Karl Hyde (Underworld)
February 2006
London

A mixture of dance and daring, Underworld nailed their legacy in 1996 when the irresistable track "Born Slippy" was introduced to the world in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting and became the anthem of a generation (how can you forget "shouting lager lager lager lager..."). Although they've garnered notoriety and commercial success with "Born Slippy" and many other singles, Underworld has consistently spent the three decades of its existence purusing the road less traveled by, venturing into new musical, technological, and visual territory with their work. It is, perhaps, the experiment that the duo—comprised of Karl Hyde (sitting, above) and Rick Smith—is currently engaged in which is raising the greatest number of eyebrows to date.

With the Riverrun project, Underworld are offering immediate delivery of their most recently-completed music, utilizing the immediacy of the Internet to satiate fans as well as get feedback. Yet there is no physical release, no packaging, nothing you buy at the local shop to take home and unwrap then try to find room for on your shelves. But in this case, a move seeming so commercially illogical makes sense. Underworld are surprisingly interactive for an act of their status; for many years now, the group has exchanged ideas with and solicited creations from fans via their Website. Riverrun is perhaps too new for some long-time fans to digest immediately, but it's nothing out of the ordinary for Hyde and Smith, who welcome this opportunity to share more of their mad genius and musical bliss with the world while receiving feedback from anyone who listens.

From the midst of doing a million things at once (a typical M.O.), Hyde took the time to talk about what it means to be Underworld.

Where are you right now? What are you doing?

We are in Abbey Road studios in London and we’re working on the film score that we’re doing for Anthony Minghella’s new movie.

Wonderful! That was one of my big curiosities because as a filmmaker myself I love Anthony's work and am thrilled by the collaboration between you. How did that come about?

Well, Anthony approached us – he apparently wrote the screenplay to this movie, which is called Breaking and Entering, listening to our music. It was a heck of a thing, really – we were quite surprised. Anthony’s worked with a composer, Gabriel Yared, on many, many films; you know, Gabriel’s a legendary composer, and he asked us if we would form a music-writing partnership between the three of us which has turned into really the most wonderful experience, to the point where we’re just going to carry on writing after the film’s finished and see what happens. Gabriel has a studio right next to Abbey Road because he obviously records a lot of orchestras here—in fact, he was in here five minutes ago. We jam together, he comes to our studio, we write, compose… It’s a relationship that’s going to continue on after we’re done with this.

That’s incredible. How long have you guys been working on the film score?

Um, that’s a good question. Let me see…Anthony came to see us in the early part of last summer, I think. But we had a lot of touring to do, so... We’d written a lot of material, probably finished about 180 pieces of music, which we gave to him as a starting point, a point of conversation. I think we really, really got going in late summer. We still had to go away and do more shows, but we began properly improvising with Gabriel late summer of last year.

When you say that you guys get together and jam, is that sort of traditional rock jamming with guitars and such, or what?

Jamming in the sense of improvising together with whatever instruments we bring. Underworld is traditionally eclectic in its instrumentation; we’ve always used traditional acoustic and electric instruments as well as electronics, so coming to a project like this is kind of normal in one respect in as much as anything that sounds appropriate we’ll pick up. But it’s been a great opportunity to get out all our acoustic instruments—the grand pianos and all the guitars and world percussions as well as all the electronics—and together improvise. That’s how a lot of the pieces have begun, but also Gabriel might write a theme and we will improvise with it and treat it and change it and throw it back to him. We also do a lot of improvising via the Internet; we have a kind of virtual studio. Gabriel spends some of his time in Paris, some time in London; we live out of town, out in the country and we have studios out in the countryside, so we kind of feel like we’re working in the room next door but sometimes we’re a few hundred miles apart.

Ah, the miracle of technology.

Ah, it’s a wonder! (Laughs)

This is your first proper film score, right?

It’s our first major one, yeah. We got our name from doing the score to a film called Underworld in about ’84, I think. It was a Clive Barker book that was turned into a not-very-good film. (Chuckles) That was our first attempt to score, really, but this is our first major release.

I'm glad that it’s finally come about because Underworld is such a visual entity, especially considering all the work Tomato does for you guys.

Well, Rick and I have always thought visually; I mean, I trained as an installation artist and fine artist in the 70’s, and Rick has always thought visually and whenever we play our music, we always see it both as a film and as music that accompanies driving. And those two have been central to our thinking whenever we make music.

Now moving on to the Riverrun series, which to me is a very interesting release for many reasons. I’m sure you’re getting this kind of reaction from many people. To me, it seems organized almost as a series of clips or scenes, talking in a filmic kind of way. It very much strikes me that way; I’ll shift internally while I’ m listening to it to a different scenario in my head each time the tracks shift.

Right. They are like journeys, I suppose, each one of these combinations of tracks.

Was that a big part of it, the way that you decided to release it in these chunks?

It goes back really to Rick’s desire to approach production in a different way, to make it exciting again and less intense an experience and just look for a way of keeping it fresh for him, too. We were writing these pieces—jamming on our laptops, swapping files and just improvising over the top of each other’s writing—and what he was finding was that these pieces were very fresh and relatively raw compared with the degree to which he would normally finesse our music. He really liked that; there was something fresh that he wanted to retain. And so he treated these tracks rather like instruments and started to thread them together. He took quite long pieces initially—he called them "shakedown sound systems"—and he had several of these shakedown sound systems and they were kind of like, in a way, listening to your iPod on random or our experience of listening to the John Peel show that was always very changing direction a lot and keeping your ears fresh because of it. And there was something in that thinking. He put these things together and we were very excited by what he’d put together.

Then we handed over this concept to Steven Hall at Junior Boys Own records, who we’ve worked with for many, many years. And he liked the concept but his take on it was to come back with what he saw as groupings of kind of families of tracks; he’s only grouped together a small number of what we gave him because as I said there’s about 180 in all, finished tracks. So the first one for him was kind of electro and the second one was kind of dub, and there’s a third one which is just being finished coming together, too.

And again, being an internet-based thing, we were able to put together a package which incorporated things that we couldn’t do normally, like hundreds of photographs. We could put movies that went with them. The lovely thing about the Internet is the cost isn’t there for printing and packing and shipping so therefore we keep the costs lower and also we can expand what we give away with it. But also it was kind of central again to our thinking that these pieces didn’t have to be 70 minutes long or however long a CD seems to be now. We wanted to revisit the experience of playing one side of vinyl, rather than a whole CD, which can often be quite boring. Also, not everything on a CD necessarily is that great. The tradition is becoming to pad it out with extra tracks and takes and clips. To me, that is very against my listening experience and we wanted, as I say, to revisit the feeling of listening to one side of vinyl. What was that like?

It’s a good thing because so much of this generation doesn’t know what that’s like. They’ve never done it.

Yeah, and I’m not saying that it's any better, it’s just that we were becoming bored with, “It’s a CD, it has to be 10 tracks and they have to last this long, and there’s the padding out with the extra stuff because everybody does that." I was like, “Well, why don’t we just make something that’s priced appropriately and doesn’t have to be that long and let’s release more frequently?” That’s something else that was important about the web releases: we wanted the time between finishing a piece of music and it coming out to be shorter than it had been in recent years.

Right. But it can be an issue for people who have become quite attached to owning a package, like a very physical manifestation of all of this, since it’s something that’s ingrained in so many of us. Granted, like you said, you’re giving people the opportunity to have much more with the photos and the tracks themselves, but having it together as a package, nobody—well, maybe a couple of super fans—will print out all of those hundreds of photos and have them in hand while they’re listening to have that whole tangible experience. So is that anything that you guys are considering—an actual, physical release of this stuff in some way?

Not at the moment, but at the same time we released a three-CD set of the live concert here in Tokyo before Christmas. And unfortunately—or fortunately—we were allowed only to sell it to the people at that concert, or at the two concerts that we did in Japan, which V2 very kindly allowed us to do. But of course it meant that we couldn’t sell it further afield. But we did experiment with what was kind of a virtual counterpart to that, too, which was I think 1700 photographs that's a journey through Tokyo and down to Osaka over several days. Again, it was experimenting for the future with the notion of a physical release which has a virtual counterpart that can continue to evolve even though that physical release is fixed and seemingly finished.

That’s something which is quite frustrating about physical releases. Not only are they constrained by things which sometimes feel less than your intentions—you know, how many pages a booklet can be printed and how many colors and where the staples go and things which are really counter to the creative process. We want something that allows us to keep a project alive for years after it's been released. Physical releases are something which we will definitely be doing; we just wanted to take this time to experiment with things in ways which would be less easy were we still within a traditional recording contract.

We decided years before the contract was completed that we would take this time to do some of these things or take an attitude that we’d taken in the early 90’s before we had any recording deals, and that was to try stuff out which, when we explained it to people, they thought we were mad. (Laughs) So it’s just something we’ve learned: that it’s probably best to go and do it and don’t talk about it. I mean, how do you bring that to the table when you’re talking to people about having a business relationship?

Yeah, absolutely, but you guys have worked hard enough so that you’re at a position where you can go out and do something and then prove to people, “See, it does work.”

It’s nice to be able to describe a system by actually doing it, even if it’s on a smaller scale. Then you bring that to the meeting and you say, “This is what we’ve been doing and this is how we’ve been doing it and this is part of what we’d like to explore together with you.”

All of this innovation is nothing unusual for the two of you; you guys have been doing it since you started, and anybody who is a fan of Underworld has grown to expect this kind of thing. At the same time, I think every time you do do something new it sort of shakes people up. Especially this time around—and I’m talking about reactions I've read on music lists and message boards and stuff—fans seem to still be jonesing for more of a physical presence. That also includes shows—the live manifestation of all of this material. So in that regard, is there a plan for taking this out on the road, maybe not as extensively as you guys have toured in the past, but definitely in some way?

Well, we did actually take it out on the road last year in Europe.

I know, I’m being selfish and I’m asking about the U.S.—specifically, Los Angeles. (Laughs)

I understand what you’re saying. (Laughs) We would like to come back to the U.S. and play the new material because one of the other advantages of releasing more frequently is that we have a larger pool of new material that people know that we can then start bringing into the live show. Last year saw us taking the show from two hours up to three hours and that was really liberating. It was fantastic for us because in three hours we can take far more curves; it’s a very different show to a two-hour show and we can start to incorporate more of this new material that is becoming familiar through the download. So it would be great if we could start to bring that out to the States.

This year, once we finish the film and we’ve had a bit of a holiday—which we haven’t done for a long time now—we would like to get on with the next part of the project, which will be a continuation of downloads and a physical manifestation of our music, plus a new book, which we’re working on via the Internet with Joey Warwicker from Tomato, who has emigrated to Australia. And we're looking at other ways that we can play live. We’re exploring Internet radio—you probably know that we’ve been doing web broadcasts for the last year, and the last one that we did live from the studio had us jamming live as well as playing people’s material. That one went very well, so we’ve begun to talk to people in different countries about a kind of a hybrid between radio and television that we can do, live broadcasts from wherever we are. So this year will be about exploring things like that, finishing a physical release, a book, and trying maybe a few shows where we can experiment with how we play live so that come next year we can do a full-on world tour.

It's great hearing you talk about all of these things that you have planned or that you’re juggling right now because I think that again popular opinion is, “What are they doing? They’re releasing music but they’re not touring—why?” People have these expectations but they don’t necessarily take into consideration the work that you’re doing with Tomato or the film score, nor do they know all of these other plans.So it’s easy to believe that you’re being very simple and laid back, when in reality it doesn’t sound that way at all.

Naw. (Laughs) It’s funny—as time has gone by, the work has racked up but it’s got more fun! See, what happened in about 2003 was we were halfway through a two-year world tour and Rick and I realized that we were very comfortable, you know? We had a band that was popular and we were selling records and selling out shows and we were very comfortable. And that horrified us! (Laughs) It was not a very good place for a creative process. So we decided in 2003 to throw everything up in the air and get to a place where things were less certain and it was becoming a little scarier again for ourselves. I’m not saying we were changing the world at all by any stretch of the imagination. But for ourselves, we created a place where there was far less certainty, and that has been a real shot in the arm. We expanded the team so that people that were dealing with new technologies were listening to us, enabling Rick and I to achieve things by introducing us to people who could make real our ideas, and that has meant that we’ve opened the door to working together with other people.

We started a project with Brian Eno last year which hopefully, when he’s finished with the project he’s on this month, we’ll get back together at our studio out in the country and see what next that brings. In Japan, we hooked up with Adrian Sherwood, who’s been a hero of ours for years, and did some jamming onstage and that started something which we will continue once we finish the film. Rick and I we came to the decision last year that we were going to open the doors and welcome in people who wanted to try stuff out really and see where that took us.

But live performances are still something that you can take us away from for a short while but then we start getting itchy feet again. It’s a big part of what we are and it’s not something that we have any intention of stopping right now. So our apologies to people who haven’t seen us for a while, and it is weird that we haven’t been to the U.S. for a while because the Dirty.org, the site that we are very closely connected with, was started in America and is run from America; we work very closely with people in California, up in Chicago—every day I would say there’s some form of correspondence with the guys out there. So it is weird that we haven't been out there lately; the shows out there that we’ve done just have been fantastic—I have so many fond memories of coming to the U.S..

Ah, yes, so do we. (Laughs) But tell me, with all of this stuff that you’re doing and this open-door policy and the other crossover projects that may not be under the banner of Underworld so to speak, how is it that you determine what does get branded as Underworld and what comes out as something different?

When it’s finished. It’s always the same when Rick puts together an album; we don’t know what an album is or what a track is until it’s arrived at a place where it’s taken a recognizable shape, where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that looks like an album,” or “I think it’s time to put stuff out because it feels right.” It’s as loose as that, really.

Right, so it’s more like when it’s done and not necessarily when it starts.

Yeah, yeah. When you’re in a relationship with a label as well, obviously there’s the desire of the people that you’re working with to have things for release at certain times. It has been nice, I have to say, to take a little bit of a break from that and feel what it was like again when we used to be putting out 12-inches. That’s been nice. But we will be getting back to the scheduling of records again. Funnily, there will be 12-inches coming out very soon; there are white labels out at the moment, remixes by people like Paul Woolford and Pig & Dan and Pete Heller, but lots of very cool 12-inches have been mixed from the downloads which will be hitting the streets properly. But it’s just been nice to take that break for a while. (Laughs)

I'm eager for you to explain how you get away with doing so much that’s outside the normal way that this industry operates. We’ve been talking about packaging, presenatation, the release, the tour, the way that whole machine functions, and your method seems not necessarily defiant of it but definitely outside of it. Do you get a lot of pressure to do things according to the norm, to someone else's schedule, or are you at a point of seniority now where you can really just hold it at bay until you’re ready?

We get a lot of support. V2, for example, have been very supportive of this and it’s lovely to see. We’ve had nothing but encouragement from our friends in the industry who have said, “Well, we kind of expected you would do something like this and it’s about time.” (Laughs) If any criticism has come, it’s been, “You should have done this a while ago,” and that’s nice.

But for us, it hasn’t been anything that’s anti-industry; it’s been born out of creative necessity to go and explore these things and as I say make them real so that we don’t have to talk about something fictitious when we’re talking about a new deal. For example, when we were in Japan, one of the guys on the team had his laptop and a laptop camera and we broadcast the show on the Internet from a very crude static point, a crude little camera point of view. But ideas like that we’ve been having since 1982. (Laughs) The tools just didn’t exist. And now that it does exist, it seems like there’s so much to explore and not very long to explore it in, really. We have to make some decisions.

Do you ever fear when you’re embarking on some of this new exploration that you might encounter backlash?

No, no—but again that’s not out of arrogance, it’s just that the focus is on following these ideas…one foot goes down in front of the other and it leads you somewhere that you can’t imagine.

It isn't that you guys haven't worked hard for such freedom. And it's testimony to the belief that if you really are true about what you’re doing then it is going to pay you back. You’ve not compromised and done things simply for money or fame.

No, we’d have stayed out on the road and just gone back into another record deal if we were doing it for the money. Of course we have obligations to our families, but we see that the longevity of what we do is that obligation and for it to remain potentially a career for life, we have to enjoy it. If we don’t enjoy it, then what’s the point? We’ve worked in kitchens and washed up dishes; I’d rather do that, really. Really, I would! I would rather do that than do this just for the money.

It’s less pressure in a way to do something simpler like that.

Well, yeah! That sounds like an incredibly easy and shallow cliché to come out with, but for me it’s true, and I know for Rick too. We’ve stayed friends and we actually enjoy working together. I don’t know what’s going to happen when we start on a project together and it never goes where either of us wanted it to in the first place. (Laughs) He’s me favorite musician to work with. And that’s lucky, so you might as well stick with it. I think we’re going on 26 years now; we may as well stick it out for a few more. (Laughs)

Sure! Going back to what you said about making choices about a lifetime or a career and having longevity to your work, not only are you going to continue to keep it interesting but in order to have that longevity you’ve got to adapt to the times and the way that the world is changing, which seems very evident in the way that you’re handling this release.

That’s why it’s very important to have contact with other people, to leave the doors open to encourage dialogue with other people and exchange ideas and information. So that’s why, as I say, our studio is the virtual studio, whether it’s to do with sending sound or pictures or thoughts or just, “Hello, I was thinking of you.” It’s really important to us, and keeping contact with younger people, too; one of the greatest shot in the arms and inspirations has been the webcasts because independent labels and artists have been sending us their music for the last twelve months or more, and it’s fantastic! It’s absolutely fantastic! There’s so much great music that’s inspiring and really is a big kick up the backside to people like us.

Having contact with those people and being able to turn other people on to what they’re doing, for them to use us as a doorway through to something else, to be around that stuff of all genres—I mean absolutely all genres—has really been the greatest inspiration. So as it was in the day when Rick went and looked for a DJ to work with, so we’ve worked with fantastic software programmers and games designers and Internet genius kids. And the musicians who are doing stuff that is just amazing. That’s really important because as one gets older, one is less inclined to go out and go doing stuff; you know, your attitude changes. Also, the sheer amount of work means that we’re spending most of our time making work, so we need this constant flow of information coming through.

With all that work that you're doing, one definitely has to wonder when you have time to listen to all of this new music.

All the time! I’m a record junkie. (Laughs) You were talking about physical releases; well, I love physical releases. My iPod is jammed full of stuff. But if somebody burns me a copy of something I like and say “That’s fantastic!” I’ll go out and buy it. Why? Because I want the actual thing; I want it with the artwork in a box and I want it in my rack, you know? We’re buying vinyl again and I’ve got decks up at home; it’s just something that we enjoy. So, for example, if I’m working on a bunch of photographs or I’m working on text or something, I’m playing music all the time and writing notes on it, like post-it notes, ready for the next radio show.

Since you're interacting so much with other people, and given the way that the world is leaning socially and politically, was that ever a consideration for you in terms of this release? That is, not just tackling the way that technology is changing but also the way that politics are going.

(Sighs) Not overtly, but you know politics with a capitol P has always been a part of dance culture in the sense that it is a physical manifestation of a positive attitude as far as we’ve seen and a potential antidote or alternative to some of the negative directions that can be the norm during the day. I don’t know that we are saying anything other than when we’ve been doing something for a long time, we get bored and it’s not good enough for us to say, “Oh, well, that’s the way it goes and we can make a few quid and we’ll just keep doing that.” It’s important to try something new. But we’re not waving any flag there; that’s just for us. It’s not necessary to be confrontational for the sake of it but one becomes confrontational sometimes because you’re trying something which doesn’t fit a shape.

Change is important. Change is painful. Change is disruptive. But it’s important. It’s important to challenge the norm. It’s important to challenge the mainstream. Not because the mainstream is bad, but because if one doesn’t, then there’s nothing to become tomorrow’s mainstream; there’s nothing to become tomorrow’s pop culture, you know?

I have to say that I was unsure when I first heard both “Lovely Broken Thing” and “Pizza For Eggs”. I wasn’t sure what to think because there wasn’t an actual release that I could pick up and look at and I wasn’t sure because of the length of the tracks and how there were different tracks mixed into this longer thing—there was just a lot that I was unsure of.

Yeah, I understand.

But I’m so glad that I had the chance to talk it through with you because it’s definitely illuminated things. It’s reminded me about what’s most important about Underworld and why I’m a fan and why so many other people are fans—because you guys do shake things up and you do ask us to keep our minds open and to keep progressing.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

Thank you! To wrap things up tell me what is it that you’re doing with Brian Eno.

We’ve been mates for ages because we worked together on the War Child project back in the 90’s; we got talking a while ago really. He was going to start singing again, and we just got together in the studio at the beginning of last year and played each other’s stuff. He started jamming over the top of our stuff and we we all went, “Ooh, this is interesting!” So we’ve started to exchange material and that’s it, you know. With Brian sometimes you can just be having a chat over a cup of tea or it can be if we go into a radio show for the BBC we phone him up and he sends us unreleased material and we play that. Or it can be we’ll get together in a studio and go, “Play me what you’ve got,” and we’ll start improvising. He was one of our teachers, you know, when we were kids, and it’s quite easy to work with Brian because a large part of what is common is the language that he taught us. (Laughs) And he’s a cool bloke.

Listen to Underworld at Underworldlive.com or visit Dirty.org for news and other information.
All photos courtesy of Perou.co.uk.