The Chemical Brothers: ‘We played on top of a toilet block with sequencers on the loo’
You’ve collaborated with loads of great artists – who’s the one that got away? ShermanMLightTom Rowlands: “One that got away” implies that it was feasible, but I did have Kate Bush on the phone. I sent a track, she was very sweet and said: “It’s a nice idea, but you’re alright on your own. It’s fine as it is.” But you’ve got to aim high, haven’t you?
Ed Simons: We are both massive Bob Dylan fans and after one long-running conversation, we thought: “Why not ask Bob Dylan?” It got far enough that we were asked to write to him, so maybe he liked the idea. I’m not sure we ever wrote the letter.
Tom: We did try, but got stumped at what to call him. Robert?
Ed: Bob, if you’re reading this, we’re still here.
Do you have any anecdotes about the late, great Andrew Weatherall? FulhamFredsEd: He was an incredible DJ, a funny guy and really kind to us. Just after our first record came out on Junior Boy’s Own, we got him to DJ at our club Naked Under Leather in Manchester, but then we had to move it to the University of Manchester’s student union bar, the Swinging Sporran. Not his usual gig. But to be fair, he took his shirt off and pummelled it, although he was heard to say on arrival: “Ed, you bastard!”
We used to get quite tongue-tied around him. I remember being in a nightclub asking him what synths he’d bought. He said: “I’m waiting for the Chekhov Warp.” Which I took to mean a new synth we hadn’t heard of. A couple of weeks later I realised he meant he was waiting for the “cheque off Warp” records to buy new equipment, so when we remixed Saint Etienne’s Like a Motorway we called it the Chekhov Warp mix.
Tom: Our first ever live gig was at his club, Sabresonic, that normally hosted proper techno DJs. We didn’t think of ourselves as pros, so we told him we wouldn’t feel comfortable on the stage. I think he appreciated a wrong way of doing things, so he set us up at the back of the room on top of this makeshift toilet block with the sequencers on the loo.
Ed: I once looked through his DJ box and one record was labelled “Italian piano canterer. Break open only in emergency.”
I worked behind the bar at the Monarch in Chalk Farm during the 90s and you guys DJ’d with decks set up on a trestle table next to the bar. My best day at work. What has been yours? Flanboy73Ed: You never think “That was the one”, but we have been looking back for the book [Paused in Cosmic Reflection, published later this month] and headlining Glastonbury in 2000 was a phenomenally good gig for us.
Tom: I always remember doing Galvanise at the Hit Factory in New York. There was a lot riding on the session and I remember walking along 34th Street in Manhattan on a bright blue day with this nervous anticipation. Then later coming out of this iconic studio with this amazing piece of music.
You’ve been responsible for some cracking remixes, such as Jailbird by Primal Scream. How much involvement does the original artist have and are you typically given free rein? VerulamiumParkRangerEd: We would never take one hi-hat from the original track and call it a remix. We take the same ingredients somewhere else. In the big 90s run of remixes we did for Primal Scream, the Charlatans and so on, people would come down and contribute or bring stuff on tape. In terms of free rein, we’ve only had a record label man ask us to change something drastically.
Tom: He didn’t get his way, although
when we did Björk’s Hyperballad, she said: “I will never have a record with slap bass.” She made the right call. How did we ever think Hyperballad needed to be a slap bass odyssey? Although we reworked those bits for our track Dig Your Own Hole.
On your new album [For That Beautiful Feeling], you have reworked an obscure Teresa Harris track. The DJ version (at Amnesia Ibiza) features a Jesse Jackson speech which you previously sampled in your Ariel [Tom’s pre-Chemical Brothers band] days. Any plans to release this?OffWorld1Tom: There is an Andrew Weatherall connection there as well. He used to lay that Jesse Jackson speech down in the acid house days.
Ed: It’s from an Aretha Franklin gospel album that Tom got me for my 21st, so it’s a sacramental text. We like to make different versions for DJ-ing that we don’t necessarily want to release.
Tom: I’d been working on the music and then found this obscure soul funk record by Teresa Harris featuring the Gene Parker Quintet and took the vocal. The power comes from those two worlds colliding in a really odd way. If there’s any mad alchemy, we will always pursue it.
Can you tell us about Wolf Alice singer Ellie Rowsell’s writing credit on Feel Like I Am Dreaming [from the new album]?OffWorld1Tom: Ellie is an incredible singer and a couple of years ago we did a lot of sessions with her towards writing a song that never got finished. While making this album, we had been DJ-ing and came back to that performance, so we looped the “feel like I’m dreaming” bit and put it in this other song. She gets a writing credit because she came up with the words.
I remember hearing that, when you first started doing sets, you used to get paid in beer. How quickly did that change into pots of cash?11LFO11Ed: When we DJ’d at the Heavenly Social everyone who might have bought us a drink was busy jumping up and down. We did get paid in beer or cider but were just happy to be asked. Rather than going out on a Friday night, we would DJ, take our friends and make a night of it.
Tom: When we played the Hacienda in 1995, each of us had a hotel room rather than sharing a car home. That felt like the first proper gig. People from New Order’s road crew who worked that gig are still with us today.
I heard you turned down a gig at the Sydney Opera House because their sound system wasn’t up to scratch. Are there other big opportunities you’ve declined on artistic grounds?bathmanEd: That story is quite apocryphal. There was a technical issue with hanging the speakers. We weren’t talking down the acoustics of the Sydney Opera House! We would love to play there.
As a fellow alumnus of the University of Manchester, is the rumour about you playing at the Bop at Owens Park an urban myth?BiggestGeoffEd: This was the Friday night disco at the halls of residence. I was the DJ there and I was bad. I would play cool records I’d heard at the Hacienda, but we were student freshers so I would drink quite lot, get on the mic and call out to Tom and our friends. After I was fired, the first record my replacement played was All Night Long by Lionel Richie. They loved it.
Tom: I entered and lost the Battle of the Bands in the bar at Oak House [student accommodation], where I set up with my drum machine. I had completely forgotten about this until my eldest daughter went to Manchester and lived in Oak House. I walked in and thought: “Oh my God …”
You once said that when you first met Noel Gallagher he said something rude about Tim Burgess. What did he say?ImitationFireplaceEd: It wasn’t rude. It was more like: “You’ve had Tim Burgess do a fantastic job singing on Life is Sweet. I respect him, but also I back myself to do a similar job” [which Gallager did, on No 1 single Setting Sun].
Tom: “I back myself!”
Ed: Well, I can’t do a Manc Noel impression. Words to that effect. But in Noelspeak …
When you were told you had to change your name, what were the other potential names on your shortlist?subsubEd: When we were called the Dust Brothers we got a very nice but firm letter from the American Dust Brothers asking: “Can you please change your name quite quickly?” Suede had just become the London Suede [in the US], so we were going to become the London Dust Explosion. If we had I don’t think we would be having this conversation now.
Tom: Didn’t your mum suggest the Grit Brothers?
Ed: I think that one was mum’s. Luckily, Tom suggested: “We’ve got a track called Chemical Beats … how about the Chemical Brothers?”
How close is your relationship? Would you like to be brothers? dbates73Ed: Tom’s got a brother I’m very fond of, but we have spent an inordinate amount of time together and have a shared history in our bones.
Tom: We used to live together, go on tour and go on holiday together and we still see each other socially. We’ve probably spent more time together than most brothers.
Paused in Cosmic Reflection is published by White Rabbit on 26 October. The Chemical Brothers’ tour starts at Glasgow OVO Hydro the same day. For That Beautiful Feeling is out now on EMI/Virgin
crap.
Her patience seems fully exhausted when I mention that the swim has never been ratified by the World Open Water Swimming Association, which has advised viewers to watch the movie “with discernment, keeping in mind the discrepancies about the swim”. Questions
linger over the ways in which some of the data was recorded (or not) during the swim, and there is a whole website devoted to challenging claims Nyad has made about her achievements. Her supporters, though, think these attempts to discredit her are motivated by homophobia and sexism. “I feel very liberated by the idea that a woman can be complicated and have sharp elbows,” offers Vasarhelyi.
When I ask Stoll whether she thinks ratification will ever happen, she interrupts me: “It doesn’t matter! She did it! There are 41 people on our team that say she did it.” Does the film represent a kind of ratification? “I hope so.” What did she learn from watching it? “I learned I do this a lot.” She wipes her upper lip with her finger, as though erasing a milk moustache. “I never knew. Jodie was unbelievable. I thought it was really me up there.”
I tell her my favourite scene is when Foster, as her, jumps in the water to give Bening/Nyad a morale boost during the last stretch of the swim, encouraging her to do one more stroke, then another, just as her momentum is flagging. Stoll, it turns out, also had tears in her eyes watching that. “I thought it was brilliant,” she says brightly. “I’m just sorry I didn’t do it.” Huh? “Listen, I never jumped in. I never thought of it. I wish I had now.” Ah well, that’s movies for you: even better than the real thing.
• Nyad is in cinemas from 20 October and on Netflix from 3 November
who uses a wheelchair, when his nieces and nephews are able to send messages from a hospital with internet access in southern Gaza.
“What’s happening is traumatizing, and my heart is bleeding and aching. It spins my mind to a place of dark and unimaginable horrors,” Latefa said, adding that any optimism “is now with God”.
Amid the breakdown in telecommunications, these emotions are shared by many Palestinian Americans. In north Paterson, New Jersey, an enclave of Palestinian, Turkish, Syrian and Jordanian residents, a three-block section of Main Street last year was renamed Palestine Way.
Amjad Abukwaik, the owner of a pharmacy on the main drag of Palestine Way, says he normally checks the English soccer scores in the mornings. During the past 10 days, he’s been looking for updates on his family in Gaza.
“It’s been a very tough time, and these people are going through hell,” Abukwaik said. “Communication has been very difficult,” he added, citing how the internet in Gaza is blocked and many people there cannot charge their phones. “The information we are looking for is, ‘Are you alive? Are you still there? Is the house still intact?’”
Abukwaik’s cousin has lost a son. Another cousin has lost three kids, while a cousin-in-law has lost 10 family members. A few have lost their homes. Tears fill Abukwaik’s eyes.
“I come to work but the fact is I can’t function. My mind is not here. I’m checking my phones, checking the news, looking for whatever information I can get,” he said.
Media reportssay that al-Shifa, the main referral hospital for the Gaza Strip – and where Abukwaik was born 54 years ago – is running out of fuel to run its generators. Discussions of a political solution, Abukwaik says, are now secondary.
“The way I look at it is, will there be people left in Gaza to have a political solution? People are being displaced from their homes, being asked to go south, and then being bombed. It’s a genocide going on right now,” he said.
At least 3,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the IsraelHamas
war started on 7 October, according to the Gaza ministry of health on Tuesday. Abukwaik points out that this number probably doesn’t include people who have not been discovered under the rubble of destroyed buildings. The Israel Defense Forces say 600,000 people have left the Gaza City area. That leaves 100,000.
“When this is all over, the Israelis on the other side will still have schools and playgrounds to go to, a future to look forward to, the best colleges, a choice to remain in Israel or go to where they have come from. The people in Gaza, if they are not pushed into Egypt, will be a buffer zone,” Abukwaik said.
He rejects western pressure on neighboring Arab states to take Palestinian refugees.
“Are you fucking kidding me? We already lost our home in Lod [a city in Israel] … in 1948. And now we’re going to get pushed out of Gaza? They have to go through this nightmare again?” Abukwaik asked.
The Paterson deputy mayor, Raed Odeh, said someone had left a message at his business, the Palestine Salon, threatening to burn it down.
Odeh told the Guardian he was concerned for everyone imperiled by the war: “Everybody is upset and mad seeing all these innocent people dying. A lot of us are hoping that a ceasefire takes place after the president [Biden] goes there and we will not have to see any innocents dying on both sides. It’s enough.”
‘brrr-hmm’ call more than tripled the chances of a successful interaction, yielding honey for the humans and wax for the bird,” reported Dr Claire Spottiswoode, who led the project.
Hawk bouncers
If you spend any time hanging around British railway stations, you might have seen someone in a hi-vis tabard, casually walking around with a hawk on their wrist. Or better still, you may have enjoyed a delighted doubletake at the sight of a hawk flying around the rafters, effortlessly powerful, before returning to the glove. It could well have been one of Citihawk’s Harris’s hawks – they deter pigeons in King’s Cross and Victoria in London, and many other stations, as well as in Westminster Cathedral and everywhere from stadiums to school playing fields.
Why do pigeons need to be deterred? According to Citihawk’s Leigh Holmes, they represent a twofold health hazard: “Pigeon fouling contains horrendous amounts of bacteria and parasites – and when wet it becomes very slippery,” she says. The hawks aren’t there to attack or eat the pigeons – that never happens, according to Holmes. They would rather fly back for chicken pieces held by their handlers. The aim is to scare them off and discourage them from returning. The theory, says Holmes, is that “pigeons see a natural predator that they are inbuilt to be fearful of … They disappear to find somewhere safer to roost, nest and feed.”
The hawks fly free, exploring wherever they like on the day’s site. “They love the exercise; they love getting out and flying,” says Holmes. She thinks they particularly relish working in urban areas. “They really enjoy some of the hustle and bustle, because they fly exceptionally well.” That freedom does mean they sometimes go awol. “They can be quite childlike at times and see a pigeon a street away or on another roof. They will literally just go to scare off other birds.” The hawks are fitted with trackers, so the handlers can follow their movements in real time.
Harris’s hawks are good at this work because they are naturally gregarious and used to hunting collaboratively in the wild, says Holmes. When trained by humans, they view their falconer as part of their hunting team. “They learn to read each other,” she says. “It’s incredible. It’s an amazing feeling for the staff members.”
Another big part of the falconer’s job is interacting with amazed and delighted members of the public: “The amount of photographs taken, the amount of interest and the amount of love for birds of prey … People just love it.”