FEATURE:
Chico’s Groove
The Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust at Thirty
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I am looking ahead…
to 26th June. The Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust was released on that date in 1995. Thirty years later, this album is still being played and talked about. The album was recorded between August and November 1994. Exit Planet Dust reached number nine in the U.K. To mark its thirtieth anniversary, I am bringing in some features and reviews of this epic album. One of the best and most influential Dance albums ever released. Perhaps the best album from The Chemical Brothers. I want to start out with a 2015 feature from The Guardian. They spotlighted a 1995 interview with Muzik. A really interesting interview from a moment when The Chemical Brothers were releasing this seismic album, it is interesting reading what Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands had to say:
“As anyone who ever made it to a Heavenly Sunday Social night will already know, Tom and Ed don’t particularly like the idea of confining themselves to one narrow band of music and Exit Planet Dust is sure to stand as the most eclectic dance album you will uncover this year. From hip-hop to acid to funk to techno, goodness knows where their heads were at when they were in the studio. Especially since the album was recorded in a mere three weeks.
“We were really hammering it out,” says Ed. “We’ve written loads of new material since then and we were toying with the idea of replacing a couple of tracks with fresh stuff, but then we thought, ‘Fuck it. It all sounds great, even if it is now nine months old’.”
“We were very conscious of making the album work together as a whole,” adds his partner. “The first half an hour consists of solid beats, but it also has other stuff on there because people will hear it at home, not in a club.”
With this in mind, two of the tracks, the ghostly Alive Alone and the prickly Life Is Sweet, feature vocals. Beth Orton, who has previously worked with William Orbit and Red Snapper, and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans take the respective credits.
“We had a good session with Tim,” says Ed. “He basically sank four cans of lager, scribbled a few lyrics, and went for it. We first met him when we did a Charlatans remix, after which he regularly came down the Sunday Social and danced around with his Adidas top zipped right up to his nose. We had a wild time messing about with his vocals. But then music should be an adventure, shouldn’t it? Not just going over the same idea again and again.”
“You need different sounds to fit different moods,” says Tom. “We’re both into lots of types of music and I don’t see why we should have to deny that. I can’t believe that even the most dedicated techno buff would want to stick on a Basic Channel tune when they woke up on a summery Sunday morning. I bet they all have a secret stash of Simon and Garfunkel under their beds.”
Imagine Maurizio and the Basic Channel crew flicking through the Sunday Sport with Bridge Over Troubled Water playing in the background. What a genius thought.
Although there are lots of different levels to Exit Planet Dust, it’s the fat beats which hit the listener first. And hardest.
Ed: “I think the album suggests two people with a lot of energy about them, a lot of vitality. It’s a very youthful record. If I was 16 and I went out and bought it, I’d be chuffed to bits.” Tom: “We’re not into avant-garde excursions, the sort of abstract ideas that you’ll hear on a Mo’ Wax record. We’re more like party steamrollers.”
The dynamic quality of the Chemical Brothers’ music is not in doubt. But it could be said that there’s not a lot of elbow room for any soul.
Ed: “I don’t think that’s true at all. What do you want us to do? Get Luther Vandross to sing with us? A lot of our music is pretty brutal, but I’d say that it has far more soul, more fire and passion than most so-called soul records. It’s like the Tricky album. That’s a heavy bit of gear, but it’s also really soulful. Not everyone wants to be like Portishead, making music for people to put on when they have little dinner parties.” Tom: “Which is not to say that we don’t put a lot of time and effort into our tracks. We re-worked Chemical Beats around 50 times until we were finally happy with it. It’s often a very painstaking process.”
A substantial part of which, of course, revolves around the fine art of sampling.
Tom: “I love the concept of manipulating lots of different artists and having them play together on your record. It’s a shame the days of blatant sampling are gone. Unless you pay shitloads of money. I was told recently about someone who wanted to sample a conga loop and the record company were asking for 20 grand. For a conga loop! It’s fucking ridiculous.”
Ed: “We’re not at liberty to say exactly what samples are on the album, but there are some crazy combinations. Not that even the people concerned would be able to recognise themselves.”
Except Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, who recently complained that the Chemical Brothers had half-inched all of his beats.
Tom: “I don’t know why he’s creating such a fuss. Apart from the fact that we’ve only ever used one of his beats, he makes music in precisely the same way as us. He loops bits of other people’s tracks! That’s why we didn’t mind when we were sampled by the Boo Radleys. We thought it was great.” Ed: “But we didn’t think much of that other band sampling us, did we?” Tom: “Someone in Germany sent us this dreadful soul record which started with a snatch of Chemical Beats. We refused to let them use it.”
Ed: “We did it more for them than for us, though. We didn’t want them to embarrass themselves. They’ll thank us in the long run.”
Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez is by no means the only one who has taken a pop at the Chemical Brothers during recent months. Even Kris Needs, one of the mildest-mannered guys in clubland, has had a go. And around the time that Tom and Ed were forced to change their name from the Dust Brothers, there was the fanzine which said that they should follow Prince’s example and just use a symbol. They suggested a pile of steaming shit.
The Chemical Brothers are one of the few dance groups to really cut it on the live circuit. A couple of reviewers have suggested that their set is all on DAT. In fact, the duo actually use two huge samplers to build lengthy chains of beats and noise. Listen closely and you’ll hear them balls it up from time to time.
IN THIS PHOTO: Ed Simons (left) and Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Rex Features
“Playing live is an essential part of what we’re about,” beams Ed. “One gig which sticks in my mind was at this glitzy club in Los Angeles. There was a weird political meeting going on during the soundcheck, Young Republican of the Month or something, and we were wondering what the hell we were doing there. But when the audience came in, the place went mad. We even had people stage-diving.”
The Chemicals’ live set-up has been specially designed to enable the duo to stand shoulder-to-shoulder onstage. Hunched over the samplers, their heads are simply blurs of movement, but they still seem to be communicating with each other every couple of minutes.
Ed: “But I’m usually talking in Sanskrit.”
Tom: “And I’m usually shouting, ‘More strobe! More strobe!’”
However focussed the group’s live show might be, their DJ sets are all over the shop. With sounds as varied as U-Ziq, Sly Stone, Patrick Pulsinger, Slam, Public Enemy, Desmond Dekker, Emmanuelle Top, Flowered Up, Schoolly-D and even the Beatles on offer, it’s hardly surprising that they’ve come in for some stick about their mixing. Or, to be more accurate, the lack of it.
Tom: “Our DJing has always been about us just getting up and having a go. Neither of us has any decks at home, so we have to practise in public. We’ve definitely been getting a lot better lately, though.”
Ed: “It’s important to connect with the audience. You can hear a thousand records being mixed technically brilliantly, but if the DJ doesn’t actually mean anything to you ... The people who come to hear us DJ probably own some of our records and want to know what else we can give them. Whatever our mixing is like, we’ll always give you a fucking rocking party.”
Chemical Brothers: Leave Home, off album Exit Planet Dust
It’s easy to understand why the Chemical Brothers have come in for a lot of flak in recent months, and why they’ll continue to do so. They can’t DJ, not in today’s accepted sense, but they hosted one of the hippest London clubs of the last few years. They’ve taken their have-a-go attitude into the studio and walked out with a string of successful records. They’ve been lucky. They’re the first to admit it, and their refreshing honesty, both in print and on vinyl, is something else one or two people can’t seem to handle.
But whatever you think about the Chemical Brothers, there is absolutely no question that they do make for a fucking rocking party. There’s the big crate of amyl they keep hidden under decks, just for starters. Then there’s the raucous energy of the likes of Leave Home and Chemical Beats. That’s mainly down to Ed. Listen close to the tracks, however, and you will discover some mighty skilful musical twists in the arrangements, the timings and the tones. That’s Tom”
There are a few pieces that I want to quote from before I finish off. A landmark Dance album, I hope that there is a lot of renewed focus and energy around Exit Planet Dust ahead of 26th June. A massive thirtieth anniversary celebration. Treblezine are among those who have provided a glowing review of one fo the most important albums ever:
“Formed in Manchester at the height of the city’s influential ‘Madchester’ era (defined by the psychedelic drugs that fueled its inception as much as the celebratory combination of dance and rock music its flag bearers championed), The Chemical Brothers discovered an innovative way of bringing the guitar to the club floor. Of course this didn’t actually involve guitars so much as it did samples of guitars, along with drum machines, loops, spot-on sequencing, and a whole host of siren calls (“One Too Many Mornings,” “Alive Alone”). Tracing a neon glow-stick through its many electronic influences, acid house, funky breaks and trip hop to name a few, their debut out-raves any of the dance beats that had yet dropped upon its release.
A jab of sorts at The Dust Brothers (which was actually the Chemical Brothers’ first chosen moniker), Exit Planet Dust very nearly burst under the propulsive strength of its own block rocking feats. Two years before Fatboy Slim’s popular take on the Chem Bros bombastic beat-making earned him two Grammy nominations and invaded television screens across America (in the form of rampant commercial licensing), the duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons helped to pioneer a movement that would ultimately fizzle out around the close of the century, but not before electrifying a whole generation of DJs ready to flex their own mixing muscle.
Go ahead and forget that this is the same band that would eventually release “The Salmon Dance” on their latest flop (2007’s We Are The Night). In 1995 the Brothers’ turntables were unapproachable by mere mortals. These are the same men that ignited a funeral pyre containing the remnants of Manchester ‘s momentary status as drug and music capital of the world, only to emerge unscathed from the flames of the scene’s inevitable demise (or comedown, if you will). What designated Rowlands and Simons was their blatant disregard for what had become a conventional approach to dance beats filtered through a typical guitar/bass/drums combo.
“Chemical Beats” is a trance-worthy plunge into tribal rhythms, drenched in the salt vapor and sweaty abandon it induces. Here and throughout the duo demonstrate persistent production talent, from the ominous alarm sample that opens name-checking first track “Leave Home” to the tightly wound percussion of sensationalist “In Dust We Trust.” Tempos take breathers rather than change outright. “Song To The Siren,” besides featuring female vocal loops that exude icy exhalations with frigid frequency, is a bit of a schizoid shuffle of strange electronic flourishes and drum effects.
With songs sequenced to blend together with no discernable seams, Exit Planet Dust flows as a cohesive whole. The result is a narrative of unstoppable rhythm laced together by necessary highs and lows. Aforementioned “One Too Many Morning” is a cool drop of acid on a daybreak high, hints of dub thrumming through the album’s most placid (and transcendent) vocals. Counterpoint “Alive Alone” delves despondently into its honey-slowed themes with apathetic aplomb. With a chorus as cheery as, “I’m alive, and I’m alone, and I never wanted to be either of those,” who needs self-loathing?
Though bands like The Crystal Method (considered by many to be America’s answer to The Chemical Brothers) as well as countless others would take numerous cues from Exit Planet Dust in the years that followed its release, none seemed able to match the Mancunians beat for beat at their own game as they enjoyed their mid-’90s prime. Big beat may have come and gone in a brief blaze, but its forefathers’ inspiring first foray still shudders and shakes the street as hard as it ever has”.
There are a couple of retrospectives that I feel are important to mention. Stereogum revisited Exit Planet Dust on its twentieth anniversary in 2015. For a new generation that have not heard Exit Planet Dust, it is such a pivotal album when we think of Dance music and its development. One of the very best of the mid-'90s:
“Listening to it years later, it’s a whole lot easier to understand what those critics were writing about back then. Exit Planet Dust is a psychedelic rock record, the big instrumental rave-up that, say, the 13th Floor Elevators might’ve made if they’d had access to mid-’90s technology and less-damaging drugs. The drums aren’t nimble house drums; they’re big, gallumphing thunder-bombs, even approaching Bonham territory on “Playground For A Wedgeless Firm.” The bass-tones aren’t computerized rumbles; they sound like someone ran John Entwistle’s axe through a whole pile of fuzz pedals. the synths don’t needle or stab; they riff. There’s a reason why, in an age of producers using non-representational CGI polygons for their cover art, the Chemical Brothers went with an image straight out of Dazed & Confused.
They weren’t making a record for DJs, though a few of the tracks on Exit Planet Dust apparently did get major club play. They were making an album of fired-up stoner music, one that was intended to be received as an album. Album-oriented dance music was a pretty new thing in the mid-’90s; techno was a singles genre. But Exit Planet Dust was a landmark in figuring out how this stuff could play in album form. The structure — bangers up front, woozy pretty music on the second half — pretty much defined the way most people would assemble dance albums for at least the next few years. And maybe that’s why Exit Planet Dust has aged so much better than so many of the albums that came in its wake. There’s no forced crossover, no pay-attention-to-me gimmick. Instead, it maintains and manipulates a mood, and it does it without dissipating into ambience. And on the two tracks that do feature vocals, those vocals serve a purpose. On “Life Is Sweet,” Charlatans UK frontman Tim Burgess taps into a lost-little-kid stumble that unites the Chems with the Charlatans’ Madchester scene and, by extension, the jangled-up ’60s music that inspired the Madchester scene. And on album closer “Alive Alone,” previously-unknown singer-songwriter Beth Orton coos over sitar samples and accesses the starry-eyed longing that Orton was never able to conjure on her own. To this day, I’m mad that we never got a full album of Chems/Beth Orton collabs. They sounded better together than either ever sounded on their own.
Exit Planet Dust was a culturally important album, and an influential one, at least for a while. The combination of rave sirens and psych-rock far-outness was probably what convinced people like Noel Gallagher and Mercury Rev to jump onboard when the Chems made their even-better follow-up album Dig Your Own Hole two years later. And in the second half of the ’90s, spaced-out dance music came to rival Britpop as the dominant sound of young people getting fucked up in the UK, as you’ll hear on the Trainspotting soundtrack. Exit Planet Dust was a big part of that. But if you look at the dance music that’s taken over the world in the past few years, the bleary space-rock force of Exit Planet Dust is basically a nonfactor. These days, it feels like the Chemical Brothers most influential song is their shallow 2005 Q-Tip collab “Push The Button.” Songs like that are what led American executives to realize that dance music could make ideal beer-commercial soundtrack music, and I’d argue that that’s what really led to the EDM takeover. I’m not even mad at the way festival EDM has taken over. I get it. Watching Kaskade draw the biggest crowd of anyone at this year’s Coachella was an instructive experience; why shouldn’t these vast throngs of kids dumb out to sugary melodies and cinematic buildups? It’s a formula, but it’s one that works. Still, it’s nothing compared to what this music can be. Five years ago, I saw the Chemical Brothers headline a rock festival in Sweden, and it was probably one of the five best festival sets I’ve ever seen. In a crowd of Europeans, in a place where this music has moved crowds like that for decades, I felt an echo of the dizzy communal transcendence that was always supposed to be the point of this music, something I didn’t get from Kaskade. The Chems worked a couple of Exit Planet Dust tracks into that Swedish festival set, and they felt right at home”.
I am going to end with a feature from Spectrum Culture that was published in 2023. I was in high school when this album came out but was probably not aware of it. At a time in British music when Britpop was at its height and stealing focus, there were few people my age talking about The Chemical Brothers. In years since then, Exit Planet Dust has made its way to me and made its mark. It is an album that I really love and would recommend to everyone:
“But by the mid-‘90s, innovative electronic music began to enter the mainstream, whether through the release of a new wave of so-called trip hop paving the way for the big beat explosion by acts like the Crystal Method and the Prodigy later in the decade. On the other hand, artists like Massive Attack and Tricky pitched everything down to a dreamy, relaxed state while eschewing the stomping bassline in favor of lazy drum breaks and moody pads. In 1995, British producers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons released their first album as the Chemical Brothers. Exit Planet Dust, bearing a title emblematic of leaving their former sound behind (as well as ditching the copycat Dust Brothers moniker they were threatened with legal action into changing), took a vastly different direction from the typical club-friendly house sound. Working as a catalyst for their crossover into the mainstream, this record doesn’t rely on overwrought soul samples, cheesy piano chords or predictable pop patterns. Instead, it tears down the uninspiring dance floor formula from that era and replaces the pop with a psychedelic and percussion-rich sample frenzy, making it one of the most unusual and catchiest dance music records of 1995.
The lead track “Leave Home” is the most iconic on the record. A looping bass note introduces the song under the hypnotic, echoing repetition of “The brothers gonna work it out.” A wah-wah guitar lick adds a layer of unexpected filthy funk to the rhythm, and from that point on the duo adds layers upon layers of slick breaks and synth patterns. What makes the record so compelling is the Chemical Brothers’ seemingly unrefined approach to shuffling loops, beats and warped sound effects as though there were no intended goal aside from keeping the party-goer engaged. With “Song to the Siren,” it’s easy to imagine the two of them in the studio, settling on a limited palette of awesome licks and then playing with them in experimental layers and effects until they’ve just passed the three minute mark—cut and master. It’s this dynamic approach that keeps Exit Planet Dust constantly in motion and perpetually sinking and rising in and out of a deep groove.
If there is a single song on the record that seems to at least make an attempt at traditional house music appeal, it’s “Three Little Birdies Down Beats.” Though weaker than usual, the bass drum is consistent but soon drowned out by another fresh funk breakbeat. Just as “Leave Home” had its signature sound, “Birdies” has a repeating acid worm that nearly crosses the line into over-repetition before falling away into a simple layered beat breakdown. The degree to which the duo failed to make a traditional dance floor thumper is a glorious mistake because they instead created something far more interesting and timeless in the process.
Exit Planet Dust also reveals the Chemical Brothers’ sentimental side, producing some beautifully arranged, reflective sample-based mood swings. The first six tracks all play as though they were a medley, running into each other in a style borrowed from the live DJ experience. Though a listener could pick out a dozen or so looping moments that constitute their personal favorites, the entire album also works as a complete end-to-end listening experience.
Meanwhile, “One Too Many Mornings” is as close to a ballad as the record comes. In applying the Chemical Brothers’ signature sound to a slower beat, and adding airy female vocal samples dubbed over a pad of angels to an organic meandering bassline, the album goes from being a simple dance music record to a complete music project worthy of entering the conversation for best records of 1995. Noted as the second best dance album of all time by the UK’s Muzik magazine, it continued to chart in the UK for the next five years.
Upon the appearance of the Charlatans’ lead singer Tim Burgess on “Life is Sweet,” the Chemical Brothers reach beyond their previously limited appeal in electronic music circles with an effort to pull in fans of the hugely popular Madchester sound of not only the Charlatans, but the likes of the Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets as well. In another guest spot, British folktronica singer-songwriter Beth Orton adds a sonorous dynamism to the album’s closing track, “Alive Alone.”
Nearly two decades after its original release, Exit Planet Dust sits among that rare list of records that manage to retain a timeless appeal. An unfamiliar listener today could confuse this album for a new release. There’s a larger discussion to be had about the direction the Chemical Brothers took with later releases and their inability to measure up to Exit Planet Dust, but that’s to be expected when this mammoth debut set such a high bar”.
I am going to leave it there. On 26th June, one of the most accomplished and revolutionary debut albums ever was released. This is an album that sound absolutely perfect on vinyl. I know there will be some expansive features around the thirtieth anniversary. For those in the know, go and spend some quality time with the album. Anyone who has not discovered it, go and listen to it now. There are some classics from 1995 we are celebrating this year. Maybe Exit Planet Dust will not get the same kudos and weight as other albums. It should do. There is no denying the fact Exit Planet Dust is…
A game-changing work of brilliance.