Chemical Brothers singles

Block Rockin Beats is a dance floor monster.

LATER THIS AFTERNOON: monkey mafia

Man I can't decide between Elektrobank and TPPR. Make BRB look like a rather timid mini-daemon.

interesting that all their later singles seem to require a guest vocalist

Did I ever mention that We Own The Night got me through my exam period almost single-handedly? I had a promo copy and I'd hidden my laptop away, hence it was just about the only thing I could listen two. Shame about the two singles. "Burst Generator" would win this for me if it had been loosed alone.

*listen TO! jeeeeesus

where's Loops Of Fury EP

ARGH I KNEW SOMETHING WAS MISSING

CURSE YOU WIKIPEDIA

i kind of want to go 'hey boy hey girl' on this.

'where do i begin' (not really a single!) and 'tppr' are yoga flame but not very singly.

xpost

o shi good point, though i wouldn't have voted for it.

might have voted for 'get up on it like this' though.

I think the main reason I hated Surrender is because I liked HBHG so so so much that the rest of the album couldn't compare to it.

I think HGHB is pretty boring.

wrong

14th Century Sky is a great EP

A1 Chemical Beats (5:37)
A2 One Too Many Mornings (4:10)
B1 Dope Coil (5:02)
B2 Her Jazz (8:35)

but that is crazy talk, the album is fairly ace throughout, especially the let forever be -> asleep from day centrepiece run of wonder

xposts to dan

"Music: Response: is a big pile of dick, though, and "Let Forever Be" is the diseased nutsack attached to it.

Out of Control for me. Didn't realise wee Bobby featured on it. On "vibes" presumably?

I may have this poll deleted so I can redo it with Loops Of Fury EP on it.

yeah ok the first two tracks are kinda massively gash but after that it's pretty wicked IMO, let forever be is a MASSIVE CHOON *loutishly kicks a car side-panel in*

We need a chemical bros remix poll. Poison! Swastika Eyes! Bug Powder Dust!

Might vote My Mercury Mouth, just cos. But I really like some of the later ones, too, when the beats were less big: Star Guitar especially.

Surrender is all great except 'Dream On'

:(

(Keep in mind my opinion on Surrender is based off of one listen-through that so disgusted me that I threw away the CD and actively avoided it and all things Chem until "It Began In Afrika" was released; I may have changed my mind in the intervening years.)

surrender > dig yer own hole > exit planet dust > all the others

tempted to vote for star guitar though, but maybe i'm being unreasonably swayed by the gondry video.

I can't fathom why people like Surrender at all, let alone how they can rate it above Dig Yer Own Hole.

It's more atmospheric than Dig, but less headbangin' four on the floor dancefloor smash... i guess the former just appeals more to me.

electrobank! it's pretty ravey and i like the vocal sample

ah I gotta vote for The Private Psychedelic Reel really.

^^^yeah, me too

It Began in Afrika ka ka ka ka ka ka ka ka ka ka ka

Still "Leave Home"

"Galvanize" was a surprisingly good late effort (and obviously the best thing Q-Tip has ever been involved with)

I can't really see how anyone could strongly love one of those first four albums and strongly loathe another. Yes, even Come With Us. The formula didn't really start to change/sour until Push the Button, which is ass.

That said, I'm voting for "Life is Sweet" for the last few minutes.

Runner up: "Star Guitar."

star guitar

'cause it actually sounds like music you can dance to as opposed to the music they play in movies that people pretend to dance to

almost worth voting BRB for 'Morning Lemon'

'cause it actually sounds like music you can dance to as opposed to the music they play in movies that people pretend to dance to

-- El Tomboto, Friday, June 27, 2008 5:21 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

#1 concern of internet dance fans

sorry I forgot where I was

i used to be so into exit planet dust, i wonder if i would like it if i heard it now

ok I voted for "Private Psychedelic Reel" but wtf at that being a single? Was there a 3 minute edit or something?

don't think so but it ended up being ineligible for the charts due to the inclusion of a poster with the cd. it was backed with the storming live version of 'setting sun'.

it was ltd edn, but it was a single. no edit.

'hey boy hey girl' barely over 'star guitar'

private psychedelic reel, for sure. haven't listened to this mob in ages!

DO NOT VOTE FOR HEY BOY HEY GIRL

I am still o_O at Jazze Pha quoting "Hey Boy Hey Girl" in that one Field Mob/Ciara track, bit anyway I voted for "Setting Sun" cause I am lame like that.

I thiink people should vote for "Private Psychedelic Reel" cos altho its the most rockistest obvioustest choice you could make it's still better than Wally Goes Pyjama Pixel-Wobble Apenenss Deyn" or something

Star Guitar!

Rather than "indie" Surrender arguably feels like they're more consciously crafting a 'psychedelic' album except, by abandoning big beat, that now can mean anything from (their versions of) dream pop to deep house to big-room superclub sounds all in a row without it coming over all capital-E eclectic.

Shoutout to the Futureshock Main Response mix of Music:Response that opened a Cream compilation I used to listen to (in part) a lot (a strong association even though I already owned that mix on the M:R single).

haha quite

Surrender is v locked in with both my first Glastonbury that year plus their set at Homelands a few weeks before that hsng on I feel like only a few months ago I was talking about this here and about listening to the album on a Real Player live stream on a T1 connection lol great days all gone now /Noel

I once tried to make a mashup of the Futureshock remix and Betty Boo's "Don't Know What to Do" because I decided they were surprisingly quite similar in places. It didn't really work.

(Pops head back in, fires up Claud)

I should also caveat everything I said by reminding myself that I was going through a horrible time in 1999 and most of what I would describe as the "Chris Moyles era" of radio music bums me out big time. So yes, subjectivity plays a big part in all this.
I did have Surrender on just now, and I agree it is trying to go for a vibe I'm just not into. I don't think getting these wispy alt-rock dudes like Sumner, Gallagher, Gillespie et al on these tracks dissipates the energy a lot, so that's a big part of why I dropped off around the time of that album.

Okay byeeeee

I still feel like “Music:Response” is a dick

I was a bit mean above, sorry.

I guess I meant that the impressions we form during our adolescence as to what is going on at a “whole of popular music” level (or similar) are often extremely vulnerable to inadvertently importing compressed, sedimented layers of received wisdom which are themselves compromised by misinformation and poorly-backed opinions of which we may not even be aware.

Cue Meryl Streep explaining the history of cerulean blue.

“Music:Response” was pretty weak yeah but all the housey tracks on Surrender are ace.

Actually that is broadly true of each of the first four albums: the key stretch on DYOH is the three track run from “It Doesn’t Matter”

lmao this is bringing back memories of being on an electronica mailing list when I was 13. it was like the same discussion. people seemed really disappointed in Surrender, though I do remember everyone agreeing that "Sunshine Underground" was killer. some folks defended it though, of which I was one. it just felt like Dig Your Own Hole went about as hard in that direction as it was possible to go. what was left to say after "Private Psychedelic Reel"? so Surrender found different ways to go hard.

I somewhat disagree with Ronan that the third and fourth album are more aligned with underground dance music than the first two. I'm not sure they ever got more determinedly minimalist and tracky than on "Don't Stop The Rock' for isntance.

I might say that albums 3 or 4 perhaps feel closer to many people's lived experience of clubbing, which maybe reflects a couple of things:

1. There was a pretty short acceleration period from the Chemical (Dust) Brothers releasing the Fourteenth Century Sky EP at the beginning of 1994 to the point at which the sound really blew up (by mid-1996 basically: the Brit Hop & Amyl House comp was released in January 1996, then Chemical Brothers' Live at the Social Mix was released in May, and then September saw the release of both "Setting Sun" and the first Fatboy Slim album; "Firestarter" (a few months earlier) also relevant here), by which point it was already well on the way to mostly being about well-known acts playing stadiums and festivals. I'm not sure many people except ground floor scenesters had much of an opportunity to experience big beat as a clubbing/dj-driven scene. So a lot of people, even big fans, would associate the sound of those early CB albums with a crossover context that the music adhered to only fitfully (basically: the singles and any track with a female vocalist).

2. Whereas both Surrender and Come With Us were partly course-corrections whereby CB sought to split the difference between maintaining their status as album dance behemoths and re-engaging with the big clubbing sounds of the relevant period (e.g. the big room sound of the 1999-2001 era, in turn kinda post- French House* and Global Underground) - but many more listeners recognised those vibes from going out clubbing (there's never really been a point in time in the last thirty five years that populist house has not been a staple sound on mainstream club dancefloors). So Surrender and Come With Us would probably feel closer to what people remember as the basic sound of clubbing from their respective eras than would be the case for the earlier albums.

*I think it's possibly useful to think about CB (perhaps counter-intuitively) in the context of mid-90s french house (maybe Armand van Helden also - hard to hear "Block Rockin' Beats" as something other than a partial hat tip to "Professional Widow"), given their early sound has always sounded to me heavily influenced by Motorbass and early Daft Punk, the latter of whom remixed "Life Is Sweet" in mid-95, only shortly after the initial release (and well before the wide release) of "Da Funk". That remix in turn sounds like a clear blueprint for "It Doesn't Matter".

It's almost as if Chemical Brothers were trying to come up with an equivalent to spartan early French House that carefully avoided overt disco resemblances - arguably disco as a sound acts as the unexpressed oedipal temptation around which their early music contorted itself (related tidbit: curiously, early track "Her Jazz" (from Fourteenth Century Sky) sounds like Motorbass crossed with Leftfield).

But somewhat like how the popular conception of early Daft Punk, heavily tied to the singles, reduces them to a kind of Respectable Phats & Small and ignores "Rollin' & Scratchin", "Musique", "The New Wave", CB's output is distorted in our recollections - all "brit hop", no "amyl house".

Agree with that generally. They were sort of part of the world of clubbing by then but arguably as much or more part of the world of rock music/criticism beforehand, without judging the earlier output. It's just true. They obv did as much as they could to make this the case too, Hey Boy Hey Girl is not an accidental sample or whatever.

I was going through a horrible time in 1999 and most of what I would describe as the "Chris Moyles era" of radio music bums me out big time

Not to comment on bad times in your memory, but Chris Moyles didn't start the breakfast show until 2004. I guess he did other shows before that but Sara Cox was the breakfast DJ before that which is not a totally unimportant distinction in the context of this discussion given the music she played and the fact she was married to a big beat producer/DJ at the time. Like the breakfast show was obv his biggest era.

Heh, well I was a student in '99 so breakfast was a thing that largely happened to other people. He was pretty well known even back then though.
IIRC he played Flat Beat ("This next one is by... Mister Wazzo") on his drivetime show and said it was the worst record he'd ever heard. Anyway, splitting hairs but he might have been the reason I'd stopped listening to Radio 1 by 2004

I was a bit mean above, sorry.

I guess I meant that the impressions we form during our adolescence as to what is going on at a “whole of popular music” level (or similar) are often extremely vulnerable to inadvertently importing compressed, sedimented layers of received wisdom which are themselves compromised by misinformation and poorly-backed opinions of which we may not even be aware.

Cue Meryl Streep explaining the history of cerulean blue.

― Tim F, Thursday, 19 March 2026 01:46 (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's all good Tim. I wrote that post in an idle moment on my phone and without much thought.
Wasn't intended to come from a place of authority or anything, so I should have made it clearer that it was just my perspective on why I was cool on Surrender at the time.

If I can rephrase: Surrender felt (to me) like an explicit attempt to court their existing indie/crossover audience. I don't love the guest appearances as they take me out of the experience.

Not sure they could have been any more appealing to that audience from the beginning. Like, as you say, they were doing tracks with Tim Burgess etc from very early on.

The crossover was with a more mainstream dance music audience imo. If it was an indie thing it wouldn't have been by far their biggest record with their biggest selling single charting at number three.

I remember Chris Moyles being on in the afternoons during my time working at a mortgage processing office in 2002, his most-played tunes were Stop Crying Your Heart Out by Oasis and How You Remind Me by Nickleback, it was on in the office every day and I HATED it.

But somewhat like how the popular conception of early Daft Punk, heavily tied to the singles, reduces them to a kind of Respectable Phats & Small and ignores "Rollin' & Scratchin", "Musique", "The New Wave", CB's output is distorted in our recollections - all "brit hop", no "amyl house".

Daft Punk in the popular mindset as a "respectable Phats & Small" for the first part of their careers based on the big singles is p funny and OTM

I worked in news at Radio 1 circa 2010-2011 and had to hear the shows all day every day. Some truly terrible music, apart from when they picked a year in the 90s on a Friday morning and you'd get Born Slippy etc.

One thing I'll say for Moyles is he obv seems like a massive dickhead on the radio, and possibly is one in general but even having never even worked directly with him, he would always say hello or have a chat. Possible early shift solidarity, as I used to see him outside having a smoke when arriving for work at 0545 or whatever.

xpost

The crossover was with a more mainstream dance music audience imo. If it was an indie thing it wouldn't have been by far their biggest record with their biggest selling single charting at number three.

― LocalGarda, Thursday, 19 March 2026 09:26 (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Can it be both though? Post-Britpop, "Indie" (in the loosest mainstream sense, because it was mainstream) in 1999 was still enormous in the public eye.

Or arguably 1999 could be seen as this crossover period where the Gallaghers were still all over the tabloids, festivals were selling more tickets than ever, but the NME was struggling to find its "next big thing". Meanwhile the UK clubbing bubble was fit-to-burst with the opening of superclubs and the rise of (huh) "Superstar DJs" like Tall Paul and whoever. So granted there was that too.

Not really because like, they always were popular in indie circles. Is there a dance act, even among the popular stadium ones, that is more responsible for crossing over with rock audiences? That didn't start at Surrender and in fact. besides Let Forever Be, that album was the beginning of the end there.

Like you can't ignore Setting Sun and just announce Let Forever Be was their first step into indie crossover.

Fwiw they had two number ones off DYOH and none off Surrender, tho it's their biggest selling album.

Naw, they definitely appealed to indie audiences from the off (no denying that), and I mentioned Seting Sun in my longer post. Surrender felt more like a wilful lean-in to all that. But anyway, I'm repeating myself now

First single of theirs I bought was Life Is Sweet, which is just before they got big and features Tim Burgess, so yeah indie appeal from the start. By 2001 they were releasing white labels under another name to build up club hype before they put out albums, for example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Began_in_Afrika - which is by my count an attempt to get away from the indie-pandering label.

Re: Chris Moyles, he probably is an okay dude IRL. I imagine his persona as being a tetchy, outspoken jerk is something he plays up to

Quite like It Began In Afrika. It's linked to Fatboy Slim's Bird Of Prey in my mind -assume they must've been out around the same time

Nah, a year apart. Okay surprising

The EBWs began in 1996, although the usual not-true thing I see written is that the anonymity was a way to infiltrate the sets of DJ snoots in that classic time-honoured style, which only would have lasted for as long as it wasn't clear who was behind them (i.e. no later than when EBWs 1&2 reappeared on DYOH).

What clubs or DJs were actually playing EBW1 and 2 in 96? what were they played against? I'd love to know (as I said upthread I today see them explained as indebted to the Surgeon/Regis Brum sound which I don't fully agree with but it'd be intriguing to know how they were received at the time free of context, I probably have read this all somewhere years ago but I don't remember now).

Yeah iirc it was pretty evident who the EBWs were coming from. Interesting question tho as I have no direct experience of hearing them that I can recall (I was in my first year at Uni and there were dance nights on campus with the occasional mid-tier DJ, every now and then a quite big name and I was going to lots of gigs with pre-set DJs but not clubs in London so much and when I did they were Metalheadz nights and the like). Tho he was more big beat at that point I can hear 'It Doesn't Matter' in a Jon Carter set from that time, maaaybe even Dave Clarke?

I guess it's not so much that DJs would be like resistant to playing a track because it's by the Chemical Brothers, more like it doesn't really make sense to release more club orientated stuff which might alienate some of their fanbase. Also perhaps big record company wouldn't want them doing it. Or to an extent DJs don't want to play something everyone already knows, feels more about how the music is consumed?

So doing a white label sort of bypasses all that and gets the record in people's hands a different way.

Of the later ones, I remember Ivan Smagghe playing one of them, I think maybe number 7.

Oh yeah I get that's the appeal of the white label, although maybe the logic arguably breaks a little by the time EBW10 and Midnight Madness are issued within a month of each other?

Carter and Clarke are good shouts. Clarke also did that Chemical Beats hands-off mix earlier in 96 (or at least that's when it was commercially released).

Fwiw you can argue the Chems courted the more familiar turn-of-the-millennium consensus idea of clubbing by getting in Sasha, Pete Heller, Futureshock and others in the house or trancey realms to remix Surrender/Come with Us singles. The result is plenty of compilations from the last few years of the superclub era feature those remixes when the Chems featured a lot less regularly in the 1994-97 day (you could say those comps concurrently moved away from being a determined reputation of 'the club' but probs that's besides the point) (placing some importance on those CDs as they're certainly a parallel to or artefact of 'clubbing as a lived experience' given how well they sold and the impression they would have made)

representation of* even

"Galvanize" was a surprisingly good late effort (and obviously the best thing Q-Tip has ever been involved with)

― Geir Hongro, Friday, June 27, 2008

"obviously"

Naw, they definitely appealed to indie audiences from the off (no denying that), and I mentioned Seting Sun in my longer post. Surrender felt more like a wilful lean-in to all that. But anyway, I'm repeating myself now

I felt the same way about Surrender at the time. Maybe just because Let Forever Be isn't as good or as ravey as Setting Sun.

Yeah Setting Sun is loads better I reckon.

I've given Surrender a few listens over the last day or so to refamiliarise, and I'm still not personally hearing anything more "dancey" or mainstream club-oriented than the first two albums. Especially given what mainstream clubs were playing around then: trance, garage, stuff like Phats & Small. Maybe some French house in some of the cooler clubs.

This is a groovy, less full-throttle affair to my ears. A more laid-back indie-psychedelic vibe with some hip hop flourishes. The bpms do reach their highs, but there's nothing as pummellingly ravey as Block Rockin Beats as far as I can hear.

The dance music scene was particularly non-pummelling around this time.

Mmm.. was it though? Quite a wide spectrum spanning from chill out / post-trip hop type stuff, through garage and funky house, through effusive and unabashedly corny Ibiza trance. And plenty of people were dancing to hard House and and DnB, so it was a mixed bag as far as I remember.
But granted there was definitely a trend or way of thinking around the turn of the millennium that people "just want to chill"

There was hard house but it was more towards the progressive end around then, d&b was in its jazzy phase, there was the drill & bass / IDM thing but that was not representative of clubbing as a whole. Like I said way upthread, I reckon it was the drugs.

Memories are complex

lol

idk if the album is ultimately interesting enough to justify all this but when interviewing on and promoting Surrender they were v upfront about certain tracks being Chemicalised homages to trends of the time (Hey Boy Hey Girl = Gatecrasher trance, Orange Wedge = Timbaland). They were the only big dance act really to go all in on this approach (their peers seemed more set on just maintaining their established hallmarks), particularly in album context and alongside influence-on-sleeve guest vocalists, and pull it off as well as they did.

I mean an album's first single had a chorus including the words "Superstar DJs". Doesn't tend to suggest let's send a message to our indie fans. Tho prob landed a blow in a different way which for some still resonates.

Similarly I see nobody saying Let Forever Be was a key single rather than a leftover of the sounds people who appear to hate it seem to like.

Good case to be made that Let Forever Be was their least significant single ever and I don't mean itt.

Few singles have ever been as sold by their video as Let Forever Be (as in it made me like the track more).

I can see it with "Hey Boy, Hey Girl", but the general depiction of "Out Of Control" as also being a nod to Gatecrasher always struck me a triumph of discourse over empiricism.

If it had been released 3 years earlier it would have been correctly diagnosed as fake Felix da Housecat.

And if it had been released 3 years later it would have been correctly diagnosed as... fake Felix da Housecat.

"Music:Response" is better than I remember it being but it's amusing how obviously it sounds reverse-engineered from a bootleg combining "Piku" with DP's "Da Funk".

One of the best things about the group is their commitment to changing their style every time out (basically announced with the title Exit Planet Dust — “this is the last time we’ll sound like this”) ((or ‘suck it losers, we have indie singers on our shit now’?))

I assume the early EBWs were more to hear their new stuff out, in the context of being mixed with other stuff by trusted pals, than to attempt anonymity. Like playing your draft 7” mix through a clock radio speaker.

idk if the album is ultimately interesting enough to justify all this but when interviewing on and promoting Surrender they were v upfront about certain tracks being Chemicalised homages to trends of the time (Hey Boy Hey Girl = Gatecrasher trance, Orange Wedge = Timbaland). They were the only big dance act really to go all in on this approach (their peers seemed more set on just maintaining their established hallmarks), particularly in album context and alongside influence-on-sleeve guest vocalists, and pull it off as well as they did.

― nashwan, Thursday, March 19, 2026 11:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I get the point of this but I don't think they were "the only big dance act" to do this - Leftism was just as much a box-ticking exercise (reggae house followed by afro-house followed by downtempo followed by acid house followed by vocal trip hop followed by the "tracky" house stretch followed by big beat followed by fake drum & bass followed by the big pop-house crossover), as was basically every Basement Jaxx album (even the first, though certainly the subsequent albums).

You could make a case for Snivilisation and Second Toughest in the Infants falling into this category too, albeit that in both cases I think Orbital/Underworld were sufficiently successful at making the genre excursions sound like a logical extension of their existing sound such that, while e.g. you can hear in Snivilisation the duo carefully absorbing ideas from FSOL, Autechre, Moody Boyz and others, they never ("Are We Here?" aside) feel like they're wearing their references points on their sleeves.

I get the impression that rock critics during the nineties often loved pushing this caricature of DJs who were too snooty to play tracks from established crossover acts, because it made them feel better about their own fairly surface-level engagement with dance music. But it conflates the gatekeeper roles of DJ and critic when they can often operate quite differently to one another.

The purpose of an act like CBs putting out a white label isn't really to "trick" DJs and clubbers into accepting their music, but rather to introduce (specific instances of) it into a different circulation channel. A house DJ looking for new tracks to play in their set on the weekend is going to go to the "new house 12s" section of the vinyl store to check out what's just been released, not the albums section or the "big beat" section. The manner in which record stores organised their sections were basically the rudimentary algorithms of their day.

But yeah, also per sic's point, if you're a music producer who is friends with (and enjoy the music of) artists/DJs who typically play a different style to your usual output, it can be fun to make e.g. a "Dave Clarke tune" or a "Laurent Garnier tune" for them.

Leftism is varied but not quite homaging specific things in the same way I think. It's more like Exit Planet Dust in the 'here's all the things we like and are about colliding with each other' way - see also Remedy. I guess there's a subtle difference I'm seeing between those debuts and when you're on the third album and more itching to show you're still keeping up.