(#568: 19 April 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Block Rockin' Beats/Dig Your Own Hole/Elektrobank/Piku/Setting Sun/It Doesn't Matter/Don't Stop The Rock/Get Up On It Like This/Lost In The K-Hole/Where Do I Begin/The Private Psychedelic Reel
I purchased this record, on compact disc, on the Monday that it came out - 7 April 1997 - from Harrods. Yes, I know, what the hell was I doing buying records out of Harrods? Actually it was a regular habit with me around that time and certainly had something to do with the fact that back then I had to travel to Knighstbridge in order to get my hair cut. It was only four stops on the Piccadilly Line from the Tube station nearest to where I worked (which in April 1997 was Barons Court) and it saved time doing both things at once before Tubing it back home to Turnham Green. At that stage Harrods boasted excellent record and book departments - neither of which exists in today's tourist trap of a department store - and was certainly reliable, if slightly pricier than HMV or Virgin, for new releases on major labels (though more independent affairs necessitated the trip out to Sister Ray or Selectadisc. You're fascinated by this minutiae, aren't you? I thought you might be.
What I definitely also owned and used at the time was a Sony Discman, and as is always the case with such phenomena you think of the old saying that music won't necessarily change the world, but can change the way in which you walk through it (I read Simon Reynolds using it in a rather infamous 1986 Morrissey interview, but he may have got it from someone else). Judging by the number of plays Dig Your Own Hole got in my Discman, I'd say that album was one of the truest demonstrations of a provable fact.
For the second Chemical Brothers album really did have that effect on me, and no doubt hundreds of thousands of hours. Despite everything that has happened to me in the subsequent quarter-century, I have never got rid of that copy of Dig Your Own Hole, with the gluey remnants of the Harrods seal still palpable and visible at its easternmost edge. It wasn't made to be analysed, but to soundtrack the listener's walk - or, if they're lucky, dance - through their world.
Everybody knows that by 1996 it had become increasingly clear that dance music was providing the most fruitful route forward for pop. One thinks of Kelly McDonald's prematurely wise schoolgirl telling Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting not to keep obsessing over Iggy Pop, that there were new roads being carved, new sounds, new visions; and I put special emphasis on the film of Trainspotting here, not only because it helped make Underworld's "Born Slippy," as radical a "pop record" as has appeared this side of "O Superman," into a huge hit (like "O Superman" it stopped at number two in the pop charts, but for so many it was their number one song), but also because it proposed an explicit link between the New Pop with which its characters grew up ("Temptation," be it Heaven 17 or New Order) and the new beats into which it had evolved.
Certainly I can attest that looking at, and more importantly dancing to, creative albums from this period such as Underworld's Second Toughest In The Infants, Leftfield's Leftism and Orbital's In Sides, the "opposition" of Heavy Stereo and Menswear, left to caretake Britpop in the absence of the bigger guns, looked increasingly careworn. The Chemical Brothers, however, strove to maintain communications between both camps; they idolised "Tomorrow Never Knows" as much as Paul's Boutique, and their 1995 debut album Exit Planet Dust contained many splendid tracks ("Leave Home," the extraordinary retooling of "Song To The Siren") though lacked a certain dimension - as their Heavenly Social club nights proved, this music really demanded to be heard and felt live for optimal penetration.
Dig Your Own Hole marks the point where Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons made their first decisive step towards making records as records. Its sixty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds alternately dart and float by, and bear the very real sense that these ten songs are telling a story, especially as most segue directly, or indirectly, into each other. What is that story? Perhaps it's whichever story you wish the record to tell.
It would be lax and perfunctory to suggest that a full appreciation of Dig Your Own Hole would not be possible without the use of recreational drugs. Speaking as someone who has never voluntarily taken drugs - not even on an Acid House club night - I confess that my understanding of the record may be necessarily incomplete. "Lost In The K(etamine)-Hole"? The album more or less mimics an evening, and morning after, spent clubbing and coming down, all under the influence of drugs (what I experienced with the contradictory and combative drugs administered to me as an inpatient at St George's Hospital in 2018 would be enough to put anybody off the things for life).
It begins with the remnants of a previous dream, or nightmare, swirling woozily around in the foothills of memory - did I really live through that? - before the sampled voice of Schoolly D and a furiously funked-up slap bass hurl the unwary listener into the glorious and vivid 1997 present. The impact is so decisive and confident that you immediately realise, this is what U2 were trying to capture with Pop - and this is so, so much more exciting and thrilling.
Throughout "Block Rockin' Beats" elements are thrown at you like landmines in a pinball machine; everywhere you are jostled, pushed, shoved, cartwheeled out of complacency by the stray shrill elements with which you are ceaselessly bombarded. While the bassline reminds me of 23 Skidoo's 1984 classic "Coup" - an actual eighties anthem, kids - the track itself makes you shiver ecstatically as though you are right in the middle of a coup taking place. And this was a number one single? Yet we aren't really that far away from what some still called rock 'n' roll - Duane Eddy could have played that bass, and that might as well have been Lee Hazlewood having a party in the background. In addition, the focus on the slapped bass which dominated so much intelligent British (New) pop of the early eighties reminds us of how important bands like A Certain Ratio - that Manchester influence again - really were (and still are); not to mention much of Andy Rourke's work with The Smiths (likewise, Manchester).
The title track, aided by the buoyant bass of Red Snapper's Ali Friend, maintains the initial excitement. The Chemical Brothers are not trying to Make A Statement or Express Themselves; indeed, one is positively relieved by the absence of a Bono figure - the track began life as a remix of Björk's "Hyperballad," but when the petulant three-squawk pony objected to the slap bass elements, it mutated into this. "Elektrobank" is funkier and mightier still, striding into existence overlaying an anxiously fervent statement by Kool Herc - he was there with everything first - then stuttering into magnificent majesty over a sampled loop of Keith Murray (taken from "This That Shit") which takes the listener on a fabulous dodgem ride and bears a momentum more unstoppable than the Big Beat things that would follow (not that I'm going to criticise fabulous folk such as Bentley Rhythm Ace - frankly, I couldn't get enough Big Beat in the otherwise comparatively fallow late nineties).
The initially imperceptible decelerando of the rhythm between "Elektrobank" and "Piku" is quite staggering in its genius; the latter begins as a hopeful strut before becoming ensnared in those distorted memories of calmer moments and spectacles - was that a river, or a forest, and why can't I grasp any focus? It of course also acts as a virtual pause of breath before the still flattteningly astonishing "Setting Sun."
The song's roots jointly lie in the duo spinning "Tomorrow Never Knows" in their DJ sets and elements of an abandoned Oasis song "Comin' On Strong." I doubt either element, isolated, would have borne the explosive impact of both being shoved together. It is precisely "Setting Sun"'s reclamation of the rhythm and aesthetic inclination of "Tomorrow Never Knows" which ranks it alongside, and arguably above, "Firestarter" and "Wannabe" as 1996's most anti-retro number one; at the time I was not alone in wishing that this had been the comeback Beatles single, that if they had persisted they would not have turned into ELO but would have ended up here. Its soundbites of fuzz and analogue-delayed guitar mush are its construct, rather than simply its building blocks, careering (and yes, PiL's "Careering" is felt somewhere within its immense, sprightly bowels) towards the ears at impossible angles full of electric shock touches (e.g. the backwards trombone siren - why hello, "Peek-A-Boo" by Siouxsie and the Banshees! - and minute pause which herald the second verse).
Within this Valhalla of a 1966/1996 whirlpool Noel Gallagher holds his own, doing his best not to be converted into a pinball on a VDU screen; his voice is the record's glue, but here he is not holding the revivalist fort but gladly hurtling into a new, more dangerous and infinitely preferable future - "You're the devil in me I brought in from the cold" indeed. Most startling at all is the out-of-tempo, virtually out-of-record twenty-second breakdown which occurs halfway through the song, where a descending bush fire of guitar feedback is slowed down infinitesimally and fed through Tom Rowland's analogue processing to produce what is, essentially, Stockhausen; pure, abstract electronic avant-garde music, perhaps the most avant-garde sequence on any number one single, and the final rebuffal to "Release Me" for stopping "Strawberry Fields Forever" from triumphing. In November 2006, as part of "Club Popular," I mixed "Setting Sun" in and out of "Telstar," and it fitted, as well as confirming my suspicion that "Telstar" is the key source of everything new, creative and sustainable about the futurism which has, despite regular fervent assaults from everybody glued to looking backwards, made pop worth caring about and loving. Tomorrow, I felt, always knows. Rationalism, pace one of Mr Gallagher's favourite lyrical calling cards, is fading away.
Dig Your Own Hole is in places as functional as it is meaningful. "It Doesn't Matter" and "Don't Stop The Rock" had originally been released as DJ promos in June 1996 as "Electronic Battle Weapon 1 & 2" respectively - as indeed, once upon a long ago, had "Blue Monday" - but in this setting both prolong the momentum that the record has been building up; the former pole-vaults around a cut-up sample of Lothar and the Hand People, and do I hear the introduction to the Kiki Dee Band's "I've Got The Music In Me" somewhere at the base, or heart, of "Don't Stop The Rock"? "Get Up On It Like This" pulls off the same trick, in this instance converting library music (a sample from the John Schroeder Orchestra's cover of "Money Runner," composed by Quincy Jones for the forgotten 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn Hamburg-set comedy bank heist movie $ - or, as it was simply known in Britain, The Heist. Good soundtrack, that one; I especially recommend the Little Richard track "Do It - To It!") into the elements of distorted bewilderment, as though the listener is being buried in a haze of club night excitement.
The spectator, or protagonist, then stumbles out of the club, and no elements are readily tangible. "Lost In The K-Hole" captures that disorientation (im)perfectly; again, there are traces of a past life, and a real life all around the protagonist themselves, but all is blurred and indistinct, and a lot of it is imagined and mixed up. The "Amusing acid bass" on this track, played by one "Seggs" - actually John 'Segs' Jennings, bassist with The Ruts, no less - inevitably and I think purposely conjures up spectral memories of Phuture's highly prophetic "No Way Back."
Eventually the lucidly meandering dreams resolve, to a point, in the record's penultimate masterpiece - and key "coming-down" song - "Where Do I Begin." The Chemical Brothers had worked with Beth Orton before - she appears on Exit Planet Dust's "Alive Alone" - and in the interim she had released the first album under her own name, 1996's Trailer Park (a big chillout favourite in and around Oxford as I recall, forever overheard by me on rambles up to Cumnor Hill). She sings a fragmentary lyric over patient acoustic guitar, each of which might have been beamed in from foggy 1971, but the Chemical Brothers cleverly stretch and distort the song as it goes along - the kicking-in of the beats is a wake-up call and a half - such that it becomes a drugged ghost of its self and towards the end is hardly palpable, resolving in a foreboding siren drone waiting to be switched off.
But there is life after this death, as the duo demonstrate on the marathon closer "The Private Psychedelic Reel." Its prelude - keyboard figures both sprightly and pregnant - and its patient build-up immediately make me think of those other Virgin recording artists, Simple Minds (so much of Dig Your Own Hole has its feet in the roots of Sons And Fascination), before this almighty fucking thundercrack of drums blasts its way into our brains and bodies.
Thereafter the track - look, it's a bloody composition - is a clear celebration of life, of joy and of colour, completely of its late-nineties now but also entirely in pace with the "memory of our betters" who had "set controls for the heart of the sun" nearly three decades earlier (yes, James Murphy MUST have heard this) with wild phasing and in-and-out fades. Not to mention the superb clarinet (and "Dub 'Tetix Way'." i.e. sound-effects) of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue - it is accurate to claim that this piece of music more or less rescued Mercury Rev from extinction and helped pave the band's way towards the following year's Deserter's Songs) - or, above all, the shatteringly brilliant drumming, which was initially thought ascribable to the Charlatans' late drummer Jon Brookes but was actually performed by Simon Phillips, veteran of Roxy Music's Flesh And Blood and the original Evita.
What is unquestionably the case, however, is that "The Private Psychedelic Reel" is not only one of the greatest closing album tracks ever recorded, but also among the most liberating. It is an absolute, fuck-the-squares celebration of LIFE and MOVEMENT which climaxes and justifies that comparatively rare phenomenon of a record which merrily, generously and unapologetically throws open all of the windows and lets all of the light back into the room of the world. Christgau said that the great thing about Dig Your Own Hole was that "it matters even more that their futurism is neither exclusionary nor puritanical." No limited editions, no rare groove, no tribalism. Although neither Chemical Brother is Mancunian as such - Rowlands hails from Henley-on-Thames and Simons attended Dulwich College - they met each other as students at the University of Manchester, and what can be said other than, well, Manchester rubs off on everybody who spends any meaningful amount of time there? "The Private Psychedelic Reel" of course makes one think of "I Am The Resurrection" but buried deep in its heart we can also discern the not-very-distant strains of a remix of James' "Come Home" ("The way I feel just makes me want to scream").
The Chemical Brothers are neither dance music puritans nor indie adherents, yet they have managed to unite both parties without contrivance or regret. I listened to Dig Your Own Hole so many times, while I was walking and sometimes when I was running. It made the whole world seem different and better (U2, whose fundamental aim that had always been, should have admired the duo's focused ambition as much as they possibly resented it). It felt like both (1997) now and forever. At the time, nobody I knew felt it so intensely, or indeed at all - least of all in Oxford. But I felt as if I had freed the record from Harrods, and donated it back to humanity.
(In memory of James Hamilton, who should have lived to hear this record.)
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