Here at Soundproof, we've always felt that the best, most productive environment for engaging in interviews is when you're outdoors and surrounded by really irritating swarms of flies. That's always fun, and it's even more fun when you're joined by Rick Smith and vocalist Karl Hyde of Underworld.
Karl: Welcome to the land of fly.
Soundproof: It’s the land of irritation, is what it is. So you guys have kind of taken over the world here, the Entertainment Weekly high profile feature review some months back…
Karl: We’ve had fantastic reviews on the album, really fantastic, we couldn’t have asked for more glowing reviews, really. Even if we’d paid them even more for the service.
Soundproof: So "Jumbo" is still doing OK in the UK, but what happens at this point in time, i.e. a half year after the album’s initially been released; is there still a lot of enthusiasm for what you guys are doing and your touring et cetera? Or has it started to wane?
Karl: If you’re out touring, you’re keeping your face in public, if you’re doing stuff which makes copy; then yes, it’s the same as anything, isn’t it, it’s pop culture, and in Britain, it’s probably faster than most places, the turnover there. So its very easy to be forgotten for a while, it’s very easy for people to move on, shall we say, en masse, but there are people that don’t do that, but that’s the way it is. It’s kind of part of the beauty as well as the ‘bug bear’ of being over there in the UK, things move on very fast.
Soundproof: I wanted to ask you about remixes and additional production work, what’s been going on with that? Are you doing any more remixes?
Rick: No, remixes have been really thin on the ground now for a few years…
Soundproof: You’re no longer being asked?
Rick: We’re no longer accepting. We went through a phase, to cut a long story short, from about ‘96 where we were being asked to do the most, to do about three or four every week that were just by record companies wanting a slice of ‘trendy’ and that was really irritating, and we weren’t doing them. To be honest it just became, Underworld itself became that much more time-consuming, the touring and all became a lot more serious again in ‘96 and onwards. And Tomato, we’re finding it really difficult to have time for Tomato, at the moment, but it’s not a "No" or a closed door completely, just rusty hinges.
Karl: That’s well put.
Soundproof: How do you end up determining who you guys get to remix your own material?
Rick: That’s been very much influenced by JBO’s ideas on what’s going on around us, I’m like the worst, I live in the studio so I don’t really know who’s happening (stops to brush several flies from his visage) other than the flies that are buzzing in my bloody ear at the moment. It’s been interesting, that’s something we never did, people never remixed us until this album, it’s something that’s kind of worked and kind of hasn’t. You know it’s something where we feel it’s been a little bit ‘total’ this year, so we want to get back into mixing our own stuff. Again, it’s very difficult when you’re taking one track off an album and releasing it as a single; there are so many formats to fill, you can end up writing effectively three albums because we can’t accept something second rate so it can be very difficult, you know?
Soundproof: Are you still doing sound installation work?
Rick: Yeah, and Karl’s got a photographic exhibition in London in about a month’s time, something like that, and I’m going to do a sound installation, a piece for that.
Soundproof: On that note, tell me about Bareback.
Karl: Well Bareback’s the new Tomato book that came out.
Soundproof: Is it getting a US distributor?
Karl: Yeah, it’s got a US distributor, it’s doing well, Carmen King in Europe, but it does have a US distributor, I think it’s the same people that distributed the last one, I think.
Soundproof: I noticed it was very ‘writing-oriented’ as opposed to some of the prior Tomato releases, Process and Skyscraper.
Karl: Bareback? You think so? I think there’s more writing in it, but there are an awful lot of images in there, a ton of images in there.
Soundproof: A lot of which recall your recent cover art. Were those mostly Jason Kedgley’s work?
Karl: No, Jason put the thing together, but most of them are all of Tomato. Except Rick, Rick cut a picture, a fantastic picture of a concert that we did on Mt. Fuji, and it was a really great picture, and it didn’t get put in there, which is just, you know, part of the beauty of Tomato’s inadequacy to communicate with itself sometimes. Genius buffoons, that’s part of the beauty of it. It went into its second reprint about a week ago, so it’s been selling incredibly well.
Soundproof: Bruce Lee…
Karl: Good man. Great haircut. What a body.
Soundproof: Poor Brandon Lee. Is that going to get a limited release, full release, what?
Rick: Limited release, I believe.
Soundproof: It’s a very different sound for the latest album.
Rick: Yeah.
Karl: Yeah, you’re right.
Soundproof: The boxed set, the live album….
Rick: The boxed set is completely illegal. No no no, actually no…
Karl: We’re talking about two different boxed sets here.
Rick: There’s a real bogus one floating around which has been manufactured in a garage somewhere in eastern Europe and that’s like100 pounds a shot and it’s completely bogus.
Karl: And all you get is the albums that you’ve already bought and the singles that you bought and a really crap T- shirt and a certificate that says…
Soundproof: Really, they’re pulling that shit with you guys now? I remember in the early 90s they’d do that with all the big bands like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails…
Karl: Yeah they’re doing it for us now. And the thing is that a very big chain is selling it in London… I’m not saying whom, but it’s very sad, it doesn’t say on the box what it is, cos if it did no one would buy it cos they’ve already got the stuff. The box set you’re talking about is something that’s happening over here in the US, sort of 15 tracks and "Bruce Lee" and "Jumbo" and "Push".
Rick: I think that’s coming out isn’t it? Things have changed a lot since the days when we were selling records out of the back of the car. Mostly for the good, but some of it…
Soundproof: Ever going to re-release the three-track "Skyscraper" or the old, old, old JBO material?
Rick: I don’t know…these things sort of creep out occasionally. Steve Hall (JBO label boss) will have an idea…"OK, we’ll do that," and you just never know. It’s not something we actively like to do. We like to make spaces, and there’s hardly enough space for the new things, but that’s OK, people want them, and they seem to get received quite well.
Soundproof: Well that’s all for now. ‘Beaucoup questions.’
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