The legends: The Chemical Brothers
Playing the Isle of Wight festival, 15-18 June; Wilderness, 3-6 Aug; Cardiff Bay with 2ManyDJs, Hot Chip and Erol Alkan, 9 Sept
When I speak to Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers, the electronic music colossi have completed the first weekend of Coachella and are gearing up to play the second. “It was really good,” says Simons of their first outing at this year’s mega-festival outside Los Angeles. “Amazing production, nice crowds. It’s strange because it’s in a desert, so one minute it’s a really peaceful evening and the next it’s whipping up a storm. But we had a good time.”
Volatile desert elements may have played a part, but the real storm that night was being whipped up by Simons and his bandmate Tom Rowlands, two unassuming fiftysomethings who’ve been unleashing shock-and-awe live sets on audiences for nearly three decades, backed by ever-more-spectacular visuals. “We found our place playing festivals,” says Simons. “We’ve been doing our own shows between the two Coachella weekends and it’s a nice contrast, but we definitely would see ourselves as a festival band.”
Simons and Rowlands met as students at the University of Manchester in 1989, united by their enthusiasm for rave culture and medieval history. They went on to play anarchic DJ sets at club nights like the Heavenly Sunday Social, while making their own tracks on bedroom equipment and hawking them around London record stores. The release of Chemical Beats in 1994 marked a turning point, says Simons. “That seemed to really hit hard.”
At the time they were still known as the Dust Brothers (they pinched the name from a US production duo and were forced to change it once their star began to rise). The following year they put out their debut album, Exit Planet Dust, to great fanfare. Britpop was at its height but dance music in the UK was enjoying a mainstream moment too and the Chemical Brothers established themselves front and centre of the scene. They’ve held on there ever since, bagging themselves six No 1 albums and 13 top 20 singles in the UK, and a slew of Grammys across the water.
They played their first ever Glastonbury in 1997, after their second album, Dig Your Own Hole, topped the UK charts. Three years later, their Pyramid stage set attracted one of Glastonbury’s biggest ever crowds, if not the outright biggest. “I can’t remember a huge amount about it,” confesses Simons, “but I remember the roar of the crowd. It was wild.”
The pair of them are “very unlikely performers”, he admits. “Tom used to say that we weren’t people who’d be queueing up to be in the school play.” It helps that on stage they are mere silhouettes, bouncing around in front of gargantuan video screens with sci-fi laser shows meshing above them. “Somehow we found this thing where we liked being on stage and creating this magical atmosphere, this crackle in the air. It’s quite addictive.”
Three decades and millions of record sales on, with an as-yet-untitled 10th album dropping this autumn, Simons still enjoys touring and festival-hopping. “Having the time off during the lockdowns, it was like, oh wow, we can’t do this now. That definitely focused things a bit. If you’re suddenly told you can’t do something that you like, it makes you like it a lot – it’s a yearning you weren’t really aware of.”
Part of the appeal of festival slots is their unpredictability. “You can play them a lot, but until 10 minutes in, you really don’t know what kind of crowd is going to be there, what the mood will be, if everyone’s up for it – it’s never a sure thing. So dealing with what’s in front of you and putting together a show is really fun for us.” They’re not alone in putting the shows together. “Most of the road crew, particularly the people who do the sound, have been with us since the mid-90s,” says Simons. “So there’s this team of old friends, about 20 of us traipsing around the world, and really good camaraderie.”
So what can UK festival audiences expect from Chemical Brothers’ appearances this summer? “Blinding visuals, a sense of celebration, transcendence,” says Simons. “Hopefully it will tap into that sense of freedom that good festivals engender, that hedonism and escapism, that communion with others. We’re just finding ways to intensify all of those good things in life.” KF
Favourite festival memory?
ES: The feeling of release and satisfaction after we headlined Glastonbury in 2000. That sense of, “Wow, just a few short years since we started putting records out, here we are headlining this huge festival and people are into it.” That was a real sense of achievement.
Who are you most excited about seeing this summer?
2ManyDJs are amazing curators, with an incredible breadth of knowledge. When they DJ it’s always a great selection. They play a lot of festivals [including Secret Garden Party on 21 July and Bluedot on 22 July], so I’ll go and see them.
Top tip for festival-goers?
Go with a good gang. Whatever your friends are bringing, let them bring it.
The innovators: Young Fathers
Playing Glastonbury, 21-25 June; Somerset House Summer Series, 15 July; Latitude and Bluedot, 20-23 July; Green Man, 17-20 Aug; Connect, 25-27 Aug
Festivals, according to Graham “G” Hastings of Young Fathers, is where the Edinburgh group feels most at home – but not because festival audiences are easy to connect with. On the contrary, says bandmate Alloysious Massaquoi, “people generally aren’t there for the bands per se, they’re there for the experience of being at the festival. Also, there’s a sort of dissociation with the crowd, because the [physical] gap between yourself and them tends to be really big.”
But that’s a challenge to be relished, says Hastings. “It’s how we learned our craft, in that scenario of playing to a crowd that’s not yours and trying to win them over. Which I think weirdly is our kind of comfortable place. You just have to play your strongest possible set.”
This summer, the trio (completed by Kayus Bankole, away in LA at the time of our interview) are back for their first run of festivals since the pandemic. In the five-year hiatus that followed their third album, Cocoa Sugar, Bankole travelled extensively in Ghana and Ethiopia, and Hastings took time off to start a family. “I’m looking forward to performing,” says Massaquoi, grinning, “but also we need to make some cash.”
They played a batch of gigs after the February release of their latest album, the excellent, propulsive Heavy Heavy, figuring out which songs worked best live but taking care not to over-prepare. “For us it’s all about what happens in the moment,” Hastings says. “Spontaneity is our strongest suit.” This applies in the studio, too. “In songwriting, quickness suits us so much better. We’re all very in-the-moment kind of guys, we don’t like waiting around.”
“We’ve all got short attention spans,” nods Massaquoi. “Working quickly plays to our strengths.”
The brevity of festival slots appeals to them. “It’s like, just get to the point and be as intense as possible,” says Hastings. That means paring everything right down to the basics.
“All that matters is the people on stage and how we perform, rather than a mental laser show or visuals. We’re at a point where we’re really settled on the bare bones of what actually makes [our music] what it is, and it always comes back to us.”
The three met at an underage hip-hop night in Edinburgh when they were 14 – they connected over a love of “making three-minute pop songs with choruses and verses and bridges”, as Hastings puts it.
For years they grappled with “the wrong side” of the music industry, suffering attempts by managers and execs to shape them into something they were not. The fact that Massaquoi and Bankole were Black and Hastings was white, and that they weren’t interested in making straight-up hip-hop or indie rock, frustrated industry attempts to pigeonhole them: “You have to battle because you weren’t just white guys with guitars and instantly credible,” is how Hastings remembers it.
Eventually they hit their stride on 2011’s self-released EP, Tape One, giving themselves licence to sound as dark and weird as they pleased. Tape Two followed in 2013, winning the Scottish album of the year award. They signed to London hip-hop label Big Dada, which encouraged a more experimental approach, and put out their debut album, Dead, the following year. It went on to win the Mercury prize.
It’s never been easy to categorise Young Fathers: their sound freewheels through hip-hop, soul, noise pop and alt-rock. “It’s always interesting to see what people’s take is on our music,” says Massaquoi, “because it’s sort of like a bingo: ‘Oh, they’re punk this time’, ‘They’re so-and-so this time.’”
Intensity seems to be a unifying theme, on record and on stage. “That’s our calling card,” Hastings nods. “At a festival, if we come on unbridled, and there’s an intensity, the audience can be like, ‘Oh, I just came here for a laugh and have a good time but, wow, I really enjoyed that. This is why I come to festivals.’ If you leave people with that feeling, that’s just the best.” KF
What’s the thing you like most about playing live?
GH: The element of surprise. Just like being in the studio, you want to get in and surprise yourself. That’s what’s going to make it special for us – and everybody else hopefully.
Who are you most excited about seeing this summer?
GH: I’d love to see [Nigerien band] Etran de l’Aïr play somewhere, but I don’t know if they’re on any bills.
AM: Grace Jones is headlining Bluedot festival on the same day we’re playing [23 July]. I’d like to see her. Big fan.
Top tip for festival-goers?
AM: Baby wipes.
GH: Just don’t bother about trying to see everybody, or trying to schedule your day. Sometimes the bands you don’t know are the ones you’ll enjoy most.
The party starter: Biig Piig
Playing Connect, 25-27 Aug; End of the Road, 31 Aug–3 Sept; Forwards, 1-2 Sept
For Jess Smyth, the stage has long been a safe haven. Moving from Ireland to Spain and London all before she was 14, Smyth began to find her voice through jam nights as a young teen. “My uncle got me a guitar when I moved to London and I started to write my own songs by learning off YouTube,” she says. “My dad then took me to my first open mic and I fell in love with the community – being able to go somewhere, express yourself and feel held by your peers was incredible.”
Starting out with folk-inspired, guitar-strumming tracks, Smyth soon honed her sound into a combination of ear-worming neo-soul melody, dextrous hip-hop verses and head-nodding beats, thanks to the range of music she would encounter at the jam nights she attended up to three times a week. Under the name Biig Piig – taken as a joke from a pizza menu on a drunken night out – Smyth uploaded self-produced tracks to SoundCloud and caught the ears of contemporaries including singer Lava La Rue and producer Mac Wetha, becoming a part of their Nine8 collective.
With her debut single, Crush’n, released in 2017, featuring Smyth’s warm vocals sing-rapping over a lo-fi jazz-inspired beat, she went on to develop her live presence from the bare stage of the open mic to becoming an energetic and committed bandleader. “It was just me and a guitar playing for six minutes at the open mics,” she says on a call from Paris, where she is recording her debut album. “As I started to play my own shows, I realised how you can welcome a crowd into your music and let the songs live on stage. It became my favourite thing to do and I really started to find my flow.”
Following a 2021 tour with indie group Glass Animals, Smyth’s live flow began to encompass the thump of the dancefloors she would frequent on nights out, aiming to recreate the same sense of abandon in her crowds. “I’ve always loved going out and being able to connect with others through moving to music,” she says. “I decided I wanted to make the walls shake when I played – to get people to feel alive and escape into the energy of it all.”
Packed with breakbeats, ethereal vocals and piercing synths, 2023’s latest mixtape, Bubblegum, has propelled Smyth into a new era of on-stage exuberance. From the bouncing two-step and bass funk of Kerosene to the jungle drums of Picking Up, Smyth is leading the current charge of singer-songwriters such as Nia Archives and PinkPantheress who are including dancefloor influences into their heady sets. Smyth’s shows see her jumping around just as much as her audience, racing from side to side of enormous festival stages while her live band produces frenetic breakbeats and lively instrumentals to back her energetic vocals.
Festivals are a natural home for this blistering musical experience. “I’ve always loved the euphoria of a huge crowd and being able to stumble across sets,” she says. “One of my fondest memories is playing Melt festival in Germany last year and diving into the lake after our set finished – it was the best way to celebrate a show!”
Smyth has a packed schedule of gigs lined up for this summer, including Roskilde in Denmark and Super Bock in Portugal. “If I go a while without performing, I just don’t know what the purpose of my life is,” she laughs. “My songs can’t exist without the stage, and being together with a crowd is the perfect way to feel alive.” AK
What’s the thing you like most about playing live?
It’s a space where you get to feel everything so intensely, in the present moment with your audience and without shame. It’s the best thing in the world.
Who are you most excited about seeing this summer?
Erykah Badu [All Points East, Forwards] was such a big influence in my early music; I have so many core memories attached to her songs … in the music scene in London she was always on heavy rotation. I still listen to her all the time so I feel like the set is gonna be super-nostalgic and emotional. I also want to see Maverick Sabre [El Dorado] again because his live set is always unreal.
Top tip for festival-goers?
Try to make time to explore and stumble on other sets by acts you might not have heard of. Some of the best shows I’ve seen were entirely unexpected in a tiny tent.
The rock stars: Yard Act
Playing Bearded Theory, 25-28 May; Dot to Dot, 28 May; Latitude, 20-23 July; Boardmasters, 9-13 Aug; Leeds and Reading, 25-27 Aug
In September 2019, after years plugging away separately on the Leeds music scene, James Smith and Ryan Needham came together to form Yard Act. The timing may have seemed inauspicious – they put out their first track, The Trapper’s Pelts, just as the pandemic hit – but it worked in their favour. Their second single, Fixer Upper, a hilarious character study of a neighbour from hell over nagging post-punk guitars, struck a chord with listeners cooped up at home. “It blew everything out of the water for us,” says Smith.
They released a couple more singles, gathered onto an EP in early 2021, and recorded their debut album as a three-piece, with Smith on vocals, Needham on bass and Sam Shipstone on guitar (the lineup was later completed by drummer Jay Russell). When restrictions finally lifted, the band had a dedicated following, buoyed up by support from BBC 6 Music, but they’d barely managed to rehearse together let alone play in front of a paying audience.
After a couple of small gigs in Leeds, their first major outing was the Hertfordshire festival Standon Calling. “We got a call when we were about half an hour away saying that they’d lost loads of acts [due to Covid] and we ended up going on the main stage,” says Smith, chuckling. “That felt like a learning curve.”
The curve kept rising. Their debut album, The Overload, which cast a jaundiced eye over Brexit-era Britain, with deep reserves of feeling beneath the one-liners, shot to No 2 in the UK album charts in January 2022. They toured the US, bumping into Keanu Reeves at Coachella and hanging out at Beck’s house in LA. “Obviously, all the Elton John shit was really mad,” adds Smith. The pop legend, having declared himself a fan, accepted the band’s invite to play piano on a rerecorded version of 100% Endurance – the same song that David Thewlis had starred in a video for weeks earlier.
Yard Act played nearly 200 shows last year, saying yes to nearly every festival going. “We didn’t know our limits,” says Smith a touch ruefully. “All the festivals were ace, it was just the logistics of travelling that was a nightmare. We didn’t really think about it. We were just getting these offers in and thought, why not?”
Now, as they put the finishing touches to their second album, they are looking forward to a slightly calmer summer ahead, but with grander vistas. Headlining the BBC Sounds stage of Latitude will be a highlight, as will playing the main stage at Leeds – a long-held ambition for Smith. “It feels like a good point to up the ante with our live show,” he says, “seeing if we can step it to the next level while retaining who we are.”
Smith relishes the unpredictability of playing live. “Things going wrong is my favourite part. We wrote a new song on stage in Belgium when Sam’s guitar broke and he had to repair it. The options were to walk offstage or try something new. So me, Jay and Ryan just carried on for nearly 12 minutes. We came up with a song that’s going on the second album.”
As for festivals, the key to a good show is to “just play the hits,” Smith says. “Don’t do anything clever. At festivals, people are there to have a good time, so have a good time with them and save your drone tracks for the art galleries.” KF
What’s the thing you like most about playing live?
JS: The spontaneity of it. I try to find that moment that’s unique to that night and hone in on it, and explode it – so it’s not the same for us every night, and people feel they got something unique.
Who are you most excited about seeing this summer?
Pulp at Latitude and Blur at Primavera. They’re both playing on the days we’re on, so that’s quite exciting. I’ve never seen either band live before.
Top tip for festival-goers?
Just go with it. Be in the moment. You’ll find your mates if you lose them and you’ll make more mates. I think phones at festivals are overrated. Someone will help you if you’re having a bad time. So just go with the flow, make some friends and put the phone down. And take wet wipes.
The first timer: yeule
Playing End of the Road, 31 Aug-3 Sept
As a teenager growing up in Singapore, Nat Ćmiel found their true home on the internet. “I experienced gender dysphoria at an early age and had very few real friends until I was 18 and moved to London,” they say. “Being online was an escape – it allowed me to be a faceless blogger with no physical exterior. I created my own world.”
Withdrawing into their room for days on end, Ćmiel scrolled on Tumblr, gamed, and began to teach themselves music production – all while posting as the digital persona yeule. “I was really inspired after watching a video of Grimes performing on [US radio station] KEXP and seeing her creating music with basic equipment,” they say on a call during a trip back to Singapore. “I realised I could do that with just my laptop at home and online tutorials.”
Starting to produce music using their laptop keyboard to punch in sounds on digital software and a microphone repurposed from the video game Rock Band, Ćmiel released their self-titled debut EP as yeule in 2014. Combining ethereal, processed vocals with melodically driven electronic production, Ćmiel has spent the past nine years amassing a following in their native online world. Two more EPs and two albums – 2019’s Serotonin II and 2021’s standout Glitch Princess – have manoeuvred their sound from wistful electronica to dream pop and intricately warped dancefloor beats.
“On Glitch Princess I started collaborating with other people, mainly [producer] Danny L Harle,” they say. “I realised my songwriting was almost too structured and I needed to include moments of spontaneity instead. That album became about throwing off the shackles of what I felt was confining me as an artist by giving into digital distortion and the inherent glitches of music-making.”
Since then Ćmiel has developed an aesthetic that is equal parts Renaissance ruffles and face-painted cyborg futurism, as well as an energetic performing style that has seen them tour extensively with Harle collaborator Charli XCX. Their live shows play like a performance art piece mixed with strobing club euphoria, where Ćmiel is often poised with a guitar and singing softly before launching into warped noise at a moment’s notice.
When it comes to festivals, Ćmiel spent their teenage summers at Singapore’s Camp Symmetry, uploading pictures and videos of sets by the likes of Beach House and Slowdive onto their Tumblr account: “I loved those experiences – it really showed me the power of live shows and how different groups can express themselves.”
Ćmiel has since played sets at Pitchfork festival in Berlin and Primavera in Barcelona, while this summer will see them playing their debut UK festival, End of the Road in Dorset. “I’m so much more performative now – I want my shows to be full of movement and intensity,” they say. “I’m writing music that is more drawn to the guitar and I’ve got this giant stomp pad that messes up my vocals when I sing. It means I can be jumping around while playing and distorting the sound, really allowing the whole room to release tension.”
Ćmiel’s unpredictable music may have been formed through myriad faceless interactions of the digital world, but their next phase seems squarely based in reality – in the sweat, heat and catharsis of a huge stage. “It’s the thrill of performance,” they say. “There’s no escape.” AK
Who are you most excited about seeing this summer?
I’m a huge fan of Big Thief and I’ve never managed to see them live, even though we played the same festival last summer, so I’m really excited to try and catch them this year.
Top tip for festival-goers?
Please remember to take care of yourselves! Drink water and wear proper earbuds because hearing loss is a real risk if you’re standing next to those huge monitors.
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