A few weeks ago, a friend put a shout out for recommendations for the top tracks of 2012. Soon after, another friend listed their Top Ten Albums of 2012.
I don't think I even heard ten albums in 2012.
There was a time when this list-making would have been easy. But, now I am over forty, have two kids and no time.
I have got into the habit of doing mixes occasionally, in order to incite myself to seek out new tunes (I try to keep everything twenty-first century, with room for maybe one to sneak in from previous years).
Here's my Top One Track of 2012
It swaggers, stomps and staggers through the dark. It's minimal and menacing. Sweaty, grimy, glitchy robo-funk for the lock-in at the heat death of the universe.
Not for everybody, perhaps, but just my cup of tea.
Whilst 2012 saw me failing to harvest much in the way of new music, it also saw my favorite band of all time returning. Not only returning, but commanding an audience of a scale they have never previously known. The thing is, the audience themselves probably weren't aware of this at the time.
You may have noticed that London ran a sports event during the summer. No?
Underworld were responsible for the music of Danny Boyle's universally-lauded opening ceremony to the London 2012 Olympic Games.
I first came into contact with Underworld twenty years ago. I remember walking into The Rocket on Holloway Road in North London for a Megadog all-nighter and seeing three guys on stage. The two blokes on the left-hand side wrestled with infernal machines, producing a thunderous, pulsing, clanging, bleeping cacophony, whilst on the right-hand side, the third guy accompanied them on the harmonica.
Tunes didn't begin and end. Sections slid across one another. After a while, the guy on the harmonica stopped playing his mouth-organ and sung for a bit. Then he danced. Then he picked up a guitar and jammed. It was a glorious, controlled chaos. It was, as the song goes, a beautiful thing. It was Underworld.
I bought my first piece of Underworld vinyl soon after and then it was really just a case of finding things to do with my life until it was time to see them play live again. It's hard to believe that Spikee is twenty years old. It still sounds fresh. Both alien and unlike anything else, yet warm and familiar.
Underworld became the background to everything (everything) I have done since; truly, the world beneath the "real" world. Where the everyday and the strange are one of the same. I met my wife partly through a shared love of this music. The tracks To Heal and Two Months Off (Our song!) were played at our wedding. Both our children have been to Underworld gigs in utero.
When they announced that they were working with Danny Boyle on the opening ceremony, it made perfect sense (they had collaborated several times before) but, for a devotee like myself, it also seemed unreal. To have them sneak to the cultural foreground, still hidden, but in plain sight, was a perfectly Underworld type thing to do.
And I Will Kiss, from the Pandemonium section of the show (with Evelyn Glennie) has licks recycled from one of their earliest tunes, Rez.
The 'pealing bells' at the climax of the performance were lifted straight from Two Months Off.
Underworld's DNA was spliced right into the show. Not only that, but the arrival of the athletes was accompanied by swathes of their back catalogue, some having been remixed especially for the occasion. For those who already loved Underworld, it was simultaneously surprising and obvious. Their music had already entwined itself with my own life in much the same way. Why shouldn't it do the same in this celebration of the Best of Blighty?
2013 has begun and already Underworld have resurfaced from two different directions in space and time. Karl Hyde has announced a solo album and small tour this year. Amongst the work from the new album, he's promised to perform some of the more esoteric Underworld tunes, not normally performed live. Meanwhile, from the distant past, an audio recording of Underworld's Experimental Sound Field from the 1992 Glastonbury festival has materialised. A tantalizing taste of a show from a few months before I first came into contact with them.
Some new, old stuff and some old, new stuff.
Everything everything everything everything everything everything everything...
