Interview: Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons' chemical attraction | The Independent Features Interview: Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons' chemical attraction As their latest album, We Are The Night, tops the charts the duo reveal the secret to their long-lasting music career and friendship. Thursday 18 October 2007 23:00 BST Click to follow Interview: Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons' chemical attraction 1/3 Still block-rocking after all these years: Ed Simons (left) and Tom Rowlands 3/3 What with Klaxons winning the Mercury Prize last month, and young pretenders such as New Young Pony Club, Shitdisco and Hadouken! all storming the charts, it seems that dance music is not as dead as everyone had thought it was. The Chemical Brothers don't seem much bothered either way. Earlier this month they won the award for Best Electronic Artist or DJ at the BT Digital Music Awards and their latest album, We Are the Night, recently topped the chart – the fifth time in a row they have accomplished the feat.

And with a nice touch of scene-making serendipity, Jamie Reynolds and James Righton of Klaxons are among the many guest acts featured on the album, lending a touch of spiky nu-rave dynamics to the track "All Rights Reversed". "Whether it is a time of boom or famine for dance music has never made any difference to us," says Tom Rowlands. "We never saw ourselves responsible for a scene or anything. For us it was always all about making a record that would excite people and show them that we had something interesting to offer." Thanks in part to this philosophy, the duo now find themselves cast in the not-altogether-welcome role of last men standing. None of their contemporaries from the 1990s is still in quite such rude health either creatively or commercially as the Chemical Brothers. But Ed Simons doesn't feel that longevity for the sake of it is a particularly worthy aim. "Some people would see it more as a curse," he says. "We didn't set out to last a long time. It's more about making music that's exciting, particularly on stage, where we're playing these festivals all round the world and people seem to be excited when we come on.

It's gratifying." Rowlands and Simons are sitting in the bar of The Social, a club in the West End of London. This is not the same Social where the pair famously enjoyed a DJ residency in 1994 when they were still known as The Dust Brothers, an engagement that resulted in the album Live at the Social Volume 1 (eventually released in 1996). "That was the Sunday Social in the Albany at the top of Great Portland Street," Simons says. "It only ran for about 14 weeks and then they had to find somewhere else." Rowlands picks up a copy of the Live at the Social CD, which I have brought along to jog a few memories. "I haven't even got a copy of this myself," he says, looking at the picture of his younger self, long blond hair dangling all over the decks. "That's all gone," he says, ruefully. "It does feel a long time ago. But it's all part of the same thing, really." Maybe so.

But a Sunday-night residency mixing and matching a string of obscure tracks to a bunch of James Brown beats in front of 150 people seems a long way removed from the kind of shows that Rowlands and Simons have been playing this year. These have included festival headlining appearances at Creamfields, Glastonbury and the Electric Picnic in Ireland, and a special one-off spectacular in Trafalgar Square. They have more shows coming up all over Eastern and Western Europe, South America, Australasia and a tour of the UK, including a three-night stand at Brixton Academy, the venue where they hold the record for the most gigs played in a single year ("we've got a special plaque for it, somewhere"). It is, perhaps, ironic that a 1990s dance act should have become such a huge and respected live attraction in the 21st century. Neither of them sings or plays an instrument on stage (Rowlands can play keyboards and "bad guitar"; Simons doesn't play an instrument at all). So what exactly do they do when they "play live"?

"We always think we should maybe put on a little film before we start, to explain the process of what is happening," Rowlands says before embarking on a lengthy explanation of how it is all about manipulating an electronic brain to determine exactly which combination of musical information stored on synthesisers, sequencers and samplers is deployed at any given moment of the performance. "A very early cliché established that electronic music was just two guys twiddling knobs on stage," Simons says. "We never found that intrinsically boring, but when we play live, we've always carried around our huge speakers and the visuals. We want people to experience the music in a really exciting environment, and the visuals are part of that, to absorb people in it so that you get disorientated, you get completely intoxicated by the music. That's always been the point of making it an experience. That goes back to Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground... "It might be unfashionable to say, but that's the kind of experience that we've been trying to create when we've played from pretty much day one." So are they happy for people to remember their light-show, but not them? "Yes. That's fine," Rowlands insists.

"Neither of us started making music out of a desire to have a foot up on the monitor at the front of the stage telling you, 'this is how it's gonna be'. I like to see people do that as well. But it's not what we want to do." The man responsible for the stunning visuals at the Chemical Brothers shows is Adam Smith, who used to run a company called Vegetable Vision. "Adam was doing the visuals at the very first gig we did, at Andy Weatherall's club," Rowlands says. "And we're still together. When we're writing music we play it to him. As we're making the album, he's getting ideas and stuff. We may have a specific idea for a song, but generally we just let him run riot." Is he the third Chemical Brother? "Definitely," Rowlands admits. "Especially when we play live." "We have three or four very longstanding collaborators," Simons says. "Our engineer, Steve Dub, for example. If there is one secret to our success it could be that when we find someone we enjoy working with, we keep working with that person.

That's my advice." While keeping an unusually stable team of core personnel in the background, the Chemicals have maintained a contrastingly rapid, revolving-door policy when it comes to their featured collaborators. In the past these have included Noel Gallagher, Bernard Sumner, Bobby Gillespie, Richard Ashcroft and Beth Orton. The guest performers on We Are the Night are a typically motley crew, including the folk singer Willy Mason, the rapper Fat Lip, from the Pharcyde, and Tim Smith, the singer with the up and coming Texan indie-rock band Midlake. So are the Chemical Brothers an A&R team as much as a pair of DJs and producers? "Hopefully not," says Rowlands, clearly not very impressed with this suggestion. "Obviously we gravitate towards things that we like. We hear something in their voice that connects with something we're doing. But it always comes out of us writing music. That's the first thing that we do. Then we start imagining a voice. We've never tried to do it the other way round." "Before we made music together, when we were students in Manchester, our friendship was based on playing each other music," Simons says. "We used to go to clubs together.

We used to go record-shopping together. So finding people to work with is really an extension of that. We have endless discussions about who we might work with." Rowlands adds: "It's usually the most traumatic part of making records." Meeting the Brothers for an hour or so, you get a sense of the tremendous rapport that has bound them together for so many years. But relationships change, and the two of them now lead widely divergent lives away from their work. Rowlands, 36, is married with three kids and lives in Lewes in the rural south of England, while Simons, 35, remains single, and lives in Notting Hill, West London. "The 1990s was spent in each other's pockets and in the studio the whole time," Simons says. "We were either on tour or we used to go on holiday together and that resulted in certain records and a certain working relationship, but now we have a different arrangement. But I actually think the music we've made in the last five years is the best we've made." "The key is that we're still friends," Rowlands adds.

"Sometimes it's fraught, as it was when we were students in a house together, arguing about what to watch on telly." At the end of the interview, Simons nips out for a cigarette, while Rowlands, a confirmed non-smoker, hangs around chatting in the bar. He looks wistfully once again at my copy of the Live at the Social CD. "I'll have to go on eBay and get myself a copy of this album," he says. "It's always the ones that you play at a party that disappear. I've been through about five copies of this already." The Chemical Brothers play Koko, London NW1 ( on 25 October; their UK tour runs from 6 to 15 December ( Interview: The Chemical Brothers | Music | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close As Ed Simons knows only too well, the Chemical Brothers have something of an image problem. When the topic comes up, his face takes on an expression somewhere between pain and bemusement. And well it might. In the past eight years, Simons, 32, and partner Tom Rowlands, 31, have amassed an enviable list of achievements.

The Chemical Brothers have presided over one of the most celebrated British clubs in history. Their four startling albums have broken new ground and invented new genres, and been rewarded with number-one singles and a Grammy (bizarrely, Block Rockin' Beats snatched the 1998 gong for Best Rock Instrumental). Their live shows have transcended the usual presentational dilemmas faced by electronic dance acts, offering a stark, dramatic and mind-blowing son et lumière experience to wild acclaim. Their appearance at Glastonbury 2000 drew the largest crowd in the festival's history. They have sold more than 6m albums and their 2001 single It Began in Afrika may well be the most wilfully extreme and experimental piece of music ever to make the Top 10. However, as Simons says, glowering: "The nerdy-guy myth is pretty well-travelled." Simons is by nature a worrier. A smoker since the age of 13, he admits to "sitting here stinging" over the handful of criticisms in the largely positive reviews of their fourth album, Come With Us.

But there is certainly truth in his view that the Chemical Brothers are largely viewed as "nerdy squares" by the media. Delight is taken in the duo's uneventful middle-class upbringings in Henley-on-Thames (Rowlands) and South London's Herne Hill (Simons). Much is made of their past as students. They met while studying medieval literature at Manchester university - an early single was titled 14th Century Sky, in tribute to their love of the period. Both specialised in Chaucer. Despite the evenings they spent DJ-ing and exploring cheap "loony soup" lager and amyl nitrate, both scored 2:1s. "We weren't into the just-getting-by ethic at all," says Simons, his voice tinged with suspicion when their studiousness is mentioned. "We did history and some people treated it as a joke, something you could just do two weeks before the exams started. We treated it as something we really enjoyed and got a lot out of. It's the same with making our records now.

It's what we do, so we work really hard at it." It's not just their past that leads people to assume the Chemical Brothers are a pair of aloof boffins. The most common adjective used to describe Rowlands and Simons is "diffident". Part of the problem is their dislike of that pop-star staple, discussing your personal life in interviews. Simons famously described such behaviour as "an odd way to carry on". Rowlands won't even countenance discussion of the lyrics he occasionally contributes to Chemical Brothers tracks. They chose their friend, folk singer Beth Orton, for the vocals on Come With Us's solitary ballad The State We're In because, says Rowlands: "I can't imagine saying to one of the other vocalists we've worked with, like Bernard Sumner or Noel Gallagher, 'These are the words for my song, can you sing it?' " Attempts to probe any further into the song's meaning are rebuffed with a silent, enigmatic smile. Eventually, you just give up and ask about something else. Further fuel has been added to the nerdy-guy myth. There's the suggestion that their closeness is a bit peculiar.

At a time when manufactured bands largely consist of hand-picked strangers, the duo claimed to have only spent two weeks of each year apart since meeting in 1989. They were flatmates for three years. These days, they live three streets apart in west London. Rowlands is married with a baby daughter and Simons is in a long-term relationship. Tellingly, both have a tendency to leave sentences hanging in mid-air, half-finished. Rowlands describes the harsh, percussive hammering of It Began in Afrika as "jungle noises... spaceships... future primitive". It's as if you should instinctively know what they mean. "If I'm in the studio working on my own, I can feel this kind of...presence," says Rowlands. "This Ed presence around me, looking over my shoulder, going: 'Oh, I don't know about that.'" "We don't really have an element of friction between us," says Simons. "We're friends, and our friendship is more important than the music that we make." He pauses.

"Some of the time." There are certainly a lot of in-jokes shared between them, but, in person, the Chemical Brothers hardly resemble an impenetrable and foreboding cabal. The duo are amiable, chatty, possessed of a dry wit and a keen sense of dance music's ridiculousness. Simons was tickled by a recent TV show featuring a DJ's rosy-hued recollections of minds being opened during 1988's Summer of Love: "Bricklayers used to come up and give him poetry while he was DJ-ing," he says. The only people Simons and Rowlands seem to have upset during their career are Boy George (who demonstrated his grasp of the Wildean bon mot by dubbing them "the cunt brothers") and a crowd at Ibiza's Space club, who were reduced to tears by a Chemicals DJ set. Nevertheless, some people express a sense of disappointment that Rowlands and Simons don't embody more of their music's characteristics. They forget that anyone who did embody the prevelant characteristics of an average Chemical Brothers record would be relentlessly aggressive, monstrously loud, overblown and under the influence of vast quantities of psychedelics.

Brian Blessed in a frothing, LSD-induced fury. Someone you'd spot a mile off, then cross the street to avoid. The last person you'd want to interview in a cafe at Westbourne Park in London at 11.30 on a Sunday morning. By contrast, Rowlands and Simons pass unnoticed as they sip their herbal tea. Their anonymity is slightly surprising. Aside from Keith Flint, the Prodigy's idiotically haired, extravagantly pierced, make-up-sporting frontman, the duo are probably dance music's most recognisable couple. Neither glamorous nor particularly nerdy, Simons and Rowlands still have something inexplicably striking about them. Recently, one music magazine reported that female Japanese fans felt the pair inspired "kawaii - the love one feels for small furry animals". As Julie Burchill once remarked of Slade guitarist Dave Hill, the Chemical Brothers have faces you are unlikely to forget. Rowlands is additionally memorable because he doesn't actually appear to have changed his clothes for the past eight years.

He may have finally divested himself of his long raver's tresses (a hairstyle he maintained long after even the most redoubtable raver had given it up as a bad job), but today, as every day, he sports slightly flared jeans, battered trainers and tinted spectacles. The duo's international success, their number-one singles, their increasing wealth - none of it has had any impact whatsoever on his wardrobe. Perhaps he has his mind on higher things. Rowlands and Simons claim that the way records like Come With Us sound - overloaded, crazed, saturated with distorted beats and psychedelic noises - has less to do with their own personalities or drug consumption than an ongoing desire to make the listener feel "overwhelmed by sound". When they start discussing their music's ability to "mess with your mind", they don't sound diffident at all. There's something of the mad scientist about their excited talk of concepts such as their bewildering "Turin Shroud Theory of Implied Music" ("It must have been a good afternoon when we came up with that one," nods Rowlands sagely), and their musical quest for transcendence.

"If you can sit in front of a computer in the studio and feel totally transported by the sound you're making, then that's the most fun there is to be had making music," says Rowlands. "Sometimes when we're onstage, playing a track like [1997 single] The Private Psychedelic Reel and it's really loud, you just don't feel that you're anything to do with this piece of music. It's just happening and you're holding onto the sound desk, going, 'Fucking hell!' It sounds like there's a plane going over your head. I don't feel, 'Wow, I've created this thing - I'm in an incredible position of power.' I'm just experiencing what the person in the audience who hasn't made the music is experiencing. It's all about giving me dem feelings." Listen to the audio clip (49secs) "We like doing it to ourselves," adds Simons, succinctly. Nevertheless, they have become used to their music's unpredictable effects on others.

The unfortunately coiffeured "world's fastest heavy metal guitarist" Joe Satriani sent them a cassette featuring him frantically soloing over one of their tracks ("I think that's one for the Chemical Brothers Anthology box set," says Rowlands). Then they received a puzzling video from former Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth "of himself, running around his house, getting up to no good, with one of our tunes in the background and him singing over the top of it". Even Roth's curious behaviour was topped by an Australian fan who calls himself Dan Rad. "He used to rap over our records and then send us the tapes," says Rowlands, shaking his head. "It was just him shouting all this obscene stuff. 'She tells me I'm listening to my music too loud so I say faack off yew baaah-sted! My eardrums are fackin' bleeding, yew drongo!' We haven't heard from him in a while, but we're going to Australia soon. Perhaps he could get onstage with us, do a bit of MC-ing." They may not look particularly mythic, but in the past eight years, that's exactly what the Chemical Brothers have become.

The story of their reign as DJs at the Heavenly Sunday Social - a club held in a packed, grubby Marylebone pub basement during the summer and autumn of 1994 - is enshrined in dance-music legend, and talked about in hushed and reverential tones. To have been present during their four-month residency is still a badge of honour, an e-generation equivalent of having seen the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. Listen to the audio clip (1min 25) The Sunday Social's fabled reputation is partly due to the number of celebrities who turned up - Primal Scream, Tricky, the Stone Roses. There was something groundbreaking and thrilling about the music Rowlands and Simons played at the Sunday Social. Uniquely for the time, they were unconstrained by the rigid generic boundaries of dance music. Pounding acid techno was mixed in with old Beatles records, hip-hop, ska, the Manic Street Preachers - anything they felt would fit the mood of druggy abandon.

Rowlands and Simons were doing nothing more complicated than playing records they liked, but the results were refreshing, unpredicatable and kaleidoscopic: a mix that, for the first time, placed the notoriously insular world of dance music in a wider context. This filtered through into the Chemical Brothers' albums, which pitched unlikely guest vocalists against their unruly sound. Their debut, Exit Planet Dust, offered a collision of distorted hip-hop drums with techno effects and guitars. U2 guitarist the Edge claimed it was his favourite record of 1994. "It said, 'This is the way forward and what we should all be doing,'" commented Norman Cook, who later adopted its style to vast success as Fatboy Slim. Their second album, 1997's Dig Your Own Hole, featured Noel Gallagher on the number one single Setting Sun. It proved to be one of the most influential and pivotal albums of the 1990s, an evocation of the clubbing experience remarkable both for its musical breadth and its emotional depth. Dance music has always had problems expressing anything more profound than the earth-shattering notion that dancing and drugs are fun ("Not such bad things to say," smirks Simons).

But Dig Your Own Hole shifted from euphoria through numb nihilism to desperate melancholy. Like Rowlands's sartorial sense, it remains unchanged by time: no mean feat in the accelerated culture of dance music, where styles and genres are rendered obsolete overnight. Today, the venue of the Sunday Social is now a chain pub. More bizarrely, the boundaries between rock and dance, which the Chemical Brothers did as much as anyone to destroy, have been hastily erected once more. In Manchester, nu-metal-worshipping Moshers and garage-loving Scallies are involved in running battles around the city. Rock has returned to its workmanlike roots. Earthy, earnest musicianship in the early 1970s tradition is big again, and regards artists armed with samplers as deeply suspicious. Dance music, meanwhile, has greedily abandoned any pretence of innovation and become risibly frivolous and disposable: it is the province of DJ Alligator and Do You Really Like It?.

The Chemical Brothers may still express the desire to work with artists as disparate as Bob Dylan ("We got word back that he'd like a formal letter, telling him exactly what it would entail," Simons smiles) and US rappers Outkast, but elsewhere the twain no longer meet. In 2002, the only place you're likely to hear a rock star collaborating with a dance act is Come With Us, where trad-rocking Richard Ashcroft sings over wriggling beats on album-closer The Test. "There's no cross-pollination going on," agrees Simons. "The rock music that's big is so boring. The idea of us doing a Travis remix... what would that be?" "It would be pretty rubbish," says Rowlands. But if times have changed since the days of the Sunday Social, so have the Chemical Brothers. Their previous album, 1999's Surrender, contained tracks called Out of Control, Under the Influence and Got Glint?

- the latter being Rowlands and Simons' slang for "Were you out until 11 o'clock in the morning?" Despite the nerdy-guy myth, the strict work ethic and the aversion to celebrity hang-outs such as the Met Bar, the duo were well-known in the dance scene for their love of a hedonistic party. By contrast, amid the invigorating mayhem of tracks like My Elastic Eye and Galaxy Bounce, Come With Us features Richard Ashcroft plaintively moaning: "I almost lost my mind, but now I'm home and I'm free." If Rowlands looks exhausted during our Sunday meeting, it has less to do with druggy excess than the sleeping patterns of his six-month-old daughter, Matilda. It all sounds suspiciously as if the Chemical Brothers, like most clubbers when they reach their early 30s, are feeling domesticity dragging them away from the strobes and sound systems. "I really love the words about being home and being free," nods Simons. "For five solid years, I've gone out every Friday night in some form or another, but now if 10 o'clock on a Friday night rolls around and there's nothing on, I'm in for the night.

I think both of us feel out of that trap, where we have to be out every night. It's not everybody's idea of freedom, sitting around at home, but for me it is. There's a tyranny of going out. That track's called The Test because you do end up wondering if it's some kind of test you were putting yourself through." Rowlands continues: "It's the only test that this generation has, really. People need to go through a rite of passsage and because there isn't national service or something anymore, you build your own thing. It sounds stupid, but it's true." Listen to the audio clip (57secs) We live in an era when club attendance figures are plummeting and the chill-out album reigns supreme. But if Rowlands and Simons are feeling the lure of the sofa, where does that leave their brand of punishing dancefloor psychedelia? Does their future hold nothing but odes to the simple pleasures of family life? Simons snorts. "Nah. We still like to stand in the studio with the speakers on full pelt, listening to something that takes you back into that... " Characteristically, his sentence tails off.

Rowlands takes up the challenge: "When you're in a club and you hear a record for the first time, you get excited, the music overtakes you. That feeling is what I like about music. If you feel that way, other people feel like that as well... " Aware his partner is rapidly running out of steam, Simons steps in again: "Just feeling absorbed by sound, giving in to it, feeling unselfconcious about dancing, feeling emotion triggered by the way a track's going." He looks at Rowlands and frowns. "Am I talking out of turn?" "No," says Rowlands quietly.

"I think you're talking perfect sense." You can hear songs from the new album and see the Chemical Brothers' new video at The Chemical Brothers: ‘We’ve been together longer than a lot of marriages’ | Music | The Guardian The Observer The Chemical Brothers: ‘We’ve been together longer than a lot of marriages’ Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands on two decades of fame, the changing face of dance music – and why the time has come for them to pursue solo projects The Observer The Chemical Brothers: ‘We’ve been together longer than a lot of marriages’ Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands on two decades of fame, the changing face of dance music – and why the time has come for them to pursue solo projects Sunday 28 June 2015 05.00 EDT Last modified on Sunday 28 June 2015 08.53 EDT Share on Messenger Close During the 1990s, when the Chemical Brothers were the hot new thing, they used to receive some strange offers. Metallica and Simon Le Bon both requested remixes from them. David Lee Roth memorably proposed a collaboration by sending them a video in which he cavorted around his house to one of their records.

Now, they say, unappetising requests are more likely to come from brands. “Generally it’s going to a club with a phone, and doing a gig with your phone on, and being on a phone …” sighs Tom Rowlands. “They wanted to use our music in an advert, but we would be driving a car or something,” says Ed Simons , with an expression that suggests he considered this idea to be utter madness for all concerned. “The music’s the best bit of us,” says Rowlands. “Have the music! You don’t want us trying to sell you a phone.” The Chemical Brothers, in 1995: 'There’s far too much good-blokery in dance music' Read more The Chemical Brothers never claimed to be celebrities. They are ordinary people who make extraordinary music: a distinctive modern version of psychedelia that is both intense and idealistic. Their album titles (Surrender, Don’t Think, Come With Us) suggest benign cult leaders, offering to take the listener somewhere new. Their music has more practical applications – Chris Hoy played their track Escape Velocity for inspiration before winning his fifth Olympic gold – but the goal is transcendence and their live shows are reliably mind-blowing spectacles.

“We still want that feeling of transportation,” says Rowlands. “It’s a simple aim but it’s hard.” Next month, the duo release their eighth studio album, Born in the Echoes , a little over 20 years since their first. True, 1995’s Exit Planet Dust still sounds great, a time capsule of that period in the mid-90s when it became the norm to love dance music, rock and hip-hop all at once, but there has been no anniversary reissue. The duo are wary of dance culture’s nostalgic tendencies. “Continually harking back to some golden age is daft,” says Simons. “It’s like people in the 80s wanting to make records that sound like Tommy Steele. It’s a long time ago now, isn’t it?” Rowlands, 44, and Simons, 45, met in 1989 when they were both studying history at the University of Manchester, and have been inseparable ever since. I meet them in the same west London pub where I interviewed them in 1999 and not much seems to have changed, except that Rowlands has considerably less hair.

They have an entertaining rapport, going back and forth with a very wry, very English sense of humour. Rowlands, who has three children and lives in East Sussex, is amiable and somewhat dreamy while Simons, who remains in west London, is more guarded and caustic. They’ve never explained exactly how their creative partnership works but Rowlands is more naturally musical. He runs the studio, collects the vintage synthesisers, and sometimes sings and plays guitar on the albums. Revealingly, their main source of creative tension is the length of tracks: Simons favours brevity while Rowlands likes to jam. My hunch is that without Rowlands the music wouldn’t exist but without Simons they wouldn’t have sold millions of albums and had 16 top 40 hits. Pinterest Pump it up … ‘We try to hit something wrong that still sounds good’: the Chemical Brothers on stage together at Glastonbury, 2011. Photograph: Ben Hider/Getty Images Now it seems they are separable after all.

After their last tour ended in 2011, Simons returned to academic studies and a deadline means that he isn’t joining Rowlands on the Chemical Brothers’ current tour dates , which include a headlining slot on Glastonbury’s Other stage. What’s he studying? “I don’t really want to say,” he says warily. “For various reasons. Just put unspecified academic pursuits.” Rowlands grins. “He’s a spy, innee!” Whatever they are, Simons talks about his studies as if they’re his solo album. Rowlands has made music without Simons, producing records for Klaxons and Tinie Tempah, and making a song for the third Hunger Games movie with Lorde. (“She wasn’t even born when Exit Planet Dust came out,” he notes.) This is Simons’s equivalent. “To live your entire adult life in a kind of partnership, however much fun it’s been, there still is that thing: how do you exist separately from another person?” he says. “For 20 years we’d have to coordinate when we were going on holiday and things like that. There comes a time when you maybe want to …” He stops, reconsiders.

“You know, it’s longer than quite a lot of marriages. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a great thing, but I wanted to do something which was just me.” He’s not sure if this marks a permanent retirement but it’s disconcerting for both of them. “I’m friends with the Chemical Brothers on Facebook,” says Simons. “I’m in the Chemical Brothers! And I see the dates coming up and I’m like, Am I?” He does a double-take. “No. It’s heartbreaking, really.” “It’s really strange,” says Rowlands. “Rehearsing it today, I was looking over and expecting Ed to be there.” “I’m going to go to a few shows, like Nigel Tufnell in This Is Spinal Tap,” says Simons. “That’s quite a weird thought. We started all those years ago creating this thing, whatever it is, and it’s a bit lazy really, not seeing it through. This thing we made together is now going to be manifested live and I’m not there.” It makes me wonder if the Chemical Brothers considered splitting up altogether.

Their 2012 concert film and accompanying live album, Don’t Think , felt like a summation of their achievements to date: typically, the film was more interested in the revellers than in the two men on stage. Rowlands was doing more work on his own. Did they consider bowing out? “That could have been a good point to exit, but it felt like, actually, no, there’s another good Chemical Brothers record in us, and to not try to find it would be sad,” says Rowlands. Pinterest The Chemical Brothers’ Block Rockin’ Beats. “I’m glad that this record is so good, because yeah, maybe it would have had a neatness,” says Simons. “We did a long tour and we played to a lot of people, and there may have been a little bit of me that could have …” The sentence dies. He tries again. “It’s quite difficult to see how it can keep being rewarding and exciting.” Born in the Echoes takes its title from a resonant lyric by Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon .

Rowlands and Simons thought it reflected how they make records, subjecting neatly structured songs to long, wild studio jams, using feedback, echo and other effects to achieve the disorienting intensity they crave. Before the Chemical Brothers, Rowlands was in an unsuccessful indie-dance band called Ariel. One day Manchester DJ Justin Robertson told him: “You know those little noises you’ve got that you can’t really hear? They’re really good. You should do records that just have those.” The heart of the Chemical Brothers resides in those little noises. “That’s what all the months in the studio are: trying to find those little bits when you’re overwhelmed by what’s coming out of the speakers,” says Rowlands. “It’s still chasing that feeling. It’s so easy to make a massive-sounding tune. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. We try to hit something that’s slightly wrong but still feels good: a strange but necessary record.” Pinterest Pick ‘n’ mix … Under Neon Lights, a track from the new Chemical Brothers album Born in the Echoes, featuring Annie Clark AKA St Vincent.

Simons mentions a small moment on the new album, during the seasick techno of Reflexion , and says he had exactly that feeling while they were making it. “You’ve drifted slightly out of the frame where you were before you heard that piece of music,” he says. “That, I think, is what we’re striving for.” It’s the sensation that he remembers most keenly from going raving with Rowlands in 1989 and he makes it sound almost mystical. “That moment when a beat or a particular sound takes over a room full of people, it’s magic to watch. Just seeing how music can take people somewhere else.” After 2010’s mostly instrumental Further , Born in the Echoes is a return to the duo’s usual way of making records: writing the tracks, working out which ones cry out for vocals, and deciding who to call. This time they reached out to previous collaborators Q-Tip and Ali Love , and to new ones, including Beck and St Vincent . The calling-people-up bit sounds like great fun, but the politics of the actual collaboration sound a bit tricky. “Further was so uncomplicated,” says Rowlands. “Just do it. When you collaborate with people it goes both ways.

I love it when you have an idea and then someone has a better idea but it can be like, [awkwardly] ‘Oh yeah, that’s interesting.’” “It’s good but can you make it better?” says Simons. “Finding different ways to say that is a fine art.” The track with Beck, Wide Open, is particularly interesting because these three poster boys for 90s eclecticism could easily have worked together 20 years ago and they would probably have made a psychedelic hip-hop record rather than this beautiful, melancholic house track. “The two of us together have quite a nostalgic feeling,” says Simons. “Those Odelay [Beck’s 1996 album] tracks were really zeitgeisty. Everywhere you went you heard them, in a similar way to some of our records. It seems very fitting that he should appear so late in both our careers.” The Chemical Brothers established their reputations in 1994 as resident DJs at the Heavenly Sunday Social , a raucous club-in-a-pub where they mixed Renegade Soundwave and the Beastie Boys with Oasis and Barry White .

It seems obvious now but at the time it was a bracing antidote to purist DJs who prided themselves on never deviating from their chosen genre. This sociable open-mindedness informed the duo’s own music, too. They made records with Beth Orton and Bernard Sumner , pilfered song titles from Bob Dylan and the Ramones , and remixed Primal Scream and the Manic Street Preachers . One of their No 1 singles, Block Rockin’ Beats , won a Grammy for best rock instrumental performance. The other, Setting Sun , took Noel Gallagher , then at his cultural and commercial zenith, and plunged him into a perversely abrasive racket somewhere between the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows , a violent exorcism and a car crash. I’m not sure there has ever been a noisier record at the top of the charts. “I love that it was totally out there,” says Simons. “Other producers might have thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got the biggest songwriter in the world in the studio …’” Pinterest Back in the day … Tom and Ed DJing at Glastonbury, 1998.

Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns “The idea that you’d just be trusted was brilliant,” says Rowlands. “I’m sure today it would be a different scenario. Things seem much more micro-managed now. We used to sort it all out ourselves and say, ‘Here you are.’ There was no back-and-forth.” They are not, therefore, a natural match for Hollywood. The director Joe Wright used to design visuals for the Chemical Brothers’ live show so he shielded them from studio interference when they composed the exhilarating score for his 2011 thriller Hanna , but it’s rarely that easy. Three years ago, they agreed to score a big movie (which goes unnamed) but didn’t like the first cut they saw. Their agent told them they were too picky and should do it anyway but Danny Boyle advised them: “You’ve got to do what you like.” They pulled out. “It seems simple but it’s hard to do the things that you’re into,” says Rowlands. “There’s always people with different agendas wanting you to do things that you’re not into.” Rowlands says that the Chemical Brothers’ records “live in their own world”.

The duo emerged during British club culture’s 90s boom, weathered its post-2000 bust, witnessed the rise and fall of countless new subgenres, and carried on regardless. In 1997, alongside Underworld and the Prodigy , they were the shock troops of the so-called “electronica” revolution that was supposed to convert Middle America to the joy of rave and transform rock’n’roll. Newsweek predicted “Electronic Eden” while New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani warned darkly of electronica’s “cold, distinctly anti-humanistic agenda”. For two young men steeped in British club culture, it was all a bit odd. Now, at last, America has well and truly “got” dance music. Rebranded as EDM , it’s become a glossy multibillion-dollar industry. I jokingly suggest that the Chemical Brothers should bid for a DJ residency in Las Vegas and make a killing. “Can you imagine?” says Rowlands. “Not your archetypal EDM DJ look.” He ponders it for a second. “If we really wanted to we probably still could but I think it would be soul-destroying. It’s a mad old world, that world.

It does feel alien.” The Chemical Brothers are ambivalent about EDM. On the one hand, they are firmly in favour of young people having fun on dancefloors. On the other, they don’t like the grim efficiency of what Rowlands calls “pie-chart music”. “We played in America recently and every record sounded like [Italian DJ/producer] Benny Benassi ,” says Simons. “I know that sounds like your dad wandering into Top of the Pops and saying it all sounds the same, but it did all sound the same. There’s just one feeling: very triumphant, very celebratory. We like the sense that you go through different experiences.” “The one-dimensional sound is quite effective but it doesn’t seem to have that magical, transporting quality,” says Rowlands. He shrugs. “But if I was 18 in Orlando and I’d just finished my exams, maybe it would. I don’t know.” “There’s only one way to find out,” says Simons. “Enrolling in Orlando Tech!” Like the movie 22 Jump Street , I say. Blank looks. I explain that it’s about two cops who go undercover as college students and visit Florida for spring break.

Everybody keeps pointing out that they are plainly too old but they deny it and carry on anyway and it works out fine. Simons gives an exceedingly wry smile. “That’s a metaphor for life, isn’t it?” What is Ed Simons listening to? Francis Bebey: Psychedelic Sanza, 1982-1984 A suite of mesmeric music dominated by the sound of the thumb piano. Beautifully recorded, empty enough to let imagination take hold, peaceful and mysterious. This is music that really takes you somewhere else. Boot and Tax: Balkan Youth Slow, atmospheric electronic disco with old-school cut-and-paste vocal samples. Modern but also sounds like something you might hear on a cassette of an Andy Weatherall acid house set from the late 80s. The Clash: Lost in the Supermarket Just came up on the shuffle this morning. Really enjoy the youthful existential angst in the words: “I came in here for that special offer, a guaranteed personality.” … And Tom Rowlands? Demdike Stare: Patchwork This is a wild mix of [experimental techno] sounds and cut-up style groove. Erol Alkan first played it to me and I am forever grateful.

Joe Crow: Compulsion Great record from the early 80s. Raw, emotional electronic music. New Order: Singularity An ace track from their forthcoming album, Music Complete, out on 25 September. The Chemical Brother will be appearing at the Other stage at Glastonbury tonight at 21:45. Born in the Echoes is released on Virgin EMI on 17 July Interview with the Chemical Brothers (NY Rock) Tom Rowlands, Ed Simons Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons met in history class at Manchester University in 1988. The two immediately got along and soon began scouting out the citys active nightclub scene. Not content with the popular house music at the time, they began DJaying themselves. As a tribute to the American Dust Brothers, they initially called themselves Dust Brothers, but later changed the name to Chemical Brothers when the Dust Brothers threatened to sue. In 1995, the duo released their acclaimed debut, Exit Planet Dust. Two years later came Dig Your Own Hole, and now theyre back with Surrender. NYROCK: It's been quite a while. What have you guys been up to?

TOM: A bit of this and a bit of that... The usual stuff, you know. ED: A bit of fighting, a bit of remixing, a few dramas, the usual stuff that happens when you know each other for over ten years. NYROCK: Ten years is a long time. Since you're still friends I guess it hasn't been too bad... ED: We grew up together and we need our drama, makes us work better... TOM: We grew up? When? I must have missed that completely. Grown up? That sounds scary. I don't want to grow up. NYROCK: Lets get back to the drama. Drama sounds good. What was it all about? TOM: We had so many ideas for this record, so many different strands and different things we wanted to do. Sometimes it was too much and we squabbled about it. Nothing really serious, more like outbursts. ED: Two different people, two different ideas, but that's good. It causes some friction sometimes, but that helps the creative process. NYROCK: I'm puzzled by how you got started? It seems like you went from DJs to stars. I imagine your original material helped a lot.

ED: I don't really see us as stars. I still see us as DJs trying to give people a good time. TOM: That's the whole deal. The whole idea of being a DJ is working a club and making people dance, making people enjoy themselves and dance their bootie off. We still enjoy doing that. Putting it on an album isn't much different. We're trying to do the same stuff we do at live gigs: Giving people a good time. ED: Tom and I always DJ together. TOM: We still get our inspirations from DJaying. We get a lot of new impulses and it's a good way to check new tracks in clubs, if people like it, if it's club compatible. ED: Dance music is something that grips you. It forces you to dance. Resistance is futile, ha ha. TOM: We don't want to be rock stars and stuff. We like getting our music out; we like sharing our music; we love playing. We make these albums which can be enjoyed by a lot of people and that's great. NYROCK: Is it difficult working together all the time? Small wonder you have some friction... ED: It works for us.

TOM: We always do it together. We don't work apart. We have one studio, one computer, one desk and all the music you hear is written between us. We're always writing and recording because we have our own studio and we go in there every day. ED: We work on tracks but there's an album somewhere in the back of it all. NYROCK: You guys won a Grammy for "Best Rock Instrumental"... TOM: (snorts) Best Rock Instrumental, yeah. It's kind of amazing what they come up with. Best Rock Instrumental, oh please. They really were looking hard for a label or a drawer to stick us in... ED: Oh well, we took the Grammy anyway, so what the hell. NYROCK: In the early stages of your career the Dust Brothers threatened to sue if you didn't change your name. Now they've remixed one of your tracks... TOM: Yeah, that was some shock. We loved them, admired them. That's why we called ourselves Dust Brothers and when they threatened to sue we were shattered. ED: Yes, but now that they remixed one of our tracks and we remixed one of their tracks everything is fine.

It's a great compliment, after all they were our heros and our inspiration. NYROCK: You are pretty well known for your remixes. Have you had your eye on the scene? Anything you particularly liked? TOM: I quite liked the stuff the Microbots did. That really impressed me. Or the Pole album, a lot of effect with really simple methods, that's great. ED: The Dirt Chamber sessions are also great. TOM: Yes, but Liam Howlett , come on, the guy is a genius. NYROCK: On Surrender you worked with Noel Gallagher again. It seems like a steady collaboration between the Chemicals and Oasis... TOM: It's fun working with Noel, really fun. He's a good sport. ED: Noel's really cool. When we asked him to do it, he said yes and just came round and did it in a day. TOM: It was a lot of fun. We had fun and I think it comes across on the album. I think he likes it because it's so different from putting together an Oasis album. It's something else for him. NYROCK: You had quite a number of guest musicians, Noel, Bernard Sumner and Hope Sandoval.

What was it like working with them? TOM: It was different with each and everyone of them, Bernard Sumner and Noel and Hope Sandoval. They are far apart from each other. But our sound is so strong and so defined that it can really take on these different things, without sounding watered down or losing it. NYROCK: You guys seem to be a bit nervous. Did I ask the wrong questions? ED: TOM: Champions League, Man United... PS: The team Manchester United won. It looks like the Chemical brothers are always on the winning side. July 1999 Running on Instinct: How the Chemical Brothers Stay Vital | Pitchfork Their Vibrant New Sound—in Each OtherRead Now Running on Instinct: How the Chemical Brothers Stay Vital For 20 years, the UK duo has weathered myriad hot-button trends while offering their idiosyncratic take on festival-filling dance music. Philip Sherburne talks to Tom Rowlands about puncturing EDM maximalism with their forthcoming eighth album.

Electronic July 7 2015 The Chemical Brothers ' last major outing was 2012's Don't Think , an unusual concert film collaged together from the perspectives of multiple gobsmacked audience members—a strobe-lit, jump-cutting jolt that put a point on the duo's ecstatic two-decade career. "It felt like the culmination of a lot of years' work," says Tom Rowlands. "I suppose, after we made the film, you could have said, 'That's it, they've done their thing.'" But calling it quits wasn't in the cards, even though fellow Brother Ed Simons is now increasingly occupied with his academic career, the details of which he prefers not to divulge. ("'Non-specific academic work' is the phrase he's very keen on," says Rowlands.) In fact, Simons will sit out the group's upcoming live shows, in which Rowlands will be accompanied by Adam Smith , their longtime visuals partner. But the pair still DJ together on a fairly regular basis, and Rowlands can be found in his London studio pretty much daily.

That's where he and Simons spent the better part of the last three years working on their eighth album, Born in the Echoes —not just woodshopping their sound, but rethinking the purpose of the entire project. "When you first start out, you make a record and you go on tour, and you're just in that cycle," says Rowlands. "But at this point, we have to make something that feels vital, something that we couldn't not make. A lot of time was spent experimenting and finding a vibe." They got their first intimations of that vibe as they began perfecting "Sometimes I Feel So Deserted", a white-knuckled, peak-time anthem that does pretty much none of the things that peak-time anthems are supposed to do: There's hardly any kick drum, there's no real bassline, and the drops are actually anticlimactic, building to a frenzy and then pulling the rug out, leaving the listener hanging in midair. Nevertheless, the exhilaratingly uneasy track became a staple of their DJ sets, in part because it sounded so different.

"It was a conscious decision not to make that track so pumped-up—it felt more like a like band playing techno music, but with their instruments not quite plugged in," says Rowlands. "It's exciting for us when we can make a record that doesn't sound like another club record but still gives you that response when we play it in the club." Fittingly, Born in the Echoes contains some of the duo's most effective club cuts in years: "Just Bang", a gnarly house bruiser that sounds like the bastard child of Ron Hardy and the Bomb Squad ; "EML Ritual", a seasick acid-house burner featuring the high-strung crooner Ali Love and a battery of rushing 909 snares; and "Reflexion", a pitch-bending instrumental that wails like a five-alarm fire in a synthesizer factory. Rowlands calls the album's tougher cuts "instinct records—they're not trying to be everything to everyone." These subwoofer-stretchers are just part of the album, though. Elsewhere, St. Vincent plays an ice princess on the shuddering "Under Neon Lights", and Beck drops his guard on the melancholy "Wide Open".

There are '60s-inspired psychedelic rave-ups and odd, radiophonic sketches; in my estimation, the spooky and slippery title track, featuring Cate Le Bon , is one of the best things they've ever written. And then there's "Go", the album's first big single, complete with a quirky Michel Gondry video. The song's a quick-stepping hip-house joint that finds Q-Tip riding a boisterous, Technicolor-soul chorus. It's not my favorite song on the album, but I can imagine hearing it on a car stereo 10 years from now and being supremely stoked. Rowlands laughs when I tell him this. "It's one of those things that some people love, and other people just go, 'Ugh, that doesn't sound like the Chemical Brothers,'" he says. "But to me it really sounds like where we started, mixing hip-hop and synthesizers together. If I were going to a friend's house and there was going to be dancing and fun, I'd want that record in my bag." He imitates the beat, singing the hook through the phone.

"Some people don't want to go down that road—whoa-oh, ba da da da da da da da—but that's the bit I always sing. This record is about trusting what you feel, going with what makes you feel good, and not worrying what people will make of it." Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. Photo by Hamish Brown. Pitchfork: How is making music different for you guys now compared to when you were starting out 20 years ago? Tom Rowlands: When we started making music, it's almost like we had no choice about what we made. There was only one thing that came out of me; I was trying to copy a Public Enemy record, but I wasn't up to it, so it came out like it did. But the more skillful you become, the more choices you have, like, "Oh, I could do it like this, and I could do it like that…" It's a curse, really. For this record, it's almost like we were trying to unlearn our skills and do everything on a more instinctive level.

A couple of years ago, we were listening to a lot of these old Ron Hardy edits, and it was all so strange and primal and wrong and raw—exactly what excites me about dance music. A lot of big, maximalized electronic music now is kind of easy to make, and we were trying to find a different sound. Pitchfork: How did that decision play out as far as instrumentation and decisions on how the album would actually sound? TR: We used a lot of the stuff that we used on our first couple of records: sequencers, Akai samplers, MPCs, old E-Mu drum machines. And there's a lot of samples of ourselves playing guitar or bass; creative sampling still really excites me. I love the idea of, like, a hi-hat from some old jazz record next to some sample you've made of dropping a piece of concrete into water next to the sound of playing a cymbal with a bow—all these weird things together. We're just really into making funny sounds and putting them into some kind of order that makes sense. There's a lot of strange, half-broken old synthesizers all over the record, too.

"Born in the Echoes" was made with antiquated technology, and that's another song that feels simple and clear, and when an interesting sound comes in, it's just the right sound. It feels like one of those strange records that you hear, and you're like, "What is that? Where is that from?" Pitchfork: Another synthesizer track that stands out is "Taste of Honey", which sounds almost like ‘60s electronic pioneers Perrey and Kingsley with its buzzing bees, and then that guitar solo at the end. Was that a studio experiment that just— TR: That went wrong. Pitchfork: Or went right! TR: It reminded us of things we put on some of our early records that weren't fully formed, ideas that took you on strange trips to some other place—I love it when that bee comes through my brain. There's obviously some humor in it. Not every song has to be the meaning of life. Pitchfork: How did you decide upon the featured vocalists for the album?

TR: When we collaborate with people, it's always from a perspective of us being a fan of what they do, and them having some kind of unique voice or approach to making music as well as being open to experiment. I love the process of collaboration, where you have an idea and someone else has an idea that you'd never have imagined, and the music moves on from that. Being in the studio with St. Vincent, you feel like you're in the presence of someone who is an artist, who can just conjure things up. She's amazing. And as far as track that we made with Beck, we'd been working on the music for a while, and it always felt like we needed something that really connects emotionally, so it was a joy for him to bring that to the record. Pitchfork: You were pioneers of live electronic music. In the days before Ableton, was it difficult to take what you did in the studio and translate it to the stage? TR: In 1993, we were DJing tiny parties in London, but when people asked us to DJ at big events, we'd be like, "Oh no, we're not proper DJs.

We'll come and play live!" We would set up in the club with an MPC and some analog synthesizers and everything would get very sweaty and break. Now, the idea terrifies me, but it was a different time, really. One of the first places we played live for a lot of people was in Orlando, in 1994. We were just amazed that someone knew who we were and got in touch and paid for a plane ticket to America to play. And then we turn up, and it's a massive, full-on rave. We had this track, "Chemical Beats" , and we'd show up with an MPC and a Juno-106 and some distortion pedals and just make it up. Pitchfork: Was there a sense of culture shock in those first trips to America, before you had any idea of what was happening in the States? TR: Yeah. No one was asking us to come and play that kind of thing in England then. We'd turn up in the States and play records like "Song to the Siren" and people would know them. It was mind-blowing, really.

We'd made this record in our bedroom, and suddenly we were in America, which for us was an exotic place to go—even though, I must admit, Orlando is maybe not the most exotic place in the world. But for us, at that time, we couldn't believe it! And then we'd go off to San Francisco and New York. Someone the other day was saying they were surprised at the massive EDM-ification of American music, but we used to go there in 1994 and play these big raves that were all separated by scenes and miles. And now they're all being joined up. Pitchfork: Even though Ed isn't touring with you now, you guys still DJ together, right? TR: Yeah, we always DJ together, and it definitely feeds into our music and stops us from disconnecting. It makes you excited about making music, which I think is something that a lot of people in more traditional bands kind of lose that as they play live less. But in general we just like to play small DJ events. Pitchfork: You started out in a world of intimate clubs, yet the music you make feels better suited to festivals.

It's almost like the current festival format grew up around electronic artists like you, whose music is too big to be contained by a dance club. TR: Well, I don't know. From our initial experience of dance music, it was this dual thing of being in small local nightclubs and then going to massive raves, where you'd have 20,000 people dancing to a Renegade Soundwave record. It's always seemed to us like dance music does work on that scale. People were amazed that Orbital could play a big stage at Glastonbury in 1994, and I was like, "of course!" because we had seen Orbital play in a massive field outside London to the same amount of people. It always felt like this music was made to be shared. I remember playing "Leave Home" in the basement of a pub in 1994, and you can play that same piece of music on a stage at Woodstock. That's what I like about music. You make it, and it goes off and becomes something else, or it doesn't. You don't really control what it means.

CNN.com - Chemical Brothers' music lab still mixing things up - May 13, 2002 Chemical Brothers' music lab still mixing things up The Chemical Brothers: Tom Rowlands, left, and Ed Simons (CNN) -- The Chemical Brothers have come up with yet another magic formula. The group's new album, "Come with Us", sees the duo mixing things up and creating more of those spacious instrumental dance tracks that groove enthusiasts love to hear in nightclubs from Miami to Milan. A total techno infusion with tracks featuring vocals by Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft, the January release is the Brothers' third album to reach No. 1 in the British charts. The Chemical Brothers, made up of disc jockeys Ted Rowlands and Ed Simons, have been pumping out dizzying dance tracks for more than a decade. They first met at The University of Manchester in Manchester, England, in 1989, and aren't ashamed to admit that it was the city's nightclub scene -- not the school's extensive library collection -- that attracted them to study there.

The two history students established themselves as competent DJs on the Manchester dance circuit and went on to remix for Manic Street Preachers, The Prodigy and Primal Scream. Their 1995 debut album, "Exit Planet Dust", sold more than a million copies around the world. Their follow-up album, "Dig Your Own Hole", brought with it international recognition, with the No. 1 single "Block Rockin' Beats" winning a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental in 1998. TMR caught up with the Chemical Brothers at a recent performance in London's Brixton Academy . Here's what they said: TMR: What has Manchester meant to you in terms of the bands who influenced you and the city where you met? Rowlands: We both ended up at University in Manchester and the reason we both went there was the Hacienda nightclub which was opened by New Order and was the first place in England to play house music. So I must admit the quality of the library was not my first reason for going to study in Manchester. Simons: I was inspired by the music scene (in Manchester).

You could go to a club, the greatest music club I've ever been to, The Hacienda, and you'd be dancing with the people who'd made the records. It instilled in me and Tom the feeling that you didn't have to be a star you didn't have to be in the music industry to make records. You'd hear a great record and it was made by someone dancing a few feet away. We used to love record shopping in Manchester and you'd hang out in a record shop all day and the people who made the records would come in. Those people gave us the feeling that if you had a good idea and you had the ability to make music you could get it heard. TMR: How did you make the transition from students to musicians? Simons: Tom was a musician from an early age. He was very good guitar player before any technology and I wasn't a musician at all but we met and lived together and he had all the kit in his house and I learned my way round a sampler and the sequencing software and stuff. But that feeling of being able to do that - to be able to put music together and never having been a musician before was wicked. TMR: How do you go about making a record?

Rowlands: Some things we work out in a very detailed way, this is how the song will be and it has a defined structure and it's more of a traditional way and other things we come at from a completely different angle, using the computer as your instrument. Simons: There's no set place where a record begins. It can begin with an idea, it can begin with an impulse to make a certain kind of record, something you hear in another record that you like or just a tune that you write. TMR: How has America influenced your music? Simons: All the house music we listened to and all the techno music we listened to when we were 18 or 19; 90% of it was American, so it was a tremendous influence. TMR: How do reactions to your music differ in the countries you perform? Rowlands: One of the things about the music we make is that it's dance music so it's pretty universal. You go to Japan and people feel the same reaction to a funky beat as they do in wherever -- Norway. Simons: There are places where I particularly do like playing, where there's a more frenzied reaction.

Japan and Spain are particularly good places to play for us. The Chemical Brothers | Insomniac The Chemical Brothers Twitter Facebook The Chemical Brothers are the UK-based Grammy Award winning electronic music duo comprised of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. Share:

Question: Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons make up which musical duo?
Answer: 'THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS'