld enlightens, whether in the plains of Minnesota, the space-ness of L.A., the skyscrapers of New York, the neon futurism of Tokyo, the raves and alleyways of London, or a warm teapot in Essex — from here, then there, they pioneered a new voice.
The power of an idea, can be hard to measure. Except for those who get to see it arrive and grow in their own time. That was rave culture. That was Underworld. That was the gift of the ’90s and everything it promised.
“This is the most ancient form of the sign,” Hyde says on Barbara Barbara’s sexiest moment, ‘If Rah,’ a British slang term for rich party kids. At the Fox Theater, ‘Rah’ attacked with metallic scythes, its bass line popping back smirking emojis, building to a flame-throwing Neu!-inspired twang — a dramatic attitude ready to rumble.
“And you don’t look old enough,” Karl sings, “To have suffered so much. What do I know?…Crisscross angel…People, struggle…Have a good time!…Passion die!…In a perfect storm…Illuminate…Luna, luna, luna luna! Luna, luna, luna, luna!…”
Next came ‘Juanita,’ the winding epic start to their classic 1996 album, Second Toughest In The Infants, which got an expansive remaster and reissue last fall. Twenty years later it has lost none of its power. At the Fox, it pumped with an energy that made the whole room fly.
“Your thin paper wings,” Hyde breathed, “In the wind dangling / Your sun / Fly high / Your window shattering…Handheld candle sugar boy…Your Coca-Cola sign rattling…Walking in the wind at the water’s edge, comes close to covering my rubber feet, listening to the barbed wire hanging…”
And in answer, from one generation to another, an electric guitar riffed across space and time, echoing over the sand and water, through the cables and wires, an old-fashioned sound leaping back into an electric present.
Re-invigorated by the new album and touring some of their ’90s oeuvre like ‘Juanita’ and ‘Dirty Epic,’ Underworld are already at work on new material. But instead of retreading, Rick and Karl are always onto new ground.
As is clear from Barbara Barbara, it’s still them, but without the weight of the past. They recently revealed some of the witty games that they’re bringing to their writing. One technique Rick and Karl explored on Barbara Barbara, was the circular phrasing of hymnals, drawing on children’s storybook rhymes and songs, finding the timeless in the simplest of patterns and timbres.
You can hear it on ‘Ova Nova’ and ‘Nylon Strung,’ and in swirling cries and choruses on ‘I, Exhale’ and ‘If Rah.’ It’s a re-balancing of sorts between Rick and Karl. Their new phase is more “vocal” in Rick’s accounting than some of their past work. Karl’s guitar forms the basis of new rhythms and harmonies more often as well, as evidenced on the album’s closing act. Rick has also plugged back into analog modular synthesis, sparking new connections.
There are many things that make Underworld one of a kind. The mixture of impressionistic vocals with electronic sounds is one of them. Their roots in traditional instruments combined with the state of the art is another. They're wide open-mindedness about genre, and their range, unmatched. But maybe the most unique thing about Rick and Karl is that they’re the first great duo to bring all of these elements together. They’ve been a trio, yes, but it’s the bond between Rick and Karl that is Underworld.
It’s a partnership that has endured nearly four decades of ups and downs with a deep commitment to art — a heroic feat in human behavior. It’s as if they’ve reached musical mastery on the level of telepathy.
Less in the spotlight is Rick. He masterminded the music for the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. His instrumentals alone make the case for Underworld’s uncompromising vision, from ‘Rez’ to ‘Thing in a book’ to ‘Cherry Pie’ to ‘Kittens’ to ‘Peach Tree.’
“When I watch Rick, it reminds me more of a Miles Davis approach,” remarks Karl. “Which is ‘learn your instrument really well.’ Then you can start ripping things out. ‘Now let’s see what happens, now that we know there’s a backdoor that you can go through’ — that you can mess with something and get it to screw up, and the screw up is really special.”
Using the ARP 2600 analogue synthesizer, Rick happened upon the distinctive synth delay patterns of 1993’s ‘Rez,’ which would also help inform the groove of ‘Cowgirl,’ both undisputed classics of electronic music. “What happens in the moment, you better record it then, because it’s not going to happen again,” he explained to the BBC’s Shaun Keaveny in 2014. “You can take pictures of it and do what you like, but you put the cables back in the same place and it just doesn’t sound the same.”
And so Smith woke and released a tempest trapped within the ARP: ‘Rez’ sounds like a piano literally come to life, the joyful sound of music freed from wood and metal. Its every point sparks perception of a holy electric constellation. Like an invisible city, it resolves into a three-dimensional matrix with waterfalls of fire and angels glorifying, illuminating the labyrinths deep inside the man-machine.
What was happening in the ’80s and ’90s, was simply this: electronic music was the sound of the interaction of humanity with the machine; DJ-ing was the programming of the narrative of that human transformation; and raves were the gathering of humanity to hear that great story told, to absorb it, embody it, understand it, and pass it along, pulsing into the horizon.
Underworld took that to the next level as both songwriters and as live act. Not only did they explore the human-machine interface in their own way, but they put that knowledge into words, tics and idiosyncracies — so that it better reflected who we are — humans and cyborgs — chimeric ideas just on the tips of our tongues, waves reflecting the other, in and out of phase.
One of the best descriptions I’ve read of their breakthrough Dubnobass was by an iTunes reviewer, who simply wrote that it was “Blade Runner for the dance floor.” And what is Blade Runner, other than a dark myth about the importance of recognizing humanity in both humans and machines?
Because we too often fail to remember we humans created machines, and that they’re just strange and powerful reflections of who we are: magical reinterpretations of human nature, of our foibles, heroics and more.
The power of that reviewer’s statement isn’t just about futuristic dystopia, androids, flying cars, or rainy dark streets as a human hallucination. The great irony in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film is that robots, or Replicants, have a sell-by-date. They live shorter lives than humans, a fate they rage and rebel against with both tragic and uplifting consequence.
It’s how the story plunges us into machine consciousness — both a prison and a dream — exploring the limits of our lives through the infinite field of the “human” experience. It’s Roy Batty the poet Replicant dying with a dove released from his hands, his memories like “tears in the rain.”
Which is the opposite of today’s obsession with Artificial Intelligence (or A.I.) and the “singularity,” the author Ray Kurzweil’s search for the fountain of youth: the assumption that robots can live forever. And yet the power of Blade Runner is that it says how we face death is less important than how we face each other. No one escapes the future. Because we can never escape ourselves. Robots are us in a new form, as inhuman as we are.
It’s about blood and tears, opening the heart and daring to wonder, not just pushing buttons, writing code or looking into glowing screens. That’s what Underworld reveals. Electronic music is a human mirror.
“We don’t wait for a space or a time or a moment,” Rick told KCRW’s Jason Bentley during a live in-studio session before Coachella, describing their creative process. “A lot of it is about clocking on, logging on, and just trying to express honestly how you feel in that moment whether it’s joyous or sad, whether it’s positive or negative.”
Their most famous song, 1995’s ‘Born Slippy. NUXX,’ is a chronicle of pure crash and drive. With Rick’s angelic piano and shuddering beats, it became an anthem for defiant good times. And yet after the haze and the vomit, clarity was on the other side.
When you listen closer, you realize it’s a tale of addiction. It’s Karl getting wasted with strangers, his ego disintegrating, crashing from tenderness into agony and crying for help.
“And remembering nothing boy,” he sings, “Shimmering and dirty… Squatting pissed in a tube hole… I just come out of The Ship… Shouting, ‘Lager, lager, lager, lager’…Shouting, ‘Lager, lager, lager, lager’…”
Hyde would survive, going sober at the end of the ’90s. That’s why Underworld is so important to music. Because they found a way to endure, heal, and to continue to tell stories about their “nostalgia for the future” — to borrow a Brian Eno phrase — yet moving onward, long after ravers turned to drink and 9/11 kids discovered that a transformational beat might change the world, our flaws running deep, deep, deep into our phones and computers.
It’s musical echolocation, helping us imagine where we’re going, not just where we are or where we’re from. It’s about how far we’ve come and how the “human” will forever shape the future even when we’re gone.
A fire storm in a crystal ball, is what it looked like to me.
Underworld walked out onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl last June to their ‘Most ‘Ospitable’ mix of ‘Dark & Long.’ Its melancholy synths filled the summer air as the Sun set, giving the band a touching human frailty. The letters “underworld” appeared bold behind them, emblazoned on a black field as they waved to us.
The crowd cheered in response, welcoming them back once again, the techno artists who had come to L.A. in the early ’90s with revolutionary records that helped sustain the Western underground, who played at the historic Organic music festival in 1996, which would help pave the way for the first Coachella, where Underworld would again lead the charge.
The brainchild of promoter Philip Blaine, Organic was thrown in partnership with Insomniac and Goldenvoice — and Daft Punk’s former U.S. manager at the time, Gerry Gerrard (Chaotica agency), who also helped break Nine Inch Nails. Other producers included PR maven Sioux Zimmerman, who along with Gerrard and Blaine helped bring in other big British electronic bands like Meat Beat Manifesto, Orbital, The Chemical Brothers and The Orb.
“Creatively we knew we had to do it,” Phil told me for the L.A. Weekly last year, noting that 1996, when they were all available, was a fallow year for Glastonbury, meaning they could play for a steal. As if a hole through the Earth from London to L.A. had opened briefly before it closed again, they jumped for it. “It was definitely a unique moment in time.”
So their performance at the Bowl last summer, organized by Bentley for the KCRW World Festival — with admirers like Trent Reznor in attendance — was a homecoming of sorts, another great echo of their pioneering spirit.
Kicking off with ‘Mmm Skyscraper I Love You,’ the video artist Toby Vogel (part of their TOMATO design collective) channeled their essence up onto the Bowl’s giant video monitors in a way few could have imagined, turning Karl and Rick into inky ghosts, with deep shadows and bright flames burning off their faces and frames.
It was like an inverse Hell — in the best sense, for that was once what they had been through — revealing a psychic journey in a photo-negative universe — a bat-vision, a world of echolocation.
It was as if the ghosts of the future were one and the same with the ghosts of the past. That music is scripture from the spirit world. That the timeless is the natural order of the human spirit. So that at the Bowl, time in waves washed off Rick’s shoulders or blew across Karl’s face, their expressions alternating across the full spectrum of human fates.
So you get fire with a razor calm at its heart — the eye of the perfect storm. Nowhere is this more evident than watching a dancer in the zone. Hyde’s dancing is cool, in the jazz sense of the word.
In a crouch, knees slightly bent, he leans back, then leans in, weaving side to side, his arms wading and paddling with the groove. It’s the Prince part of him. But unlike Prince, Hyde doesn’t make it seem like a performance. He would be dancing like that even if we weren’t there.
He’s a great dancer because he’s just being himself.
That, is rave.
Together, Underworld unite the electrical currents between left and right, acoustic and electronic, man and machine.
Smith, the storm-bringer, is rare because he’s not just a brilliant musician, taught piano at an early age. He’s an engineer too, from a time in the ’80s and ’90s when people were still working it out, wrestling with cables and manuals, and big unwieldy synthesizers.
He had to be.
He had to break down the machine and in an almost supernatural way, show it, what it could do, like breaking a horse.
That kind of persistence and tactile knowledge — the warmth of the human touch — that’s why songs like ‘Spoonman’ feel like living things. Struggle is in their musical DNA.
At the Bowl, it was thrilling to see each song introduced with its name projected behind the band in ghostly type — ‘Spoonman’ was one of the spookiest, appearing in red, like a demon born inside synthesizer circuits and computer code, deep in the bowels of the Machine.
Hyde’s voice gurgled with “Whoooooa, Tuuuessday,” his loopy “Talks to God” lyrics projected and fading in slow, and then hovering over a dark sea. Each song was like a robot child with its own distinct personality, filling the Bowl with a hypnotic mystique, conducted by human ingenuity.
Unrelenting, Hyde and Smith rode the waves together, poised right on the edge of the crest: Smith steering with his Solid State Logic L500 console, its screen and buttons aglow; Hyde gliding on his flank, leaning down, opening up, threading in and out, sidewinding the groove, his voice guiding us.
Vogel’s filters stripped away past and future in a kind of visual acid that felt like sorcery, stretching time in the now with spectral gusts of wind. ‘Pearl’s Girl’ was pure lightning — its fractured breakbeats pummeling Hyde, who flashed between worlds, his eyes looking up like a madman.
“Old man Einstein, crazy in his attic,” he slings back. “Wise room, sun room, shadow room, night transmitting cars across the room, these things sent to dance across the room. I’m watching from your bed — returning tooo youuu!”
Speaking with the dead, his words as fierce as Smith’s volts, everything collapsed and then pulsed out, again and again, people freaking out, punching, kicking, going “crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy…”
The mists clearing up some after the maelstrom, Underworld brought it back: “We’ve been touring on the other side of the wet stuff over there,” he told the Bowl in the space before they followed up with their call to rebirth, ‘Dirty Epic’ and ‘Cowgirl’ — “an album which kinda changed our lives 20 years ago, an album called Dub-no-bass-with-my-head-man.”
The crowd cheered as he paced a little. “You know,” he continued, “Revisiting it wasn’t something we really wanted to do. Because I wouldn’t want to go back there too much. There’s a lot of stuff back there, that hurts. But it turned out to be one of the best things we’ve ever done probably.”
“My friend and I,” Karl said, pointing to Rick, “We discovered we were actually really good friends. We actually liked each other.” He laughed. “And it was good to be together. Yeah, 36 years, that’s not too bad.”
The Bowl cheered again, louder. “One of the things, looking back, there was a level of gratitude, that we were still alive. After experiencing some of the things that had gone into the lyrics of this. The way I could crawl off the streets with some dark stuff and my good buddy here could turn it into something really beautiful.”
There it is. Time transcends machines. Humanity is the medium. It strikes me, that our memories are hallucinations from a world that’s never coming back and yet visions from a future that’s one with the past. Maybe it’s all in reverse. Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe the night is simply long.
The imagination burns through the debris of the past to the present to the future and back all over again, rolling forward in a never ending dance of perception. We’re both the dust and the wind, traversing bytes and “wires and energy.” Because in front of us, in light and darkness, is each other.
And here was Underworld, decades on, facing a new dawn at the edge of another tempest, showing the way. Still well ahead of their own time, yet ever present. Bringing us together. Determined. Optimistic. Human.
Flip it again and put it on. I try to listen more carefully than before. At the Fox Theater, it begins with a rocking backbeat, Underworld’s ‘I, Exhale’ calling us forward, everyone getting down, bright white lights shining, lowering onto our faces.
Its bass line slides high and low, Hyde coming on like a boxer, his English accent drawling to a curl, “Stare, stare like a bear, then you’ll know me anywhere!” “Big blue!” “Blah blah, blah blah blah…”
People pump their fists, grinding in, keys turning. Blow-torched distortion and metal twisting. “Hiding in the dark,” he says. “Sheltered from the winds. Hold hands.” His chant goes up in a dreamy whirl.
“Spangled top,” he goes. “Leather jacket. Run your fingers through your hair. We’re nearly there…Towers. A light. A globe over the horizon.”
Starting with ‘Rez,’ Underworld have always been there, on the horizon. Younger heads gather now too, however scattered. I see them at the Bowl, at the Fox, at Coachella — all searching, searching, searching, and listening.
“There is a sound on the other side of this wall,” Hyde sings on ‘Juanita’ from 1996. “A bird is singing on the other side of this glass. Footsteps. Concealed. Silence is preserving a voice…”
One of the great stories surrounding Underworld’s latest phase was the naming of the new album. The phrase “Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future,” was what Rick’s father said to his mother not long before he died. They had spent 62 years together and he knew his end was coming.
Those words reminded the band, Rick told The Guardian, “that shit is going to happen…but go on, forward, face up, it’s going to be good.” Everyone at Coachella needed those words that Friday night, the day after Prince died. They would need them even more in the months and years ahead.
“Two mouths talking fast at breakfast,” Karl wrote in his diary that morning, before the techno crackup, in universal terms. “Mortality, the buffet. The question is an early riser, timeless, patient, waits for no one, takes who it wants & when. What’s my number?”
Back in the Sahara, Chris and I made our way to the rear. Despite the early jitters, it was packed now. Underworld’s ‘Rez’ and ‘Cowgirl’ were welcomed with roars, Karl going into his “everything, everything, everything” mantra.
We end up just ten feet from the same spot where ten years before I watched Daft Punk shake the American pop-scape. They took techno straight to the masses. No one knew what hit them, except the ravers.
Like tonight, there was a glitch: Daft Punk’s left lighting array went kaput. It didn’t matter, we were all too busy losing it. No one cared that technology might carry something broken inside it, something broken in our nature.
I remember kids as we walked out, dazed and amazed, chattering. “They stole the show!” said a boy. A girl giddily remarked — as ‘Around the World’ blasted from a car stereo, heading home — that it was “sooooo classic!” Revolutionary as it was, one day it just may become a TV commercial for Coca-Cola Classic.
A different sentiment entirely, Hyde once commented after hearing ‘Born Slippy’ playing on the radio in the morning, that “I can’t eat my cornflakes with that.” But like ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ or ‘Let’s Dance,’ or ‘Around the World,’ plenty did, unwittingly slurping up its broken words and exorcisms.
“She said come over, come over, she smiled at you booyyyy,” he sings. “You had chemicals boy, I’ve grown so close to you… On your telephone, and in walk an angel… So many things to see and do… Mega, mega, mega, going back to Romford…And now are you on your way to a new tension headache?”
Sitting there on the grass after Underworld closed with ‘Born Slippy’ in a gale of light, we took it in slow. The trance of dance, the cheering jumbled masses, the hiccups and threats of violence, and our own resilience.
For Underworld reckoned the dream was still alive, decades after Organic, speaking to multiple generations. Silence was preserving a voice… Look at each other. Lower the fists. Turn it around. Face the future.
Because we’re all just echoes from the same horizon —
everybody, everybody, everybody…
This is Part Three in a trilogy of in-depth articles and essays on Underworld. You can read Part One here and Part Two here. Check out more of our stories and essays at GhostDeep.com, a digital magazine focused on electronic music, technology, art and the history of rave.
