Hamish Brown
About a third of the way through The Chemical Brothers’ Leeds set – during a seemingly endless drop in the middle of Got To Keep On – confetti begins to fall from the ceiling like snow, an endless blizzard of paper which turns most of the audience into five year olds again, waiting for Santa Claus and watching the skies.
90 seconds later and the moment is gone, erased by the track’s pumping chorus and a shooting gallery of lasers as they bathe the throng in tech-house euphoria: if there’s one thing you can say about Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, over the years they’ve learned the value of the spectacle.
When they began life in the ashes of the late eighties rave scene, the idea both of recording albums full of those acid belches and then playing them in the sanitised environments of an arena was laughable, but as the idea of illegal partying has gone further underground, the duo have spent decades proving that yesterday’s impossible is just tomorrow’s progress and unrealised ideas.
It helps too that as well as a back catalogue which arguably makes them the last century’s premier British electronic artists, they’ve managed to keep the flame lit, retaining their crown against all comers with their renaissance-Geist last album No Geography. Many in their position would give in to the temptation to inject this almost-festive set with old one skool banger after another, but the new stuff – Eve of Destruction, MAH, the title-track and Free Yourself – all elbow their way in satisfactorily.
No Geography also has a serious side with its messages of reconciliation and border-blind togetherness, but that’s as deep as having it the crowd want to go, the ecstatic reaction to Star Guitar and then the shit-losing roar that greets Hey Boy, Hey Girl confirmation that everyone is here for a good time and not a long one.
A key part of the experience is the dazzling visuals which steal the show: fundamentally, as Kraftwerk learned many years previously, middle aged guys twiddling a few knobs is entertainment anti-matter. To this end the giant screen runs video, backdrop-projected silhouettes and all manner of other trickery, giving the eyes as little time to rest as the feet. By the time Block Rockin’ Beats arrives, goading everyone into another effort, the sensory overload is almost tangible.
Encores however are a strange thing, fast becoming uncool. On their return to the stage the pair opt for hosing the masses down first with Got Glint and then the cinematic Catch Me, I’m Falling before, just as a wave of anti-climax looks like it might break over them, The Private Psychedelic Reel’s groove odyssey has everyone sailing off into their own little Nirvana.
This care for their people has sustained The Chemical Brothers for three decades and at this rate might do so for a couple more. Those bits of confetti are still turning up in clothes and pockets days later, a tangible souvenir of what felt almost like a dream.
