More than a dance act

Commercial dance music may be dying, but the underground is still thriving.For proof look no further than the iconic Chemical Brothers, writesBrian Boyd.

When Sugababes, the glorified girl band, were named best dance act at this year's Brit Awards it was the final nail in the coffin of an ailing genre. After dominating the 1990s, dance music had run out of ideas. Cream and other superclubs were closing down; big-name DJs were falling out of favour. In short, dance's decline was as dramatic as its unlikely rise.

"No, no, no," says Ed Simons, the short-haired half of The Chemical Brothers, becoming animated for the only time in the interview. "First of all, the Sugababes song" - Freak Like Me - "was a big club track; they are a pop band who also fill the dance floor. Second, people saying that dance is dead because all those crappy megaclubs closed down are wrong. Did people say that rock music was dead when the Marquee closed down? No, they didn't, and it's the same thing with dance.

"People still want to go and listen to music with their friends and have a good time, it's just that now it's being done in a slightly different way. And whatever about the big commercial clubs, the underground is still very much alive."

If anyone knows which way the wind is blowing in the dance-music world it's The Chemical Brothers. While other acts were making bleep-bleep music for gurning ecstasy heads, The Chemical Brothers were making intelligent dance music, displaying eclectic influences and a rare willingness to meet rock music halfway. They were one of the few big dance acts that rock fans liked, so much so that the likes of Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Richard Ashcroft of The Verve happily collaborated with them on No 1 singles.

But however much they protest that dance has merely shifted its shape, you can't help feeling that the nature of the two people in front of you is somehow responsible for the genre's decline. Simons and Tom Rowlands are clever, approachable, polite and giving of their time, but they don't talk a good talk. Promotional duties seem a bit of an ordeal for two boffins who are far happier making music than they are talking about it. They're the classic faceless dance act.

They've just released a singles collection - "we didn't want to call it a greatest-hits album. It just sounds so decadent, somehow," says Simons. "It just seemed like a good thing to do. We had all these hit songs, and we wanted people to hear them in a row. People always think when you release a greatest hits that it's the end of the band, but not with us. We're planning a new studio album for next year."

It's only when you rehear the songs, culled from a series of multimillion-selling albums, that you remember how good The Chemical Brothers are. From the early Song To The Siren and the big-beat rush of Block Rockin' Beats to the still fabulous Star Guitar - and on to a new track recorded for the album, a collaboration with The Flaming Lips called The Golden Path - this is as good as dance got.

Although both are from southern England, they met at Manchester University, where they were taking the same course in medieval history, of all things. "The only reason I went to Manchester was because it was where the Hacienda club was," says Rowlands. "And the only reason Ed was there was because it was the city that gave us The Smiths and New Order, so that's how much we were both, independently, into music even back then - we chose where to go to university on the basis of what clubs were available there and what bands had come from there."

Part of the key to the standard of their musical composition was that they were as influenced by Kraftwerk as they were by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Swept up by the tide of electronica at the beginning of the 1990s, they fused dance, rock and rap, all the time keeping the groove to the fore and showing off their encyclopaedic musical knowledge by dropping in familiar guitar riffs and vocal tags.

"That's why I think we've always been more than a dance act," says Simons. "Our music has always existed outside of the genre's parameters. In a way, listening to us or seeing us play live is the same as listening to The Darkness or seeing them play live. Well, maybe not exactly, but that's because we play a different kind of instrument. We use the computer, the synthesiser, the sequencer, the mixing desk, but we play those the same way other bands play their more traditional instruments."

What also separated them from the pack was the fact that there was no loss of energy from the dance floor to the radio with Chemical Brothers tracks.

A lot of this was down to their big-beat sound (not a million miles from what Fatboy Slim later did). And at the peak of Oasis's fame, when Noel Gallagher declared himself a fan, many rock fans followed.

Gallagher went on to lend his vocals to Setting Sun, The Chemical Brothers' knowing and playful reference to the Beatles track Tomorrow Never Knows (which many people credit as the first dance track).

"I suppose we did find ourselves at that rock-dance crossover place," says Rowlands. "We were remixing the Manic Street Preachers and working with Mercury Rev, and it did seem that we were the dance act of choice for the rock fraternity. But then we'd go off and work with someone like Method Man," he says, referring to the hard-core rapper from Wu-Tang Clan.

It's odd, in a sense, that years after The Chemical Brothers were working with Oasis and The Verve, The Rolling Stones are now having their work remixed by the dance acts The Neptunes and Fatboy Slim, although Rowlands and Simons are too modest to claim the rock-dance interface was their invention.

"Besides," says Rowlands, "it's one thing having a rock vocalist on one of your own records, quite another being given a completed song to remix. You're on to a hiding if you try to remix The Rolling Stones, I think."

Having played to an enthusiastic Glastonbury Festival earlier this year, and planning more live dates to coincide with their singles collection, they are adamant that dance is not in as bad a state as it seems.

"Maybe it's just us," says Simons, "but when we played the dance tent at Glastonbury the place was heaving. Whatever about dance being over, there will always be people who want to hear deranged electronic music at four in the morning."

Singles 93-03 is on EMI