"The Three of Us Are All Accidents!"
Karl Hyde, Darren Emerson and Rick Smith unveil the chaos theory behind the second Underworld LP
Andrew Male
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The album title
Karl: "We already had a title for the album and then, right at the last minute, Rick went to Wales and, while he was there, he saw a home video of his nephew. So, he's saying, Yeah don't worry about me, I'm second toughest in the infants now. Apparently he's the first toughest now, but that's not as good a title."
'Juanita'
Karl: "Most of the titles come from moments, half-remembered things. Juanita is a girl who works in the office below the design company Tomato. The song doesn't really relate to her, but give it six months it probably will. I bought Alan Bennett's book recently. There's this story about him being an evacuee and listening to conversations on the tops of buses. Brilliant, but I'll never be able to write like that. With me, it's just snapshots. Sam Shepard wrote a book called Motel Chronicles, with tiny little entries like, 'Cup of coffee. Old man in the corner. Green radiator.' That's how I see things. I can't write stories."
'Banstyle / Sappy's Curry'
Karl: "We've got a form book on greyhounds, where we take a lot of our titles from. 'Sappy's Curry' was one. 'Pearl's Girl' was another. We'd sit the book on the music stand and work through it. 'Born Slippy' was another one. That book's been quite good to us.
Darren: "In some sense there's a lot of accident to Underworld. The more you play together the more attuned you are to that. Recognising how things fit together."
Karl: "Sometimes, until Rick puts it all together in the studio, we don't really imagine that it's going to make any sense at all. 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry' is made up of over four different tracks and it wasn't until the finished track that I realised that all of the lyrics had come from the same notebook. These things happen all the time with Underworld. It's not really synchronicity, but we do open up the doors to allow these sorts of things to happen. We're all one big accident, really."
Darren: "You didn't tell me that!"
Karl: "Well, it may come as a shock, Darren. The three of us are all accidents!"
'Confusion the Waitress'
Karl: "What that actually came from was this youth festival in Holland. Rick came up to me onstage and whispered, Bloody sing something! So I just started on a rant, thinking that something would happen eventually and a started putting "She said..." in front of everything. We had it on tape and it was a real blinder, so we transcribed it and did it again. We only find these points of association afterwards. I love that. As far as the lyrics are concerned, I don't have ideas for specific songs. It tends to be reams of notebooks, like random samples from the world around me."
'Rowla'
Darren: "The title comes from a photograph of a street called Crow Lane with some letters cut off. It's effectively a live track and... we just like it. Rick tried for ages to get the order of the tracks right, and then he just rang up one day and said, I can't do it. So I took the job over and, with a couple of guys from Boy's Own, we wrote the titles down on paper, cut them out and set about rearranging them. It worked. Really easy. We left about three hours' worth of stuff off it. We might put out an ambient CD in the summer. There was never any temptation to put 'Born Slippy' on there. We don't work like that." Karl: "A lot of people have said that 'Born Slippy' was consciously having a go at lager culture, but it's just that I was completely shitfaced when I wrote it. I was having a go at myself. Then we saw it in Trainspotting, and that seemed to be its proper context. Begbie's mental lager culture."
'Pearl's Girl'
Darren: "I love it. This and 'Banstyle' are my favourite tracks. I've been playing it in clubs at the end of the night."
Karl: "I spent a few nights in Hamburg and it actually came from a night on the Rioja, down by the docks. I'm actually shouting, Rioja, Rioja... I'd come from this really great club on the Reeperbahn, listening to lots of classic soul, which is where the "Reverend Al Green" bit comes from. I was sitting by the docks and they have these 'bride boats' there, which people get married on. They go down the river and out to sea. I was just sitting there, Rioja-ed out, watching these boats sail past me at three in the morning. There were bonfires and everything. Completely mental. That's 'Pearl's Girl'."
Darren: "I didn't even know that!"
'Air Towel'
Karl: "What is 'Air Towel'? We should talk to Rick."
Darren: "I'll call him (dials Rick on his mobile phone). Hello, Rick? What's 'Air Towel' about? (bizarre tele-conversation ensues, touching on the stranger aspects of Japanese culture). Was it the Japanese name for hand-driers? No! I remember! It was New York! There was this porno film in the hotel called Fetch the Towels."
Karl: "And we were like, Oh God! No! What can this possibly mean? Nobody could bring themselves to possibly watch it, because of that title. I mean, what's going on there? Towels!"
'Blueski'
Karl: "A Robert Johnson blues riff. They're also on 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry'. I just play them at home, loop them and give them to Darren. We decided to leave this one as it was."
'Stagger'
Darren: "That was the one we were going to leave off the album, but I listen to it now and it just seems so right to have it there. It's a real grower. You could do a really funky remix of it. We also want to do a dub version of 'Sappy's Curry'. It's really weird. I'm listening to a lot more mellower stuff. Tracy Chapman. Very nice when you're doing a bit of decorating."
Wow, pretty cool... Now: Take a look at the other interview, look at the UNDERWORLD link on my homepage, whatever...
© 1997 rlundy@london.skyscape.net
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