Underworld – Second Toughest In The Infants – Reissue liner notes

Liner notes

In 2015 werd Underworld’s Second Toughest In The Infants opnieuw uitgebracht. De uitgave bevatte, naast extra muziek, liner notes in de vorm van een essay. Deze wordt hieronder integraal weergegeven.

In autumn 1995, I discovered the pirate Jungle stations. It was one of the last seasons that I would spend in London, and I was trying hard to find something new in a hometown that had become stale. In the cool evenings I would drive out eastwards, down the banks of the Thames, looking for empty space. The soundtrack was a frequency – 1003 AM – that I hit on one evening: given the grand title “Pressure FM”, it was obviously just a couple of guys and a transmitter, with frequent shout-outs and raps glued over a constantly shifting, time-stretched strip of zooming, hurtling, falling and manic breakbeats – all undercut by a fundamental, dive-bombing bass.

Jungle sounded like nothing had before: it was like that moment in Jean Cocteau’s film of “Orphee”, when Jean Marais turns on the radio and gets this hypnotic, disembodied voice speaking rhythmic phrases that, while apparently making no sense, cause him to completely reinterpret the world. Pressure FM sounded like this secret code, the key to the city at that moment – the fact that a few hundred other people were hearing the same message in that time and place was a source of great wonderment to me. It showed how music could tap the pulse of the city, and remake it in its own grid. It was the mood that Underworld’s Rick Smith caught during 1995 and 1996.

In the mid ’90s, electronic music of all kinds was an expanding universe: it was new, open-ended, still psychedelic. The ground-rules had not yet been set and so, in contrast to Britpop, musicians DJs and sonic theorists could project headlong into the future: to do what had not been done yet, that did not yet have a name. You could throw anything into the mix but the crucial idea was repetition: if Neu! and Kraftwerk had been the sound of the 70’s autobahn, then this new electronic music was the sound of the early internet, of high speed trains, or cars travelling to a secret destination.

Juanita/ Kiteless/ To Dream of Love – three songs jammed together into a relentless forward drive – an uncompromising beginning to an album that, as yet, had no forewarning of its contents on its first release: no featured singles or promo 12’s to sully the full impact of newness. The words are fragmentary, short phrases – ‘your rails/ you’re thin/ your thin paper wings/ your thin paper wings/in the wind’. Rather than building up into a narrative, they add another percussive, rhythmic element. After the first verse, a synthesised hi-hat joins the mix, and they’re off and running: the plates are up and spinning, suspended in the air by a terrific torque – and there they will continue, resonating with and against each other for the next fifteen or so minutes.

Banstyle/ Sappys Curry – two song titles from ‘a form book of greyhounds’: Parklife for real – begins with a slower, mellow breakbeat, which works against Karl Hyde’s wasted voice and an uncomfortable lyric that seems to hint at sadism and pain. At seven minutes, there is a beautiful acoustic/ high dub segue into Sappy’s Curry, where ‘grey clouds cover Bethnal Green’.

Already at half an hour in, Second Toughest in the Infants sounds like the album that this group – and by 1996, Underworld were a group – want to make, that only they can make. The music is recorded in depth, with pleasing and often surprising variations in tone and texture: not just banging and not just ambient, but 73 minutes of properly constructed and well-paced electronic music. With these mad words on top that sound like a human sampler, that match the twists and turns of the beat, of the different pulses, melodies and counter-melodies, with their own twisted illogic. And always the pulse, accelerated or relaxed, like a human heartbeat.

Hyde’s vocal is the only thing to hang on to, a disembodied human machine relating elliptical impressions and half-forgotten stories from the urban wasteland – life as seen and heard ‘on the other side of the glass’. Underworld have by now lost almost all of their rave affiliations – except, perhaps, on the abrasively looping Rowla – and have taken from contemporary electronic music and ambient the idea of drift: the shifting, phasing, spinning patterns of rhythm and texture turned into the perfect evocation of and backdrop to travel – through the city, the images flash by: sometimes they are in sync, sometimes jumping like a badly sprocketed film.

Confusion The Waitress is a perfect example of how the lyrics work. Beginning at a Dutch festival – where, as Hyde told Select, ‘Rick came up to me onstage and whispered, Bloody sing something!’ – the words were totally improvised: ‘so I just started on a rant, thinking something would happen eventually, and I started putting “She said…” in front of everything. We had it on tape and it was a real blinder, so we transcribed it and did it again. We only find these points of association afterwards. I love that. As far as the lyrics are concerned, I don’t have ideas for specific songs, it tends to be reams of notebooks, like random samples from the world around me’.

After the lighter Confusion The Waitress, the instrumental Rowla is a return to a banging live tune: a monster with a growling, swirling synth that could have come from the wilder shores of Jungle. Pearl’s Girl would be the first single to be released off the album, in May 1996: it begins slowly, with liquid pools of melodies, before resolving into a fast breakbeat pattern. Over the top, Hyde intones his most allusive lyrics, his voice electronically altered so that it sounds like another synthesiser: ‘rioja/ rioja/ reverend al green/ deep blue morocco/ the water on stone/ the water on concrete/ the water on sand/ the water on fire/ smoke.’

This is the city as collage, a mix of thought associations, overheard conversations and fleeting impressions – filtered through various altered states and recorded in random patterns. The lyrics add up to an interior monologue delivered from within – together with the music, they take you elsewhere: into a big night out in Hamburg (Pearl’s Girl), a porn film glimpsed in a New York hotel room (Air Towel), or the world of an East End psycho (Stagger) – this last set to a slower, Kraftwerkian patch. The penultimate track is the transcendent Blueski – Robert Johnson looped and updated for the late 20th century.

I wish it could go on forever.

For all its hyper modernism, the album remains an intriguing mixture of the banal and the exotic, the homely and the far-flung. The title was derived from a snatched fragment of Smith’s nephew on home video: “Yeah, don’t worry about me, I’m the second toughest in the infants now.” It was mostly recorded in the group’s recording studio, Lemonworld, situated in deepest Romford where the band – Hyde, Smith and Darren Emerson – all lived in the mid 1990’s. ‘People ask us why we record all our stuff in Romford, at home,’ Smith told Johnny Davis of the Face, ‘Well, when we started we couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. If you’re only getting £2,000 to do a remix, you can’t go and spend £l,500 on studio time. We know Romford’s not rock’n’roll. It’s not cool. But most of the country’s not cool’.

Jon Savage 2015