By Bernard Zuel
Karl Hyde laughs extensively at my explanation of an – ahem - in and out of body experience watching his band Underworld play at the Big Day Out in the mid '90s. A performance, crucially, on the same bill as the Chemical Brothers and Roni Size Reprazent.
It's hardly the first time he's heard a similar confession, especially when it seemed that dance and electronic music were then set on an inevitable path to sustained domination. It was a time when people who had hitherto only considered themselves pop and rock fans turned to the dancefloor. Many of them never left. And many of them, popping up at Presets' show later or maybe feeling old at a Chet Faker gig, can thank Underworld's 1994 album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, for beginning that journey.
Moving on: Underworld (from left) Darren Emerson, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith.
Did Hyde, along with his then bandmates Rick Smith and Darren Emerson, think that Underworld, the Chemical Bros, Orbital, Prodigy and the rest were shifting the axis of music?
"We were just putting together pieces that we liked," Hyde says too modestly, adding that they thought no one beyond those going out to hear Emerson's DJ sets would be interested in Dubnobass ...
"Rick and myself and Darren Emerson, we were all people with eclectic tastes. Darren was a big Beatles/John Lennon fan, and that was quite significant in us continuing to have guitars in our music. We were around people who didn't want to do things the same way as everybody else. There were already enough people doing that so there was no need for us to copy them."
The importance of Dubnobasswithmyheadman, now being marked by a 20th anniversary reissue, could not be underestimated. Not just because it still is an astounding listening experience but for what it signalled - a break from their indie rock past.
But for all the breakthroughs that came via their own remixes of Dubnobass songs, such as Mmm Skyscraper I Love You, the album wasn't just a dance record - it was an atmospheric rock record, too.
"We used to do these all-nighter shows at the Brixton Academy, the first place really that put together DJs and live bands, dressed the whole band and had stiltwalkers and trapeze artists," he says. "The first all-nighter we did at Brixton Academy after the release of Dubnobass ... I'd stood on the stage many times before and looked out on the dance crowd having a great time but on this occasion I looked out and saw these two factions, kind of mingling but not mixing. It was really clear that there was a dance crowd and an indie crowd looking at each other as if to say, 'what are you doing here, this is our band'.
"It was a remarkable moment and I remembered nudging Rick and going 'check it out, look, look, look, that's never happened before'."
And why was it happening?
"Because Dubnobass was a bridge between two what had been up to that point, quite disparate groups: people who liked guitar-driven music and had come from rock and the people who had liked dance were in their own way quite purists, staying on their own side of the river bank. They both were attracted to Dubnobass, had come together over Dubnobass and found each other, found we all belonged together because of this record."
And lo, did Underworld bring peace to the clubs and pubs. This, even as they painted, via Hyde's impressionistic lyrics, a picture of something darker in the uneasy world of a battered post-Thatcher class. As Hyde sang: "I see porn dogs sniffing the wind, looking for something violent they could do".
"I'd spent 10 years trying to write traditional lyrics and I realised that I couldn't do it. I actually couldn't explain how I felt traditionally," he says now. "But if I went on journeys through cities, collecting things that I heard and I saw and I thought and I smelt and I tasted, I could tell you how I felt by the things I was attracted to.
"I was the hole in the doughnut [he laughs]: if I described the doughnut you might be able to work out what was going on in the hole."
Dubnobasswithmyheadman deluxe edition is out now