POD Presents Underworld - RDS - 27/11/10

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Dance music pioneers UNDERWORLD have announced a very special show this November at RDS Simmonscourt, Dublin.
Renowned for their incredible live shows, Underworld are back on tour in support of their forthcoming LP “Barking”, out this month, and featuring co-productions by Paul Van Dyke, D. Ramires, and Mark Knight amongst others.
The group have been through many changes in personnel - and style - since their formation in 1986. Throughout their career they have changed the shape of dance music- with a lush fusion of Techno, House, Drum ’N’ Bass and early electro.

***TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER***


Pod presents

UNDERWORLD
RDS Simmonscourt
Saturday 27th November
Doors 7:30pm

Tickets €39.50 including booking fee from www.ticketmaster.ie <http://www.ticketmaster.ie&gt; , City Discs, and usual outlets.

Underworld – Barking

Autumn 2010 and the arrival of Underworld’s sixth studio album – Barking - sees the band perform a feat of creative regeneration once again. As before, a little outside encouragement has acted as spark to the band’s creative flame. From the first shuddering machine pulses of opener Bird 1, clearly this music is from a band reborn.

Underworld’s story proper begins in Cardiff back in 1980. A chance meeting in a student house in the city’s Splott district happened when Karl found a fully clothed Rick celebrating the last few hours of his birthday while languishing in a bathtub clutching a near empty bottle of champagne. A musical relationship blossomed through a mutual love of the outer reaches of the John Peel show, first with their Cardiff based band The Screen Gemz then with Freur, a group whose name was represented simply with an oblique glyph and whose look is best described as ‘troubled’. Signed to CBS in 1983, they fused electronic tones to rock’n’roll instrumentation and went on to work with studio legends Conny Plank (Kraftwerk, Neu!) and Dennis Bovell (The Slits, Orange Juice). These producers would help Smith and Hyde make good on feverish obsessions with both motorik electronics and cavernous, sweeping dub. Although successful in Europe, changing fashion saw the end of Freur and the formation of the first version of Underworld. The band released two albums of electro-plated rock’n’roll that put them on a round-the-world treadmill, making significant inroads in Australia with their album Underneath The Radar. When the band eventually fizzled out in 1989, Smith returned to the UK and relocated to Essex while Hyde played guitar for hire for Debbie Harry.

The musical ‘year zero’ that was acid house had created an unrecognizable landscape back at home, one that forced Smith to re-evaluate the music he was making. An introduction to Darren Emerson, thirteen years Smith’s junior and already headspinningly inspirational as a DJ, led to tentative studio collaborations and the forging of a relationship with the Junior Boy’s Own record label. Hyde’s return to the band coincided with the release of a succession of envelope-pushing 12s – Big Mouth, Dirty, Mmm… Skyscraper I Love You and Rez (the latter described recently by Jon Savage as sounding like “the best kind of dance record – one that is inspired by the audience and seals the deal by giving something back: excitement, unity, transcendence”). Each record was playful - strange, even. Seeming to exist in its own space one step to the side of what anyone else was doing at the time, the combination of Hyde’s stream of consciousness lyrics - heavily inspired by Lou Reed’s New York album and Sam Shepard’s book Motel Chronicles - cyclical electronics that seemed to weave and swoosh around the listener.

Dubnobasswithmyheadman, the first Underworld album with Emerson, was released in January ’94. Described by the Melody Maker as “the most important album since The Stone Roses and the best since Screamadelica…. There will only ever be one Underworld”, it heralded the point where the UK’s inky music press decided to enthusiastically surrender itself to dance music. Over the next couple of years, Underworld’s sealed their revolutionary live act status (“a sound so singular that it thwarts imitation” The Guardian, “pure three-dimensional Pop Art”, The Times), rapidly from dancefloor to dance tent to main stage. The release of the follow up to Dubnobass, Second Toughest In The Infants, saw the band lauded in NME as “smooth of touch, sleek of footing and downright slippery of rhythm, the anti-Green Day trio breezily persevere in their quest for Western groove domination.” The band’s transformation from nearly-rans to genre-bending visionaries was total.

At the start of ’96, a young British film director cut a low budget ensemble piece he was working on to a copy of Dubnobass. The final cut of Danny Boyle’s movie of the Irvine Welsh masterpiece Trainspotting arrived accompanied by a soundtrack that represented a Britpop masterclass, yet Underworld’s contribution – Nuxx, the B-side to the ’95 single Born Slippy, given the same name so as to get around the chart rulings of the time – became synonymous with the film and, subsequently, the entire summer of 1996. The single release peaked at No 2 in the UK singles charts and went on to sell over 750,000 copies in the UK alone. The lyrics to Nuxx documented one of Hyde’s many forays into London’s West End at night during a period where he explored the boundless possibilities of excessive alcohol abuse.

Two more remarkable albums on, at the end of 2009, a different kind of Underworld record arrived almost unheralded. Much like the 500 copy 12s of the early ’90s, Downpipe was a record made for the dancefloor. Credited to Underworld and techno producers Mark Knight and D. Ramirez, the record – Downpipe - was as streamlined as the band’s last album had been freeform. From the point the record hit club world, it was a short mental leap to the question at that had been bugging the band in the studio for some time - why not enlist the help of like-minded souls to help make an actual Underworld record?

Barking enlists the help not just of Knight and Ramirez (Always Loved A Film, Between Stars) but a whole cast of brilliant and like-minded producers from across the spectrum of modern dance music to add personal touches to the band’s original material. Enter Welsh drum and bass artist High Contrast (Scribble, Moon In Water), four-time Grammy winner Dubfire (Bird 1, Grace), Bristol based dub step producers Appleblim and Al Tourettes (Hamburg Hotel) and long term Underworld team member Darren Price (Between Stars).

While each of the nine tracks were written and recorded by the band in their Essex studio (The Pigshed), each collaboration took on different forms – edits here, additional programming there, even total reworking – before being handed back to the band for final mixing. While the band would normally be perceived as an insular unit, Barking’s gestation came after a period where Hyde had worked extensively with Brian Eno on the Pure Scenius project, an entirely improvised jam band who got together to headline the Sydney Opera House.

The question is, with such a glittering cast of extras, how does it actually sound? From the first undulating pulses of submariner bass, the first vocals – soft like a whisper in the ear - and the first fizz of hi-hats that force along the pace, the sound is unmistakably Underworld. Electronics wrapped effortlessly around songs; streams of consciousness lyrics that form indelible images; a perfectly balanced mix of melody and rhythm. Underworld’s sixth studio album is a thundering return to form, although it’s fair to say that the band responsible have never really been below par. Like the bomb on the Icarus II in Sunshine, this new process of working had the effect of not so much reigniting a creativity within the band as exploding it into myriad new fragments. And through all of this, brilliantly and uniquely, it sounds just like Underworld.

So, thirty years in and by working with a series of hand picked co-conspirators you make the best album of your career? It was a long shot, but for Underworld in 2010, maybe playing away was just the trick.

Just leaves the question of who they’ll get into bed with next time. Roll on album seven.

flywheel

great to see them playing back in Dublin after a *long* gap... altho the fights and ticket to their gig in London last Thursday came to the same amount as the cost of a ticket on it's own here!

great gig, and new tunes from the album sound great live... anyone who can stream archives from BBC Radio check out Pete Tong from last Friday with a 45 min live Underworld session at the end (available for playback until Feb 24):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tppml

oceanclub

A gang of us grandad ravers are going along to it; hope they allow zimmer frames through the door...

P.

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UNDERWORLD have announced two stellar support acts for their RDS Simmonscourt show in Dublin this November.

The pioneers of dance music will be joined by home-grown electro-house DJs THE JAPANESE POPSTARS, and DFA Records’ SH1T ROBOT, whose newly-release debut full-length “From the Cradle to the Rave” is getting glowing reviews all around.

Renowned for their incredible live shows, Underworld are back on tour in support of their forthcoming LP “Barking”, out this month, and featuring co-productions by Paul Van Dyke, D. Ramires, and Mark Knight amongst others.

The group have been through many changes in personnel - and style - since their formation in 1986. Throughout their career they have changed the shape of dance music- with a lush fusion of Techno, House, Drum ’N’ Bass and early electro.

515 tripod

UNDERWORLD New single ‘Bird 1’ announced for Nov 19th + Nov 27th RDS Show

Remixers include Lone, sbtrkt, Mark Broom and Pete Tong

http://www.underworldlive.com

Sixth studio album ‘Barking’ out now + IRISH SHOW: NOV 27TH RDS, Dublin

With their sixth studio album ‘Barking’ – out now to widespread critical acclaim – Underworld have once again performed a feat of creative regeneration; the duo have announced their next single ‘Bird 1’ will be released digitally on November 19th.

The shuddering machine pulses of ‘Bird 1’ – the album’s opener – has been reworked by several DJs and producers:

1. Bird 1 (album version),

2. Bird 1 (Mark Broom remix),

3. Bird 1 (Lone remix),

4. Bird 1 (Pete Tong remix),

5. Bird 1 (Clouds remix),

6. Bird 1 (sbtrkt remix),

7. Bird 1 (radio edit)

‘Barking’ is Underworld’s first album in three years, and their first to be constructed with a brilliant cast of co-conspirators. All the tracks were written by the band in their Essex studio before being given to handpicked studio heads from across the whole spectrum of dance music to add some of their style and creativity to the band’s raw material. The result is a pimped-up Underworld record and their finest collection of songs in over a decade.


QUOTES:

“Still brilliant, still essential, still peerless” - The Times *****

“The crowd go as bananas for the new stuff as the old” - The Guardian ****

“Barking is the sound of veterans re-energised” – Uncut ****

“Skipping beats and cavernous bass” – MOJO ****

“Epic” – Q ***

“Truly captivating” – Word

“Up with their hypnotically melodic best” – The Sun ****

“Ranks with their very best material to date” – Clash 8/10

“Lustrous” – The Daily Mirror ****

“Ebullient” – Metro

“Vital” – The Independent

“Dog-gone brilliant” – News of the World ****

“Collaborators have injected fresh energy but they’re still unmistakably Underworld” – The Observer

“Dizzyingly Divine” – Time Out