On a Razor’s Edge: The Story Behind Underworld’s Dirty Epic, ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’

In the 90s, the brightest blast from the dancefloor was also one of its darkest. Underworld’s revolutionary album Dubnobasswithmyheadman was a technicolor bonfire, an electro clash of invisible cities, shattering windows with crosstalk and hums, midnight trains to edge lands, up in the air, down in the gutter, a scream to a hush in the blues of the matrix. It’s arguably the greatest techno album of all time—and one of the best of the rest.

But for Underworld’s Rick Smith and Karl Hyde, their beautiful dream, which captured the optimism of a generation, came from a world of hurt: “a guy who was trying to kill himself,” remembers Hyde, the UK band’s singer and electronic music’s tireless bard, “another guy who was probably killing himself working 24 hours, seven days a week in the studio, not knowing how we were going to pay the rent. We were failures. We were finished.”

It’s this precarious edge that resonates again and again. Twenty years after its release, reissued last month as a deluxe edition box set, and being performed live in full for the first time in a series of shows, Dubnobass remains a noir mystery. It continues to bedevil everyone who loves it and even those who refuse it. This goes right to the album’s core, the glorious one-two punch of “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl.” Lyrically, they’re among the most powerful songs to grace dance music. “I’m invisible and an eraser of love,” Hyde sings with a black hole in his heart. Yet, it came out to many as the defiant “I’m… a razor of love,” typed out in the “Cowgirl” music video like a flashing gleam over an electric stream. Double meanings with my head, man.

Like its famous cover art—an urban crash of words and paint—what grounds Dubnobass shifts from wherever you stand. New York and London inspired the literary landscape of the album’s striking lyrics. Tokyo and Minneapolis creep in, too. But far out West under its shadow sprawls Los Angeles, a confusing heartbreak of a place that still holds keys to some big questions.

Tainted Girls and Motel Frills, You Was Done Up There Mate

Washed up from a lost decade as a 1980s new wave funk band signed to Sire Records, with a taste for Kraftwerk and dub reggae—chasing the afterglow of their early gem “Doot-Doot” and touring with the Eurythmics—Smith and Hyde’s heads were bashed in. Then rave came along like a divine wind.

“We were attracted to machine music,” says Hyde, who started his music career in 1980 with Smith, the studio wiz behind their productions and one of electronic music’s great innovators. “We had friends like the Thompson Twins, who were clearly being influenced by the dance music of America, and even they didn’t tell us about club culture. Can you believe that? We went through the whole of the ’80s not knowing about club culture. And yet, there it was.”

“Even my British friends who were living in L.A. just didn’t get it. They just fogged it off as irrelevant. To me, it was one of the single most exciting pieces of music I’d ever heard.”

At the tail-end of their ’80s cul-de-sac, Hyde had scratched out a living as a session guitarist for Prince’s Paisley Park Studios near Minneapolis, the seed for their funky song of the same name. “I didn’t work with Prince though he was there assembling the New Power Generation,” he says. “As were the JB’s, James Brown’s band, who were shooting a documentary for the BBC. Both of these artists were a huge influence on my love of funk.”

Eventually, he found himself at the edge of the West in Los Angeles, an island between desert and sea. “I remember Los Angeles in such pain in the beginning of the ’90s, in such pain,” he says, his voice filled with sadness. “I’d been completely shattered by the industry. I’d never known L.A. to be anything but cruel.”

It was a time when Hyde was reading Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, the playwright’s fractured remembrances of a zigzag life across America: “I knew a guitar player who called the radio ‘friendly.’ He felt a kinship not with the music so much as with the radio’s voice. Its synthetic quality…He slept with the radio…He believed he’d been banned from Radio Land and was doomed to prowl the air waves forever, seeking some magic channel that would reinstate him to his long-lost heritage.”

Dropped from Sire Records and at wit’s end, it would take the sound of Manchester, the mother city of Joy Division, New Order, Stone Roses and the Hacienda’s acid house explosion, to reinstate Hyde’s lost heritage.

“The Stone Roses playing ‘Fools Gold’ was like a call home,” Hyde says of the 1989 hit. “‘This is your music. This is the music of your tribe here.’ Even my British friends who were living in L.A. just didn’t get it. They just fogged it off as irrelevant. To me, it was one of the single most exciting pieces of music I’d ever heard. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m European. I need to go home.’”

Wires and Energy and My Machine, This Is My Beautiful Dream

Back in England, Smith was already redrawing the map. “Rick worked it out,” remembers Hyde. “He just said that’s where he wanted to be, whether I wanted to be there or not. That’s where he was going. So it was up to me whether I came or I didn’t. It took ages for me to work that out.”

Once he jumped onboard, almost immediately, things changed with the first beat. “There’s something about a kick drum that feels right that transmits good energy and that cuts through any dark mood,” Hyde says. The most important new ingredient was a young DJ named Darren Emerson, who would be Underworld’s third member from 1990 to 2000. He was up and coming in the East London club scene. His killer instincts for the dancefloor gave Smith’s experienced keyboard lines a youthful charge.

Early experiments like the cosmic house of “Eclipse” or their stunning dub symphony as Lemon Interupt on Leftfield’s “Song of Life” show a band radically remixing the future. Underworld’s remix of the Drum Club’s “Sound System” was another triumph. Using the original’s sighing synths, it kicked into an urgent gallop of drums and bass, rising to a riffing jig with electric guitar bending in auroral waves.

“The first movement that had ever meant anything to me as a kid was punk, and it hadn’t fulfilled any of its promises. It was very much an industry lapdog. It wasn’t what it pretended to be. And yet, rave was. Rave stood outside. It was an outsider culture. It didn’t need an industry.”

“Darren was into the Beatles,” Hyde explains. “He was this 19-year-old house DJ who liked the Beatles and Frankie Knuckles. It was like, ‘OK, I’m trying to get my head around that.’ And he felt that there was value to some of the elements of our past lives, that it was interesting to have guitars, it was interesting to have an interest in reggae or film music or Brian Eno. He was very important in encouraging us to not jettison everything that we’d done.”

Smith and Hyde also purveyed the diversity of London’s night scene, from Future Sound of London spiritualizing ambient house to Goldie angling drum & bass to On-U Soundsystem with Adrian Sherwood doing skull-cracking dub: “We went to see the On-U Soundsystem one night, Rick and I. It just blew us away, the fact that the sound system itself was the band.”

“If you can understand,” Hyde says, “the first movement that had ever meant anything to me as a kid was punk, and it hadn’t fulfilled any of its promises. It was very much an industry lapdog. It wasn’t what it pretended to be. And yet, rave was. Rave stood outside. It was an outsider culture. It didn’t need an industry.”

Collected as B-sides, live demos and rarities on the new deluxe edition, you can hear their creative freedom bursting into the open. On “Dark & Long” (Burt’s Mix), Smith slows Hyde’s voice to a low, sinister register, spitting rhythms over wicked bass bumps and what sounds like phone dials rippling past hyper fast. One of their greatest compositions is the tranquil trance of “Thing in a Book,” a 20-minute epic surf across electronic music’s widest ocean, building patiently to a sky wave—peaceful and exhilarating.

In the ghostly dimensional funk transmitted by Detroit techno and the wild transistor soul of Chicago’s acid house, like many in the UK, Underworld found a musical universe within which to grow. Both cities’ connections to the roots of blues, rock and soul sent currents through Smith and Hyde’s post-punk imaginations.

“I was attracted to the blitzed-out landscape of Detroit, like a broken Gotham City,” Hyde says. “Chicago was so cold, one winter I nearly died crossing the road to the record store, but we witnessed great blues there… The connection between the blues and electronics is in [our] heads. Soul music is the thread of the needle, and Sly Stone is the master tailor who laid the foundations with ‘I Want to Take You Higher.’”

You can hear these New-World influences on tracks like the hulking “Dogman Go Woof,” which chugs along on metal rails in the spirit of a blues train. The scatting “Spikee”—with Smith’s barking junkyard beats and soaring synths, Hyde’s celebratory “Come on and speak to yourself!” howl, and his twanging guitar burning the elastic in a joyous embrace—has as much Mississippi River as it does Kraftwerkian Düsseldorf.

Ride the Sainted Rhythms on the Midnight Train to Romford

“Cities all have their own signatures,” Hyde explains of his lyrical travels. “I love mapping journeys through their back streets… London, it took me a long time to recognize its signature, because it was so familiar I was deaf to it. Then it spoke to me through pirate radio, and my relationship with our capital was sealed. My favorite town of all to write in is Romford, here in Essex. It’s my New York.”

From the gothic traverse of “Dark & Long” and the Manhattan-to-Tokyo monument “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You…” to the winter quiet of “Tongue” and the sweet goodnight of “M.E.,” Dubnobass bottled the millennial tech-euphoria Zeitgeist, a world stepping into mania. It chain-reacted with Danny Boyle’s 1996 masterful adaptation of Irvine Welsh’sTrainspotting—it was the film’s invisible “heartbeat,” the director revealed in 2003.

Boyle, who “loved it to bits,” originally wanted to cut the whole movie to the album. Instead, Underworld’s hallucinatory “Dark Train” remix, with its pulsing beams—ricocheting Hyde’s vocals into a funky, stuttering robot—cloud-walked the movie’s climactic detox. “It was so groovy,” as one fan commented recently online, “I forgot that it should be disturbing to see a dead infant reanimated onto a person’s ceiling. Crawl on, little zombie baby!”

“It was something I had never experienced and didn’t ever believe I would see in my lifetime… It was a fabulous feeling, like surfing on a nationwide wave of positivity.”

It was the fist-pumping “Nuxx” mix of breakbeat single “Born Slippy” at the movie’s conclusion—with its timeless dawn chords and Hyde’s “Lager lager lager / Dirty numb angel boy / Mega mega white thing” rant—that seemed to best articulate the mad hopes of the time. It sealed an artistic friendship with Boyle that continues today, including Underworld’s renowned music direction of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, where on the world’s grandest stage, they helped Boyle throw a kind of international rave for the masses.

Smith was the musical mastermind for the Olympics ceremony, while Hyde mostly provided moral support. It was “almost entirely Rick’s gig, and I’m deeply proud of what he did,” says Hyde who found himself buoyed by the volunteers he met during rehearsals and on train rides back and forth to working-class Essex—encounters that helped inspire his 2013 solo album, Edgeland, including the magical songs “Slummin’ It for the Weekend” and “Final Ray of the Sun.”

“The volunteers were this tribe of once mythical people whom we had heard about when we were kids, who appeared during the worst times in World War II and just got on with the task of rebuilding and lifting one another’s spirits,” Hyde says. “It was something I had never experienced and didn’t ever believe I would see in my lifetime… It was a fabulous feeling, like surfing on a nationwide wave of positivity.”

The 20-year ride from Dubnobass to the Olympics was an unlikely journey. Walking the streets of Cardiff, Wales, more than 30 years prior, listening to Kraftwerk’s Computer World on a Sony Walkman, Smith had discovered human motion tied to electronic music. A decade later, driving the London A13 motorway from Romford, zooming through the city lights of Canary Wharf to the Milk Bar to hear Emerson mix, Smith was renewed by phantom shapes and skyward rhythms. From Dubnobass to stellar albums like Second Toughest in the Infants and Barking, he found a way to reclaim tomorrow’s spinning horizon through man and machine.

It’s a duet rife with strife and harmony. Ironically, “Born Slippy,” which became a club anthem, was in fact a kind of cry for help. Hyde, who’s the anti-stereotype of the so-called chemical generation, has never touched anything other than alcohol. It’s a prosaic addiction that almost destroyed him until he gave it up in 1998. His biggest regret the last 20 years is “having to drink so much that I wanted to die.”

It was Smith who first called out Hyde on his alcoholism. Smith, whom Hyde describes as “idiosyncratic Welsh,” shared similar humble beginnings from small towns on the edge, always looking for the heroic in the everyday. Hyde’s favorite thing about his friend? “He never gave up on me.”

From Chelsea to Essex, in Every Room, in Every Sweet Cocoon

“When the group had broken up and we were looking for a way to exist,” says Hyde, re-tracing their salvation to Essex—what he would call the Edgeland years later—“Rick salvaging what equipment we had left and building this little studio in his bedroom in this tiny little house gave us a base from which to grow. You know, without him doing that, there wouldn’t have been an Underworld.”

Smith and Hyde also teamed up with their old bandmate and art school friend John Warwicker as part of the Tomato design collective, which fired up their imaginations. Through Tomato, they developed their aesthetic—a mix of organic, digital and whimsical, pure town and country. Hyde’s first love, painting, became an important signature to Underworld’s folk-techno spirit.

“We still handcraft some of our visuals and leave in roughness, because I’ve never been attracted to purely digital artwork,” Hyde says. “Perhaps this started as a reaction against all the digital record sleeves that were around 20 years ago. I wanted to bring in abstract expressionism as a response to all that cold computer art, and Tomato embraced that concept beautifully. Technology is only an electric pencil, a brush, a hammer, a tool that should never be allowed to dictate form or direction. It’s important to have some dirt in there.”

“This is a blueprint for a band that doesn’t have a set list, that doesn’t rehearse, that responds to the moment, and is like a cross between a DJ and Miles Davis. This is the band I want to be in.’”

More than a home base, Tomato and Essex provided them with a communal web. “There was a kind of, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ ‘Have you ever done it before?’ ‘No, but we can do it.’ The attitude, ‘If you got a problem, we’re going to put the kettle on and put a cup of tea on, and I’ll call my mate who’s got a van…’ It was the people of East London who gave us their love, their support, their fellowship. They took us into their tribe, and that really was the energy behind Underworld.”

You can hear this energy on songs like the chill-room anthem “River of Bass,” a honeypot groove that ebbs and flows with radio chatter and submarine vibrations. It’s London dreaming on the Thames. “Take me down, down, down, down, down to your river of sweet relief,” Hyde whispers, a whistling synth soothing the temples and kick drums shaking the air.

From Essex, Underworld embarked on their live ascendance. With a van or two, they took their little studio outdoors to Glastonbury in 1992, where they were asked to hold forth at the Experimental Sound Field, performing for 18 hours from within a multimedia tower in the middle of 5,000 people.

“We played at the bottom, while all the projections and video equipment were on top, film and tape loops, real proper old stuff from the acid days of the late ’60s, a big cyclorama that went around the outside of this quad system with Pink Floyd’s quadrophonic desk,” Hyde says. “For me, that was the blueprint for Underworld. I remember thinking, ‘This is a band. This is a blueprint for a band that doesn’t have a set list, that doesn’t rehearse, that responds to the moment, and is like a cross between a DJ and Miles Davis. This is the band I want to be in.’”

“Playing for 18 hours was like having your mind rinsed,” he says. “I remember sunrise on the morning after, all of us stooped around an open fire, mugs of steaming tea, no one able to say anything. It was beautiful. That feeling lasted for days.”

Living in the Moment. Living in the Moment. Living in the Moment.

Taking their free-form jams around the world, one of the first times Underworld played in Los Angeles was at the historic Organic music festival at Big Bear in 1996. For those who were there, it felt like a breakthrough, part of the “electronica” surge of the late 1990s.

“In one final scream of love, who could climb this high, she looks beautiful like a child,” Hyde would sing on “Cowgirl,” giving voice to the West Coast rave scene. “I feel tears and I want to scream, you know what I mean, cause this is hurting no one. And a razor of love…” A joyous anthem, “Cowgirl” sounds like a bandit riding a crazy horse, barely in control, a kind of electric hoedown with harmonicas and lasers, a shootout of dance moves.

It’s the sister song to Underworld’s classic breakout single, “Rez”—a kind of “Ode to Joy” à la Beethoven’s Ninth—which lit up dancefloors across the globe in 1993, the same year Insomniac started in L.A. In 2013, “Rez” would serve as the peak to Electric Daisy Carnival’s Night Owl Experience, remixed by Bassnectar, who vividly remembers the first time he heard the original at sunrise. At Organic, “Rez” and “Cowgirl” kicked off Underworld’s show with an unforgettable blaze.

“It was an amazing time,” Hyde says. “I remember playing out in Big Bear, by Lake Arrowhead, at Organic, the first techno festival up there. We played in castles. We played on Mount Fuji. We played on beaches. Dance music kind of made things up as it went along. ‘Hey, this looks like a really cool place to put on a party,’ ‘Great! Let’s put on a party there…’ We can just go with our imagination, and we’re going to get somewhere.”

But it’s “Dirty Epic” that possibly means the most to Underworld. It almost didn’t happen. Smith was resistant to Hyde singing on it at first. While none of the lyrics were written in L.A., you can feel its dark, disoriented decay underneath.

“It means nothing, and it means everything. It’s just something I happen to be part of, and that’s all it is. It’s just a moment in my life.”

It begins with an almost cute “boop-bee-boop-boop-beeep” melody. “I got phone sex to see me through the emptiness in my 501s,” Hyde laments. “Freeze-dried with a new religion, and my teeth stuffed back in my head.” It’s moody music with a pace fit for a brisk midnight walk. And yet it’s the switch that turns the album full on, smart and sexy.

“We were taking off from LAX and going out over the sea, over an apartment I used to live in, and looking back,” Hyde remembers after Underworld’s first return. “And going, ‘That’s really weird. Because I’ve left this city in so much pain so many times, and now I’m leaving it feeling like we’ve discovered this whole other tribe that’s given us such happiness.’ And from then on, Los Angeles was never the same. It was always like another home for us.”

That same razor-thin line anchors all of their best work, from “Dark & Long” to “Cherry Pie” to “Bird 1.” The extraordinary “Faxed Invitation,” a sly echo of “Cowgirl” and “Dirty Epic” from 2007, dances right on the edge, welcoming the dawn with pinball melodies and a church organ in the sky, Hyde’s low voice doubling as a bassline: “I don’t wanna get dirty… faxed invitation to oblivion with bells, technicolor delights, someone pushing, don’t knock, push… you give me everything, this one cold, this one hot… lest we forget, angel at the hotel… very strong feeling of freedom, liberty… mmm deep voice, deep voice, deep voice.”

Working on a new album, Smith and Hyde still have plenty to say. Their grip of performances of Dubnobass next year, along with what some might hope could be new dates in North America and elsewhere, will no doubt inspire. Their kickoff at the Royal Festival Hall in London last month sold out in seconds. It was a cathartic show, Hyde says, “simple, silent, loud, euphoric, a surprise, binding, bonding, the giant raised eyebrow of Mr. Spock.”

More than ever, Dubnobass sounds like a blast from the future, an album that warms our computer world with wisdom, guts and bright ideas. From desperation to revival, it’s a lasting testament to electronic music’s powers of reinvention.

“It means nothing, and it means everything,” says Hyde. “It’s just something I happen to be part of, and that’s all it is. It’s just a moment in my life. It’s something Rick and I did a long time ago and something we’re performing again. The pain of revisiting a pretty dark and unpleasant time in our lives, which strangely produced something a lot of people loved.”

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