the Chemical Brothers

the Chemical Brothers, British deejay-producer duo who pioneered the big beat dance music genre in the 1990s.

Ed Simons (b. June 9, 1970, London, England) and Tom Rowlands (b. January 11, 1971, Oxfordshire) met at Manchester University in 1989. Already fans of hip-hop, the pair quickly became avid participants in the “Madchester” rave scene, then buzzing thanks to the synergy of house music and the drug Ecstasy. Rowlands and Simons attended nightclubs such as the much ballyhooed Hacienda and illegal warehouse raves in nearby Blackburn. They started their deejay career at the small Manchester club Naked Under Leather.

Relocating to London, the duo recorded early tracks such as “Song to the Siren” under the name the Dust Brothers, borrowed from the American production team who would later demand they stop using the name. In 1994 the Chemical Brothers began their deejay residency at the Heavenly Social club, whose anything-goes music policy attracted those alienated by the increasingly stratified nature of British dance culture. Rowlands’s and Simons’s anti-purist deejay mix of rap, techno, and rock crystallized into their own sound on “Chemical Beats,” which combined fast hip-hop break beats and acid techno sounds. Crucially, what gave the track its rock attack was the way the Roland 303 synthesizer-bass riff supplied the mid-frequency blare of a distorted electric guitar.

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Not only did “Chemical Beats” provide the blueprint for the duo’s 1995 debut album, Exit Planet Dust, but it also sired an entire genre, big beat. The Chemicals’ 1997 follow-up, Dig Your Own Hole, kept them ahead of a growing legion of imitators by expanding their sonic spectrum, which ranged from the crude adrenal inrush of “Block Rockin’ Beats” (the reductio ad absurdum of the “Chemical Beats” formula, already perfected on 1996’s exhilarating “Loops of Fury”) to the fragile psychedelic ballad “Where Do I Begin?” (with vocals by neo folksinger Beth Orton). “Setting Son,” which topped the U.K. singles charts and featured Oasis’s Noel Gallagher (see Britpop), sounded like a hip-hop update of the Beatles’ psychedelic rock masterpiece “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

A hit on MTV and modern rock radio in the United States, “Setting Son” pushed Dig Your Own Hole to U.S. sales of more than 700,000. Along with the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers were trailblazers for “electronica,” a media and music industry buzzword for a disparate bunch of British posttechno acts belatedly impacting the American mainstream. The triumph was sweet but brief. By 1999 the electronica–big beat sound had been codified by copyists (the best of whom, Fatboy Slim, was even more successful than the Chemicals). And it had been literally “commercial-ized” by the advertising industry, which used its high-energy rhythms to pep up innumerable television commercials.

Seeking a fresh path, the Chemical Brothers’ Surrender (1999) alternated between a gentler, house-influenced sound and further forays into rhapsodic psychedelia. “Before, our music was about a disorienting, punishing kind of joy,” Rowlands declared. “Surrender is a nicer way of achieving that—lifting you up instead of blasting you out of a cannon.” In the United Kingdom, the album enhanced the Chemical Brothers’ stature as “proper” album artists and revered elder statesmen of “rave ’n’ roll.” But in the United States, caught between a mainstream that had already tired of electronica and a rave underground scene that always regarded it as a crass sellout, Surrender’s absence of ballistic thrills confused consumers and resulted in disappointing sales, as did the Chemical Brothers’ releases in the 2000s, though these efforts fared better with the British critics and audience. Nonetheless, Push the Button (2005) and We Are the Night (2007) earned Grammy Awards for best dance/electronic albums. Later releases included Further (2010), Don’t Think (2012), and Born in the Echoes (2015). In addition, the Chemical Brothers created the soundtrack for the 2011 thriller movie Hanna and wrote and performed the song “This Is Not a Game” for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014). For No Geography (2019), the duo won another Grammy for best dance/electronic album, and the single “Got to Keep On” took the Grammy for best dance recording.