Playground for a Wedgeless Firm: Chemical Brothers

They were all of us. They were schooled in music pre-house, in youth culture and youth cults, but not old enough to fully experience it in clubs, their only idea of club culture was in strobe-filled basement or a muddy field with 10k of turbo sound from 1988 and 80 onwards. Early househeads, sure, but not that first wave.

The Chemical Brothers were us. They were our friends. Even if they weren’t our actual friends, even if you hadn’t been on the dancefloor at Most Excellent as they were waving tambourines in the air, or to their first live event at Sabresonic, or the early bonkers Heavenly Socials at the Albany in London;

The mere fact that there was no grand plan beyond “play records, make records, enjoy yourself”, as evidenced in naming yourselves in tribute to a group still an ongoing concern, forcing you into a name change after a legal nudge, further highlights their everyman status. (I still think the Dust Bags, which is what we were calling them at this stage, for reasons that are still not entirely clear.)

And even when they hit it big with their new moniker, collaborating with Noel Gallagher and proper rock stars, they were still us. No-one suddenly went off them because of the success of Big Beat (still a genre that rankles for many), even after they’d hit the top 10, they were still being namechecked for their club-friendly B-sides and Electronic Battle Weapons. And, somewhere along the way, as they subtly morphed from the soundtracking dancefloor hooliganism and late night shenanigans with a strong whiff of amyl to psychedelic evangelists and to Glastonbury headliners, they never lost that red light, strobe and a basement and a bag of records feeling.

And they’ve never sold out. They’ve kept the idealism infused with the Punk Rock Acid House spirit, just as true disciples of Weatherall, Boy’s Own, Eastern Bloc and Most Excellent should. You’re not famous. But if you were, you’d like to do it like the Chemical Brothers did it. And still do.

Their fabulous career, although they’d probably bristle at the word career, is celebrated in the wonderful Paused In Cosmic Reflection, a new book that sees them collaborating with fellow prankster Robin Turner, who helped unleash them onto an unsuspecting world, not least working with them at Heavenly on the management and PR side and dreaming up the Heavenly Social. It’s the story of a bunch of likely lads who were like us and who we wanted to be like.
Here, in an exclusive extract from the book, we look at the Early Stuff, those heady nights n Manchester that gave birth to the Chemical Brothers. Or, rather, the Dust Brothers…

Ed Simons: We arrived in Manchester in the last few months of the Nude night at The Haçienda, back when Mike Pickering was DJing. It was a very colourful, very friendly night. Once you were on the dance floor, no one cared whether you were a student or not. It was a massive welcome to the city. The two of us experienced that together. It was such an important part of the DNA of The Chemical Brothers.

John Burgess (editor Jockey Slut, Disco Pogo): The first Friday after I moved to Manchester, my best mate from home invited me to go to The Haçienda. I really wanted to go on a Friday as that was a proper night, not a student one. I queued up with Tom and Ed and the crew they’d already formed in Manchester in their first week of university. Being outside The Haçienda was quite intimidating. The blacked-out window glass was moving in time to the 4/4 beat. I’d never been to a club like that before and didn’t know how to dance. Tom told me to just bop about on my feet from side to side. So, my first Friday in Manchester, I was being taught how to dance by Tom in The Haçienda.

Nick Dutfield (friend and housemate)
Tom was massively into hip hop. I remember going to his room in the halls of residence
in first year and all of his record covers were guys in gaudy tracksuits.

Ed Simons 
Tom was quiet but he loved going out. He was someone who wanted to get the very most out of life. We’d be out every night of the week, whether it was a gig or a club or something at the uni. We’d get back about two in the morning. At 7.30 a.m., I’d hear him getting up and going to the library. He could go out full pelt, then put the hours in studying.

Tom Rowlands
As students, we were limited as to what records we could get hold of. One of the places where we would pick things up was Eastern Bloc. Justin Robertson was key to us getting a foot in the door. He must have seen kindred spirits in two students from the south of England. His kindness was so important to us building up confidence and building a record collection that would start to define us early on. Justin was a beacon. He’d grown up in a village near where I was from, had been a student in the city and had ended up properly integrated into the club scene. A lot of cities have a division between locals and students, where the two camps don’t really mix at all. Back then, it didn’t feel like there was any difference. We’d go into the shop having been to his club nights, thinking he might have seen us there and might sell us good records.

Justin Robertson
Tom and Ed used to hang around in Eastern Bloc where I worked at the start of the nineties. I recognised a couple of fellow travellers. They quickly became really integral to the club I ran – Most Excellent – and we’d hang out afterwards back at various people’s houses, listening to records, talking about music and doing all the other things that go on at that time in the morning. We must have been quite close as Ed would call me up at home about things. I’d have notes by the phone saying, ‘Ed called’.

Ed Simons 
Richard Moonboots was another big inspiration behind the counter in Eastern Bloc. He was important in shaping what we played. There was a quality threshold in the records we were getting off him. Later on, some of those tracks might have been reissued or people found a way to get hold of them after hearing them in our sets, but there was a time when only we had them.

Tom Rowlands
The currency of records was high back then. I remember getting one record from Moonboots and it had the master sleeve that had all the ordering details on it: all the information you needed when it came to restocking the record. He gave it to me and said, ‘No one else’ll be getting that now.’ There was a real generosity of spirit back then and an excitement on our side to go there and have this world open right up. That shop really was the heart of dance music in the north. Getting acceptance from those people felt exciting.

John Burgess 
Tom and Ed and their crew were the ace faces at Most Excellent. It was a small scene, and they were front and centre of things. I remember going shopping for tambourines and maracas with Ross Mackenzie, who was the promoter of the night. He’d hand them out to Tom and Ed’s crew, who would be in the middle of the floor with all of this percussion, making sure the party went off. The Brickhouse only held about 150 people. If you’ve got five or six people going nuts in the middle of the floor, and Tom’s about six foot seven, they’re going to stand out.

Tom Rowlands 
We’d go out to Justin’s nights and Nick would be in the middle of the dance floor, setting himself alight with amyl nitrate. There would be fire in the middle of the dance floor. Perfectly normal night out.

Justin Robertson 
It was pretty obvious from first meeting Tom and Ed that they’d form a team and end
up making their own music together. The Dust Brothers was the perfect combination of Tom’s sonic wizardry and vision, and Ed’s appreciation and connoisseurship of music, his rigorous good taste. Their music combined those two dynamics, while also absorbing the sounds around them in clubs and in records they bought, to make them their own. They were always interested in music where hip-hop beats met acid house sounds. They just happened to take it as far as it could possibly go when they made music themselves.

Ed Simons 
The first time we DJed together was at a wedding of a couple we used to go clubbing with. Naked Under Leather came soon after.

John Burgess 
Naked Under Leather was in the Old Steam Brewery. It was Phil and Alex’s night, and Tom and Ed were the residents. The venue was always a bit sticky and a bit wet, like the cellar of a pub. That place only held eighty, maybe a hundred people. That’s where they mastered the art of playing all those instrumental B-sides that were beat-y and bass-y and had sirens on them.

Ed Simons 
We did Naked Under Leather probably five times a year. We’d really just go and throw the records on and that had a big effect. We’d play that big MC5 speech (the intro to ‘Ramblin’ Rose’), and ‘Foodwinefood’ by Ariel was a really big record there. It was really wild, and it felt democratic. Lots of different tribes all going crazy. Andy Weatherall played there once. After an hour or so of playing, he had his shirt off, loving it.

Tom Rowlands: There wasn’t a grand plan when we chose the name ‘The Dust Brothers’. It just sounded cool and exotic. We loved what they [the original Dust Brothers] did, loved their productions. I suppose it’s the ultimate thing in sampling, pinching another artist’s name: ‘We’ll take the drum beat and we’ll take the name too.’ It does seem quite mad in hindsight. The idea that anyone might have thought that the version of us playing in a pub in Fallowfield in 1992 might be the actual Dust Brothers was pretty far-fetched. I don’t think anyone was turning up to the Old Steam Brewery student union bar expecting to hear Mike Simpson and John King from Los Angeles. Looking back, it was a pretty ridiculous thing to do.

I’m not sure people recognise how revolutionary that is. In a way, the decision Tom made to go in a different direction to the one he’d followed with (his first band) Ariel is really testament to how shrewd he is. He had all of that and turned away and went in a completely different direction.

• Paused in Cosmic Reflection by The Chemical Brothers, with Robin Turner, is published in hardback by White Rabbit and out now