Back in the rhythm to deeper, darker level

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons rarely kowtow to current musical trends. Photo / Supplied

It is less than 48 hours since the Chemical Brothers finished playing the last of four nights at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London, and over mineral water Ed Simons is thinking about how he feels now. "It's strange not to be in that little rhythm," he says, "where you're building up to a performance in the same place each night. You know what to expect, but you still get nervous.

In fairness, it's been a long time since the Chemical Brothers had to consider such a fate. Beginning with Exit Planet Dust in 1995, their six albums have all reached the top 10 in Britain (the last five hitting No 1) and no other band following the Big Bang of rave has known such success. It's led them to where they are now, contemplating what to have for lunch in a smart restaurant just down the road from the pub where they first DJ-ed after moving to London from Manchester University in the early 90s.

"Now, does anyone fancy sharing the charcuterie platter?" Simons asks. His partner of 15 years, Tom Rowlands, does. It's all very genteel and some distance from the mind-expanding experience of the music, which is also at odds with the pair in person. "If we were walking down the street carrying record bags," says Simons, "then we might get noticed, but not otherwise."

The shows at the Roundhouse were staged to showcase new album, Further, a deeper, darker record than its predecessors, which spurns the assistance of guest vocalists, but was conceived with a visual show created by collaborator Adam Smith in mind.

"It was a bit daunting," says Rowlands, "because normally when you see a band and the singer says, 'Here's a new one!', the question is, 'Anyone want a beer?' I'm guilty myself. But when you DJ, people are obsessed by what you've got that's new, so this was a way of saying, here - have an hour of it."

It's appropriate they chose the Roundhouse, given its heritage as home to the original 60s happenings when bands such as Pink Floyd fused psychedelic sounds and imagery. "It's a good tradition," says Rowlands, "but I'm sure it felt then like the verge of a new dawn and that's very much disappeared. What we're trying to do is give a sensation, a feeling ... to immerse people in something completely different. Even listening to music now, it's just skip, shuffle, shuffle, and this record flies in the other direction."

Part of the challenge as Simons and Rowlands approach 40 is to stay relevant, but Rowlands insists they've never made music as a conscious reflection of anything else: "We've never said, drum 'n' bass is really big, let's make a drum 'n' bass track." But the duo still DJ and keep "one ear open trying to understand how people do things."

Their name notwithstanding, the duo never seem to have embraced the more debauched elements of rave. "We're straight-edge kids," he half-laughs, half-deadpans.

"I've noticed that there's much less druggy energy in the clubs," says Simons. "What people do to our music is not any of my business. It would be churlish to tell them how to behave."

"You read that people are still taking drugs," Rowlands adds, "but whether it's like it was when rave exploded, between 1988 and 1992, I don't know. Perhaps it's just that rave culture is so far assimilated into youth culture now."

Does settling down mean losing their edge? Since having children, the married Rowlands has lived in bucolic east Sussex. "Our nearest neighbours are a shepherd and a farmer," he says. "They know what I do, I think; they haven't expressed any displeasure."

Simons, who is single and whose only brush with the paparazzi came during a relationship with Lily Allen, drives down regularly to potter with Rowlands in his studio. This is filled with synthesisers and drum machines. "I like the imperfections of old synths," Rowlands says, "their foibles.

"Electronic music can be celebrated for being tight and orderly but we want to create the sense of machines sweating or creaking and falling apart. There is a generation who make music on their laptops, but I like old instruments."

It's often asked what the Chemical Brothers actually do on stage, but Rowlands says they control the arrangements of each track - Dissolve from Further, for example, is "broken into 16 parts, and within that there are many possibilities, just with the mixing desk. We might have something completely different that we came up with in the soundcheck running beside it. On Sunday night, we threw away sections of songs to do something else before returning to them. We want to sound as if we're only half in control."

The secret of their relationship does sound slightly mundane. "We've had a lot of good things happen and we've made a lot of good things and that sustains the friendship," says Simons.

"We just like each other," says Rowlands, "we enjoy each other's company. We used to live on the same street and we used to go on holiday together and we don't do that any more." He drinks his coffee and concentrates on the bizarre jazz playing in the background. "I wonder how it's put together," he says.

Simons returns from a fag break. "Longevity for its own sake is meaningless; it's not hard to stick around," he says. "To keep making records that mean something to people is the difficult bit."

LOWDOWN

Who: The Chemical Brothers
Line-up: Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands
Where & when: Essential albums: Exit Planet Dust (1995); Dig Your Own Hole (1997); Come With Us (2002)
Latest album: Further out now

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