It was just three of my mates really. John, Rick and me. We've been together since about 1980. We had a band called Frrr in the early eighties, it had like a scribble for a name, we did really well in Europe and wrote a legendary song called Doop(?) which still earns us a lot of money. John used to play video screen on stage from about 82 and always did the artwork. But it used to cost us a fortune to rent all this equipment - if it wasn't for all the video gear we might have actually made some money. So basically, we have always been together. Towards the end of the eighties we ended up with Sire/WB in America , the "Original" Underworld had done two albums with Warner Brothers and we became very disillusioned with the corporate music industry. We ran a big company called Vivid ID (Nick Roeg being the film part of it) and we were employing loads of people, had a big studio outside of town. We did a very canny deal with Warner Brothers, we said `How much do you think you would be prepared to pay for the album? Don't pay the bills on the recording sessions, just give us the cash instead. So when Warner Bros. dropped us we were well in, we had our own recording studio.
So it was the end of the eighties and we were so disillusioned with all the yuppie ideals,sick of the corporate things: we just didn't fit,. So a group of us got together and decided that we liked working in close proximity with each other, we liked each other's work, we didn't need to be employed or employ anybody. We didn't want to get into the situation that we were dependent on anybody. We asked ourselves: "why don't we rent a space and start doing some stuff -whatever that happens to be?" So now we do TV commercials, Guardian ads, lots of stuff for Nike, Porch, TSB.
I have seen my work appear in TV ads and I haven't been credited for it and I don't care because Tomato gets a good reputation. We just try to do the best work possible given what we have, and if that means that you have to change someone's work: fine. If you have to work on top of my work and improve it, I don't have a problem with that. I guess, for us, the jam is what is important, that is the roots of Tomato.
The first album we did was called Underneath the Radar, and I was going to say that we were a completely different band, but we have always had an interesting groove. Frrr was into techno, into Kraftwerk and we were trying to fuse very white German electronics with dub. So we worked with people like Dennis Bowell from Black Beard and Connie Plank in Cologne. She had done early DAF stuff and Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express album and was working with Ultravox and the Eurythmics. We were fusing that together with the dub scene that was over here. That moved into interesting things like George Clinton, Funkadelic/Parliament, Prince, Earth Wind and Fire and a kind of 7 piece outfit with a full rhythm section. The first album was very big in Australia so we toured it down there in 1988.
You can imagine what the headlines were like. We toured around the states four times with that album and had always had a strong following in Germany and Italy. For the second album we build our own studio. Actually the studio was being built while we were in Australia so it was nice to get back and say "Look a studio!". So we did that tour and the last tour was during the Eurythmics' last run, doing stadiums in America. Bizarre.
The bizarre thing about America is that it is exceptionally conservative and yet out there as well. The design firms we went to see had like really big accounts and we would show them the showreel and they would sit there are say "What the fuck is this, oh my God!". Then they would say that it was great, but they couldn't use it. What do you mean you can't use it, all these major companies are using it, why can't you?
Exactly, that's Europe. I have been out there a few times, just interviewing people who are going to be putting our records out and doing press, and it has been really hard. For a long time people were going "There isn't a techno scene, there isn't a house scene, nobody knows about Detroit and Chicago." Then bit by bit I would find people who were saying "Yeah, I was at a rave last week, 10,000 people in a barn in Jersey." It is still small pockets. When I was out there last, it was beginning to get the status that grunge had when they discovered Seattle. It is credible now. I think that the major record industry now realises that the whole European phenomenon that they have been talking about, the lifestyle, revolution of thinking is not going to go away so they'd better get involved in it or else.
It's the way they wanted to do it. It's them not us. We were really surprised. In the past we had record deals and you needed to make albums because you wanted to be a pop star. Now Darrens Djing, and we're doing adverts, music for films, sessions etc. so we didn't do an album for our ego's or anything like that and it certainly wasn't because we wanted to be pop stars. When we finished with all the corporate bullshit, me and my partner, who I have been working with for fourteen years, said "I like working with you and there is this young guy we want to work with so lets make something". The first 12" was Mother Earth and a track called the Hump, which was our first ever club track. Darren played it down the Milk Bar here and we were going `it's so exciting, it's the most exciting thing we've ever ever done, oh my God! So we made five hundred records and sold them out of the back of our car to people. It wasn't like "Hey, you just sold twenty five thousand records in . . . wherever". People bought it because they liked it.
It really was just about putting records together, putting them out and really enjoying it. The album actually came from a cassette that we put together for our mates. It was something like the preview copies of the William Orbit album that were floating around and we thought "What a great idea!". So we decided to put it out to our mates and see what reaction we got.
So (getting back to the question) when it got the reviews that it did it was very surprising because we'd stopped trying to be pop stars and that had a really good result.
We have turned down a lot of gigs, because promoters wanted to put us into Rock venues. It was like Nooo!, so we play guitar sometimes, so we sing sometimes this isn't it, we are not the new grunge, we are not indies answer to techno, we are a house band, that is what we are. We have to keep referring back to that all the time. It is good to do things like the Megadog. You get people who would only go and see indie bands, they aren't used to DJ culture, but we miss that energy that comes from the dance vibe when we get away from it for too long. We are going to be doing a few festivals which is going to be interesting.
We have been known to play for 14 hours, and we just came off a tour where we were playing two hours minimum and it was just like:
"You've got 45 minutes"
"Hah hah come on!"
Then before we came on they said
"Can you give us a copy of your set list?"
"We don't have a set list"
"Well what songs do you think you will be playing tonight?"
"We're just going to jam".
I just sing bits and pieces of what comes into my head, because I have a very bad memory. I listen to things for the first time and Darren goes
"That's Skyscraper you idiot!"
"Oh wow, that's really good"
The other thing that was curious was that Darren would normally DJ for a bit before we come on. At least half an hour so that the crowd's into it and we'll actually come on during his set, have a dance, get loosened up and I might jam on top of a few records. We might start putting in some
loops and things over the records that he's playing and
all of a sudden you're in the middle of a set. So to be like, cold start :
"And here they are, boys and girls. . . Underworld!" Yeah!!!
"What! Oh my god!"
But I knew that was going to happen so I kind of soaked myself into it, plus playing in Scotland is like a birthday for us. It was funny because, we have wanted to do a party for about six months now and we have been looking for a venue down here and it hasn't been happening. People have been offering us places like the Astoria, the T&C and that's like "No, that's not right" and some of the warehouses have a bit of a cheesy vibe to them. So we've been constantly looking for places and we've been talking to the Megadog about doing production for us, not it being a Megadog thing, but using their gear with Tomato doing the visuals. So they have been coming up with some venues but it was actually in here, right here at this very table that somebody said, "Why don't we do it in Glasgow?"
And everyone went:
"YES! Why are we bothering with London, what a great idea, get another round of drinks in."
So we got a date, but unfortunately Darren had a gig and he just couldn't change it so we were heartbroken. This would have been happening at the end of June and we knew that it was going to be great, not necessarily because of us, but because it was going to be Scotland.
When we play, unless it's going to be fun, then there really is no point in playing. Again, Steve at the record company said to us: "it's completely up to you, you could tour and sell an awful lot of albums or you could just do what you enjoy doing." So we'd rather do that. What's the point? So maybe we would have sold twice as many albums, what does it matter really? We have done fine and we play really good places most of the time and we learn from the mistakes. Because you can't see us everyday of the week , it makes it more of an event, which is what we are more interested in than doing gigs. We're not interested in gigs, that's something else that has come out of the house scene.
"I played there once."
"No, with Debbie Harry"
A friend of mine called me up when I was recording at paisley park and said
"Do you fancy playing guitar with Debbie Harry on her
next tour"
and I said
"Yeah!, what a crack, not `alf"
So I did that in 1991. It was a great tour, because we were touring with Iggy Pop, Sisters of Mercy and Billy Idol sometimes. We did that thing with INXS at Wembley stadium. I got my dad down just so I could say
"I played Wembley dad, sorry it's not football but it's the best I could do."
Y'could say "How do you go from being in Underworld to playing Heart of Glass but it's for the experience.
The groove, and everybody coming together. It's interesting because I went out in the crowd while the Sandals were on and I was thinking "There's a funny old vibe here" and there were like gaps and stuff, not many people there. There wasn't a lot of energy coming off the people that were there and I was thinking "Oh my god!, I'm going to stand up there for about thirty seconds then walk off". I'm like that, if there is no vibe, then I'll walk off. Then I walked out onto the stage and it was "shit!", it was rammed, "OK then". Then when Pete Tong came up to me and went "Hi, you must be Rick". I replied meekly with hung head "No, I'm the other one".
I think if it had been anywhere else other than Scotland, it could have a complete disaster, for sure I would have walked off. We had just come from Holland and the first gig we did was in Rotterdam and they put us into this Rock venue (which I found out later was notorious for lack of vibe, people having a real attitude and all that) but we were really looking forward to it. There were a couple of other bands who looked really interesting, really bizarre groove people. Some of the people doing the visuals were really nice so I had a really good vibe about it when I went in. When I walked out on stage there were about twenty people dancing and the rest were standing there with their arms folded. Scratching their chins and being really interested in what was going on; the names on the gear and checking the grooves out. "Oh, it's a little bit different from the album" and my heart was just sinking. I kept trying to dance and once in a while I would stop and walk around a bit and start talking to people. There were these screens on the side of the stage showing Tomato stuff and in the end I just walked behind one of them and finished the gig behind one of the screens "I don't want to see this", I said to the other two, "if it happens the next night we should just turn everything off, grab some beers and sit on the front of the stage and just watch everybody until they do something that impresses us". I'm just not into that, we are not there to be up on the stage, we are there to be part of a vibe, it's not like entertainment as such, it's DJ culture isn't it?
Do you know about our quadraphonic sound system?
It's what we aired at Glastonbury. We played for three days and on the last day we played for fourteen hours. What happens is we play in the middle in this tower and all the gear, mixers etc. and DJs are in this, and we are all jamming. So a DJ might play a record, then someone will start jamming over the top of it, then we might play a song or another DJ might come in and play. It is not like one DJ is on for an hour, you might get two DJ's just swapping records, playing over the top of each other. At the top of the tower is all the projection gear with the crowd all around and the quadraphonic sound system around the outside of them (we went hexaphonic this year) and beyond that is the projection screens. There was another group came in and wrote software so we could run the quad pan by computer so you just draw pictures and assign instruments to the picture and it moves in that shape, we had sound to light and stuff.
We've developed a hollophonic sound system which we were going to use at the big airport gig. Kraftwerk were going to be playing. Megadog had one tent, we had another. It was called the Experimental Sound Field. So we were going to come and join in. It is like, Underworld does it's thing, Darren does his thing, we were going to have Laurent Garnier come over do his thing. "Tonight we jam, you leave your fame on the poster" and people come and see what it's like to see Darren jamming with someone from Ozric Tentacles, Underworld with some young kid who just brought his box of records in. You get to see that happen. That is when we started to develop this idea with Orbital and putting a record out. We had done some Megadogs together and became mates, we started talking about the Experimental Sound Field and asking if they wanted to come. Because they were talking about playing in the round and we'd already done it a couple of times, "So we've developed this thing, do you want to join in?" like "Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if we could mix the two bands together, just lock up the systems and just jam" and they were going "Yeah, yeah, we've been talking about this for ages". We had this meeting and unfortunately we were just about to tour this album and they were just about to start their third album, so that interfered a bit, but we had the meeting, set a tempo and a key and we're going to be doing some more Megadogs later in the year. We've got a record that people know and we'll lock it together and jam the two bands. It could be anything. That was the point to get to "Isn't it great that you can see Orbital, they're really really famous and Underworld (well you know about them) but look what happens when one disappears into other."
Who cares if they clash anyway. Invariably when I play the wrong note, Rick will come over to me and say "Do that again!" "but it's the wrong note" "Yeah, but do it again!" "What did I do, oh my God!" Particularly keyboards because I am a really crappy keyboard player, I can program, but live I have to translate everything to guitar and then back onto keyboard again. I have a big list of all the tracks on screen and I go over and check what we're doing and its like: this one's in F#, so F# is there, then I translate that to the keyboard.
Sometimes live, it is total choas, because it's so improvised, sometimes it's crap, sometimes we lose the plot and the best that you can hope for is that everyone else enjoys it. We use a lot of hand signals for things like "Do that again" or "Do that again later" or "Think of something else" or "Go and make a cup of tea! Forget it, who says you're in the band". But sometimes you just hit it and you come off and go "Wow, I don't know what happened tonight but we were really in tune with each other, that was a really good one."
You have shattered many of the preconceptions I had about techno. I didn't realise everything was so live and improvised.
We are still pulling from a lot from the jazz and blues culture, which is very much: improvisation - respect to it. If you can't improvise then what freedom does any of this equipment give us? We are just going further back into the past, you have to be able to improvise because then the technology can really help you, you can do anything you want. I love that aspect. I also love hearing the same sounds come through again but in a different way.
I am basically a hoover really, I write all the time, all the things that are around me and I fill these little books with lists of stuff. So if I am not doing anything, I'll just write the scene that's around me so it just became a style: I'll see that ashtray, the colour of your jeans, somebody over there and I'll hear a bit of conversation and it'll make me think of something, so I'll write it down. You end up with a list of what it was like to be in this pub at that time. It is not a stream of consciousness, I could be very arty and say that it is literally inspired by Cubism, the idea was to look at the same object from different angles. So I look at London or New York or a journey between London and Romford and I'll just write down all the things which are affecting me, and that becomes a list. Later I look at that list and think that really is what it was like, so if I try to change it and turn it into poetry, then its going to kill what it was like to be there. Dirty Epic is a funny one because it was started in Minneapolis and then it did go to New York then it finished off on a journey to Romford.