UK Edition
Review
Chemical Brothers, O2, review: an eye-popping, ear-splitting, bone-shaking sensory overload
The electronic dance music duo may not have much stage presence, but when they can put on a stunning show like this it hardly matters
During the 1990s, when the outlaw raves of 1988’s “Second Summer of Love” had sparked an explosion of electronic dance music, few would’ve tipped any of the scene’s camera-shy big-hitters for top-tier longevity – least of all, The Chemical Brothers.
As a sumptuous new graphic autobiography, Paused in Cosmic Reflection, recounts, the two-man band was formed by geeky Manchester college students Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons initially as The Dust Brothers, a name they jokingly stole from the East Coast production team responsible for early rap classics by the Beastie Boys, among others, scarcely even dreaming they’d get successful enough to warrant a lawsuit.
Hastily rechristened, the pair’s ground-breaking fusion of hip hop and acid house has since proved unassailable as a soundtrack for a big night out. On record, a pattern of hiring in tasty guest vocalists (Noel Gallagher and New Order’s Bernard Sumner were pivotal early attractions) has crowned six chart-topping albums. The beloved party-starters have also headlined a Glastonbury stage on half a dozen occasions.
Yet the “Chems” have always tiptoed around the prospect of playing the nation’s enormodomes, perhaps fearing the impact of “chilly hangar syndrome” on their show. For only their second O2 appearance, such concerns were quickly steamrollered in a minutely skilled masterclass in state-of-the-art son et lumière, which had the sold-out 20,000 crowd raving right up to the Dome’s very rafters.
Scarcely glimpsed, the pseudo-fraternal pair kickstarted the evening with 2015’s Go, its inspired combination of stumbling beats, euphoric keyboards and Q-Tip’s pre-recorded motivational rapping consuming the arena’s vast space in a multi-sensory blitzkrieg of strobes, flashing screens and over-amplification.
Where The Prodigy had Keith Flint to front their act, it’s hard to imagine how an untreated human voice would fit into The Chemical Brothers’ digitally manipulated sonic onslaught. In its place, the screened films of people in outlandish clobber doing nutty aerobics (think New Order’s True Faith video) and often lip-syncing to verbal snippets (see the space-age helmeted lady for Eve of Destruction) fulfilled that connective task. You might even argue that the show’s real stars were the visual team, Smith & Lyall.
Exactly what Simons and Rowlands were doing up on stage remained a mystery (there certainly could be little spur-of-the-moment improvisation), but the sounds they generated frequently floored you: the sudden bass blasts alone, at a volume which felt double the extremity of heavy-metal giants such as Metallica, could’ve blown over an 18-wheeler lorry.
Drawing together cross-career hits into an all-but-unbroken two-hour mix, set highlights included Live Again from recent album For That Beautiful Feeling, where ecstatic Daft Punk-style disco-house was brilliantly overlaid with deafening feedback-guitar reminiscent of turn-of-the-Nineties noiseniks My Bloody Valentine.
Such playful disregard for genre division possibly explains the breadth of The Chemical Brothers’ appeal, but there’s also the three-decade accumulation of iconic dancefloor moments, such as Block Rockin’ Beats’ hurtling introductory bassline, or the tingling guitar line throughout the final, triumphant The Private Psychedelic Reel, each greeted with jubilant abandon.
This was a two-hour feast for body, mind and (importantly, these days) social media. All the mechanised chaos somehow added up to something heart-warmingly human, unstoppably mind-bending and boundlessly joyful.