Creamfields is coming...

4:21pm Wednesday 2nd July 2008

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TO celebrate its 10th anniversary, this year’s Creamfield’s in Cheshire promises to be bigger and better than ever before.

For the first time the festival will run for two days over the August Bank Holiday weekend (August 23 and 24) in Daresbury, with a raft of dance and indie talent lined up.

To kick off the countdown to the eagerly anticipated event, we caught up with Sunday night headliners Underworld.

I read a while back about your approach to lyrics. That you take apart your old notebooks and – similar to how a remix might work – you isolate words or passages and swap it around. It sounded a bit like one of those magnetic poetry kits that you see on fridges.

[Laughs] It’s more that I wander the streets and write down everything I see and bits of conversation that I hear. I still work like that now. I write every day. It’s moved on into different medium. But, just today, I went to Rick’s studio to work on some tracks and took this big holdall full of my old notebooks. When you’re in a recording session, you can just stick your hand in the back and pull out something from 1993 or 2005 and they’re really different vibes. They reflect what was going on at the time. So I can almost steer my way through them now. It will be like: “I want something a little bit darker? Hmmm, that will be pre-1998 then.”

While you know what the source material is, the tracks themselves are open into interpretation, aren’t they?

Yes. But the music comes first. The music tells the singer what to do and when to shut up. I want people to hear the groove first and then be thinking that there’s some kind of voice in there and, if they like it, maybe the listener might finally be thinking ‘there’s some kind of singing going on there’. I like the idea of that journey of discovery.

Is it unsettling when you perform and people sing along?

At first it was. Because we were inspired by club culture, we expected that people should have been dancing. I wanted to tell them to stop all that singing. Now it’s a cross-section of people that come to the shows and I’d imagine that most people are getting the words more right than I am.

The ‘lager, lager, lager’ chant from ‘Born Slippy’ must be one that comes back to haunt you?

That’s the only lyric that we ever felt the need to explain. Now I’m fine however people want to interpret it. If it’s simply a celebration of alcohol to them, then that’s okay. If they want to consider it as one man’s reflection on years of destruction and getting wasted, than I’m fine with that too.

You’ve always tried to avoid literal ‘songs’ anyway?

Yes. It’s interesting how artists can convey a mood anyway. Whether it’s instrumental music, foreign voices or just unintelligible lyrics, they can all put across something as strong as a literal narrative anyway. Bjork is probably a good example of how to express emotion while not revealing exactly what you’re on about.

So what else is inspiring you?

We’ve been curating some events of our own. We did one in Tokyo in November and took Simian Mobile Disco and Andrew Weatherall out alongside a huge art project. We’ve also been doing web TV which is something that we’d like to further explore. But we also need to ensure that we leave time in our schedules to make new music. Because, you’ll never know when you might need it [laughs].

With regards to the Creamfields show, will it be what’s now your standard fresh interpretations of older tracks with new pieces?

Yeah, until we say Underworld has stopped, the old favourites are still a big part of what we are. We do have the luxury of being able to go out there and remix it for each performance. Being able to do that – sometime radically – is what keeps it interesting for us. Things are involving all the time. But even being a band that improvises as much as we do, it’s still very easy to fall into a pattern. So there is still often the need to turn to someone on stage and say: “You know that thing that you’ve been doing for the past three night that is totally brilliant? Don’t do it again.” It’s especially important that we continue that now. In the age of the internet, people do discuss your shows. And even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t ever want us to get complacent.

Tickets for the festival are on sale now priced £53 to £190. Visit ticketline.co.uk or creamfields.com for full line-up details and costs.