The art of The Chemical Brothers: “We want people to be overwhelmed”

“Not talking has always been a core belief,” Tom Rowlands explains, aptly, behind the shroud of an email exchange. Rowlands, along with Ed Simons, are The Chemical Brothers, the electronic music phenomenon which, this year, turned 30. As people, they are elusive; as a band, they are one of the most visually and sonically intoxicating acts of an era. Their work is the stuff of fever dreams, acid trips, folk horror and extraterrestrial fantasy. “Our live shows were initially propelled by the fact that we’re not natural performers,” adds Simons. “We just wanted blinding lights and visuals from the get-go.”

This visual success is indebted to a long collaboration with Smith & Lyall, a design studio composed of Adam Smith – who has worked with the band since their first live gig in 1995 – and Marcus Lyall. “When we first met Adam, we quickly realised we were similarly bloody-minded,” says Rowlands. “His purity of vision could be frustrating at times, but it worked. He and Marcus have rules of engagement and it has to be that way.”

In the early 1990s, The Chemical Brothers went by The Dust Brothers (before realising a band of the same name already existed) and Smith was working within a collective called Vegetable Vision, making visuals for bands, raves and clubs. They moved in the same heady techno club circuits, from the grimy, pulsating walls of Sabresonic – an under-the-arches club night in London Bridge run by acid house legend Andrew Weatherall – to long-running Leeds club night Back To Basics. They met, hit it off and a collaboration began brewing. Someone suggested they do a live show, but Rowlands and Simons were performance-shy. “From the very start, we knew we didn’t want to be in the spotlight on stage,” says Simons. “We decided that we wanted to have visuals projected right on top of us. And lots of strobes. That ethos has been the same for every gig we’ve played in the 30-odd years since.”

Smith’s orchestration for their first live show was a rudimentary affair: 20 minutes of 35mm Kodak slide projectors (acquired from a Ministry of Defence base “under strange circumstances”) and spinning wheels adjusted to the BPM by a Hornby model railway – “high tech stuff,” quips Smith over Zoom with Lyall from the studio they share in East London. “The origins of this were literally standing there with loops of 16mm film around your necks and gridding up projectors.”

It’s a far cry from the giant mechanical robots, 80 MegaPointe lights, acid-drenched marching men, monsters, clowns and Michelin man-esque live performers that define the band’s MO today. But the original sensibility remains. “There wasn’t anything prescriptive about what we were supposed to do; they trusted completely,” says Smith. “It grew from sweaty clubs to bigger shows and then going on tour with them.”

As I write, The Chemical Brothers are on a UK arena tour which concludes London’s O2 arena on 4th November. Their first stop at Glasgow’s OVO Hydro was a forensically choreographed spectacle; the band reduced to silhouettes in clouds of dry ice, strobes and blaring digital collages. “When we play live now, it’s with the same aim as when we first started playing. We’ve always wanted people to be overwhelmed. We want people to feel like it’s too much”, says Rowlands. “We were trying to do that at Sabresonic and we’re still trying to do it now. And there’s no communication with the audience other than through the music.”

The Chemical Brothers just released a new book, Paused In Cosmic Reflection, a kaleidoscopic retrospective of their 30-year career, peppered with contributions from the likes of Noel Gallagher, Aurora, Beth Orton, Michel Gondry and Adam Smith. It charts The Chemical Brothers’ evolution, from the gritty Manchester music scene that brought them together in 1989 to the band they became, notching up 13 million album sales, six Grammys, a Brit Award and an army of cross-genre fans. Their greatest hits, among them Hey Boy Hey Girl, Galvanize and Go, have risen to the rank of pop classics.

For the 2023 tour, Smith & Lyall has remixed visuals from the band’s recently released 10th studio album, For That Beautiful Feeling, as well as newly concocted sequences. At one moment, they replicate the confined intensity of the early shows where, as Smith explains, “the strobes were on and there was nothing else; that moment in the club where you see your friend in one position, and then in a second they’re somewhere else.”

One might imagine that most of the work of an electronic live tour is pre-cooked. Yes and no. “You’ve got a backbone of what’s going to happen, but there’s room for improvisation,” says Lyall, explaining that although festival gigs are fun, it’s the arena where the precision and detail of the design is at its most palpable. “You’re not competing with a funfair or the elements,” adds Smith. “You can pump a certain amount of smoke out and you know it’s gonna stay and a gust of wind isn’t going to take it away.”

Smith & Lyall recently staged ‘MUSIC RESPONSE 001’, the first in a series of art exhibitions staged in the somewhat unlikely setting of an empty shop in the small Somerset town of Wincanton. It featured costumes and films for The Chemical Brothers, many on view for the first time, and was created in collaboration with our costume designer Kate Tabor. Beyond their work for The Chemical Brothers, Smith & Lyall also work independently. Smith is a director with credits ranging from music videos for The Streets to TV series Doctor Who and Skins, while Lyall’s practice is rooted in installation art and graphic animation. The duo are now developing an immersive project for Manchester’s Factory International slated for 2025, with shows at 180 Studios, the V&A and the Southbank Centre also in the pipeline.

Reference points for their Chemical Brothers visuals are varied: “We like mixing up seemingly disparate influences to create something new,” says Smith, citing the likes of artists Oskar Fischinger, Nam June Paik, Leigh Bowery, Kenneth Anger, Bill Viola and James Turrell. They also reference specific film scenes, including the solarised sequences in the Monkee’s psychedelic film Head (directed by Jack Nicholson), the fairground ride scene in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and 1980s Japanese superhero TV shows, the latter directly informing the visuals for The Chemical Brothers’ 2019 single, Eve of Destruction.

In September, Smith & Lyall released the hypnotic video for No Reason, a track on For That Beautiful Feeling. The song’s military drumrolls are visualised in a fluorescent marching band starring performers from the Gecko Theatre. In typical Smith & Lyall style, inspiration tapped everything from David Byrne’s jerky movements in early Talking Heads videos to Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.

I ask how the creative exchange works between the quad and am met with a pause. “They give us the music,” Lyall laughs. “The whole idea is very much about play. It’s not about writing essays, it’s about what it triggers; what it makes us feel.” The results are intentionally bold and legible. “The music is the master and we serve that master.”

The alchemy of a Chemical Brothers live show is a curious recipe; its success can be boiled down to the number of chefs involved. “We’re very lucky because to be able to create stuff at this level without external interference. It’s between us two and Ed and Tom,” says Smith. “That’s created an incubator which has allowed the most ridiculous shows to evolve, that wouldn’t have evolved otherwise. Fear doesn’t come into it. Fear is the death of creativity, isn’t it?”

 

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