Underworld are making a pit stop in the U.S. this month and I got a chance to talk to Karl Hyde about Underworld’s previous life, the 90s, our current music scene, and their other artistic talents.

For those that don’t know, tell us a bit about your beginnings. You’ve been playing together since the 80s.

Yeah, Rick and I have been together for 27 years now. Working together. I was out school working 5 years as an artist, working galleries, and he was at university doing music technology. You know, synthesizers and electronics, and um, we ended working at a kitchen in a restaurant. But, yeah, we were always into electronics, into Kraftewerk, and the German electronic scene of the late 60s early 70s. It was a great influence on us. We started a band called Freur. We had a number 1 hit over here called “Doot-Doot”.

And it was electronics with guitar, you know, and dub. Dub, we’ve always loved dub reggae. The way that Jamaican dub artists play with sound and mutate the sound of instruments. So, we’ve always loved that. In it’s early days its was a fusion of dub philosophy and German electronics.

Did you ever get into the hip hop that was influenced by electronic music that was coming out at the time?..

It’s weird, we didn’t know anything about the dance scene, nothing. Nothing that was going on in the U.S. at all. We had, like, this failed career after our first number 1. We had just failed in the 1980s trying to be stars. We did a couple of albums with Freur and then we signed to Sire Records in the U.S. and did two albums. The first version of Underworld is a kinda funky, rocky, poppy sort of group. And we toured the states a couple of times and had a sort of minor record and never really got anywhere. But, we actually, didn’t know about the dancing. Can you imagine that? We didn’t know what was happening in dance music. I don’t know where we had our heads. I absolutely don’t know. And in the 90s we met people that said “Yeah, the 80s were fantastic!” And they talk about Paradise Garage and, you know, Frankie Knuckles and we’re like, “Really?”And it all started to come out, “Oooohhhhh, so, that’s this sounded like that!” or “That’s why those bands made those records!” “Incredible!” And suddenly the kind of whole world was opened up to us, what was happening in the dance scene. And that happened at the end of the 80s early 90s.

What happened at the end of the 80s, we were listening to pirate radio stations in London and they were playing Acid House. And we were in a failed band, you know, that wasn’t going anywhere. And we got really excited because, to us, it sounded like the German electronic music that we were listening to as kids. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and it was like, “This is that music that we really loved and people are making new records with it! And are playing to, like, 10,000 people in warehouses.” “This is serious stuff!” It was like punk to us. People were going out there and doing it themselves without record labels. They were just doing it themselves and doing big events that were exciting. Really exciting! And, that was it for us. We were like, “well, our career is going nowhere and we love electronic music. And, this is what’s happening in electronic music. And, this is where we want to be.

And you did become a huge part of the movement in the 90’s, with the likes of Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Orbital. How did you finally get to develop that style of music that you loved?

What happened was, in the 80s we tried to manufacture a sound that we thought would make hit records and it failed miserably. In the beginning of the 90s we said, “let’s forget about making hit records and just do what makes us happy.” And the elements that we loved which was electronics, we loved beat driven music, we still liked guitars, we liked the human voice, we love atmospherics, and we fused these things together. We just loved the noise it made, really. And it took off. I think it just came out of the fact that we were just honest about our music for a change instead of trying to contrive hit records. And that’s the way it’s been ever since. We’ve let the music just come about more natural. And every once in a while you feel the need to challenge yourself and move on and it gets painful. You come out of your safety zone and go off on another adventure and that’s what we’re doing right now.

In the 90s, did you see it as a movement, as a collective?

It was a very friendly scene. There was a club in London called the Drum Club and it was a small space in the back of a bigger club called Heaven. And, um, people like ourselves and Orbital, and Leftfield, and Björk would meet up there. And the djs would play our records and we’d check out each other’s records. And then when somebody would do well we’d be like, “Oh! That’s great!” And you’d support one another and pass each other tips. It was just a very friendly scene and you were excited when someone was doing well because that meant that the whole scene would be doing well.

What do you think of the current “non-mainstream” electronic music scene?

It’s great, I think it’s great because, you know, the whole super club, the whole super dance festival phenomena was getting really tired. It was top heavy. It was making music to make stars instead of making music for the sake of making music. And that might sound really, umm, I dunno, it might sound really idealistic but it’s what makes me happy. And before the scene broke down into its smaller components, we kept saying, “the underground has got to have a chance.” Because without the underground there’s going to be no future. The scene was so dominated by pop orientated dance music. But what I see now is just, far more healthy in terms of the variation of what’s coming out.

Do you have any current favorites?

There are labels like Cacoon that we’ve always loved. People like Adam Bayer and James Holden. There are bands that have come out of the scene, like, Late of the Pier we really like, and people that have got electronics and mutated them. MGMT, you know, which is another step off on that scene. We see kind of lots of young bands that are interesting. Bands like, Justice, are really interesting, they’re kind of another version of The Chems (Chemical Brothers) aren’t they? And they’re great, we did a couple shows with them. It’s great to see younger artists taking music from the past and mutating it and making it their own.

You also worked on a few soundtrack, how do you go about working on a soundtrack or score for a film as opposed to an album?

A score is a lot easier because you have a script, you have a director who has a very clear view of what he wants from the score, and you have images on the screen that it’s your job to support them and enhance them. So, it’s almost like the music has been written for you because, there it is. You know what your job is. Your job is to support the director and his needs.

You also have an art installation coming up. Tell us about that.

This is our second in less than a year. We did a major one in Tokyo last year, which was an enormous art jam, honor, a 7m high by 50m long wall that we built in a huge venue that we put on an all night event in, in Tokyo. And then, fantastically, The Jacobson Howard Gallery who’d come to see us perform in Central Park last year, invited us to take over their gallery for 2 weeks in the beginning of August, which is absolutely fantastic. So, we’re gonna be doing another art jam working on a wall, artists, our group of artists working on top of each other’s work. And, also, exhibiting things like our photography work, our drawings, our sound installation, video art. And, um, because we’re working all the time, working as visual artists all the time.

Do you have any upcoming projects or collaborations? Do you enjoy collaborations?

Yeah, we do. Working with Gabriel Yared on the Breaking and Entering soundtrack was fantastic. We’ve had plans in place, for us and Gabriel, to work together with an orchestra, to do an orchestral recording together. We’re working with an American artist based in New York called Nina Nastasia. She has one of my favorite all-time albums called On Leaving that came out last year. So, we’re doing a collaboration with her. And the door remains open. The thing is, because of our online radio show, there are lots of artists, and we correspond with them directly and when the opportunity presents itself then we phone up or they phone up and say, “we’re in town” or “we’ve got this idea.” It doesn’t matter which genre it is, we just like to be corresponding and collaborating with other artists.

So where will you be heading now?

We’re playing All Points West on the Saturday (August 9^th, 2008) and then we’re heading to Baltimore to play the V Festival and then back to the gallery to carry on working there. We’ve been having some great shows in the U.S. in the last few months and we’ve gotten very enthusiastic about playing there again.

I want to thank Karl for taking the time to speak to me and don’t miss out on Underworlds performance coming up this weekend if you’re on the east coast of the U.S. and their art jam if you’re in NYC. The exhibit runs through the 15^th of August.

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