Dubnobasswithmyheadman

Background

The first version of Underworld had ended after a 1989 tour of North America as the support act to the Eurythmics. After the tour Karl Hyde had stayed in the US for two months to work at Prince's Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis as a session musician, and then toured with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. When Hyde returned to the UK he found his former bandmate Rick Smith had been collaborating on dance tracks with a teenage DJ named Darren Emerson, a friend of Hyde's brother-in-law, at Hyde and Smith's studio in Romford: Emerson had been eager to learn how to use the equipment in a recording studio, and in turn Smith had been keen to have somebody who could introduce him to electronic music and club culture which he had grown increasingly interested in. The three men started to swap ideas and create songs, resulting in a series of singles released throughout 1992 and 1993 under the names Underworld and Lemon Interrupt.

Composition

Underworld's approach to songwriting was very fluid, and based on the idea that everything was valid. Hyde told Melody Maker, "We're grabbing elements from all different times and areas of music and taking them somewhere else. We don't want to simply regurgitate the past, and even though we're using vocals and guitars, we're trying to do it in new ways. We're trying to find ways which makes those elements relevant to today. By not following a blueprint, we're able to base a song on acoustic guitar, or we can do a pure techno track, based on an oscillator. In the past, Rick and I have often been excited by a poem or a film or something and thought, 'That's inspired us to do a great reggae tune but we can't because we're not in a reggae band'. Now we would think, 'F*** yes, let's do it'." Smith added, "There's a lot of cutting and pasting, especially with the vocals. Something which is recorded for one track one day may well end up on three different tracks a few months down the line. Nothing is fixed. They're just points for us to jump off of."

Many of Hyde's lyrics were written during his sojourn in the US: "Dark and Long" was intended to evoke the open prairies of Minnesota that he had visited while working in Minneapolis, and "Mmm Skyscraper... I Love You" was inspired by walking around Greenwich Village in New York City. Hyde stated that the biggest influences at the time on his writing style had been Lou Reed's 1989 album New York, and playwright Sam Shepard's autobiography Motel Chronicles.

Artwork

Tomato, the art design collective that includes Underworld's Rick Smith and Karl Hyde, designed the artwork for dubnobasswithmyheadman. It features black and white type that has been "multiplied, smeared, and overlaid" so much that it is nearly unreadable, alongside a "bold symbol consisting of a fractured handprint inside a broken circle". The artwork was originally intended for Tomato's book Mmm... Skyscraper I Love You: A Typographic Journal of New York, published in 1994.

According to the authors of The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, the cover "set a new standard of presentation for subsequent Dance albums". In Graphic Design: A New History, Stephen Eskilson cites the cover as a notable example of the "expressive, chaotic graphics" that developed in the 1990s, a design style he calls "grunge". In an article published in the journal Substance Paul Zelevansky says that "the packaging... replays the visual poetry of the 1960s and '70s and fast forwards to the alchemical transformations of computer graphics packages".

The album artwork also features excerpts of lyrics to the band's 1996 hit Born Slippy .NUXX, a track which was released two years after the album.

Karl Hyde told Uncut magazine in 2014 that the album's title had come from him misreading Rick Smith's writing on a cassette tape box.

Original release (1994-2003)

dubnobasswithmyheadman received widespread acclaim from music critics. Writing in Melody Maker, a year before he left to co-found the specialist dance music magazine Muzik, Ben Turner proclaimed that "Dubnobasswithmyheadman is the most important album since The Stone Roses and the best since Screamadelica... While others are content to go techno techno techno techno [a reference to the lyrics of "No Limit" by 2 Unlimited, a UK No. 1 hit the previous year], Underworld have taken a step back, utilising Karl Hyde and Rick Smith's experience in rock music and throwing it full in the face of 22-year-old DJ, Darren Emerson. The result is utterly contemporary, the sound of the moment, beautifully capturing melodic techno, deranged lyricism, historic bass and lead guitars and astounding walls of rhythm... This breathtaking hybrid marks the moment that club culture finally comes of age and beckons to everyone." NME said, "Before Underworld's startling remixes for Björk and Orbital last year, no-one would've put money on ex-members of... popsters Freur making the first visionary record of '94... The sheer weight of ideas on offer and the constant variance of sounds and textures add up to a coherent, cogent whole, not a series of jack-tracks sequenced together, nor a series of hits with filler thrown in... By writing 'songs'—albeit playful, deranged ones—Underworld have come up with a solution for the facelessness that blights some dance music." Vox wrote that "apart from the lumbering blasphemy of 'Dirt Epic' [sic], the only non-event here, it's all go-with-the-flow stuff laced with intricacies... Attractive, undulating and with moments of innovation, this Underworld offering transcends many of the limitations of its genre."

John Bush from AllMusic gave the album 5 out of 5 stars saying, "From the beginning of the first track 'Dark & Long', Underworld's focus on production is clear, with songwriting coming in a distant second", also adding that "Underworld are truly a multi-genre group". Adie Nunn from Drowned in Sound gave the album a perfect 10/10 score describing it as "An album indie kids and pop kids could like as well as the electronic elite, whilst the band retained their credibility". Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine gave it 4 out of 5 stars saying that "It stands as their greatest overall contribution to electronic music" and also stating that "The album blends Acid House, Techno and Dub into a refined, epic headrush".

2014 reissue

In 2014, the album was reissued on vinyl, Blu-Ray, and 2-CD and 5-CD expanded editions. Reviewing the reissue, Q described the album as "superb" and proposed that Hyde and Smith's previous 14 years of making music "was why the uncannily undated dubnobasswithmyheadman still exudes such multidimensional sophistication". Uncut praised the material on the extra four discs, but felt that the original album was still Underworld's key record, claiming that Hyde's lyrical vision was able to make Romford sound as exotic as the USA he had seen on his travels, and that this was the reason why "twenty years later, the results of that crazy belief still sound like dance music's dirtiest epic".

Accolades

dubnobasswithmyheadman was ranked at number 16 in Melody Makers "Albums of the Year" in 1994.

Early prototype

On 3 October 2008 a DAT from 1993 surfaced on Underworld's official messageboard, which featured a different running order, some extended mixes and three previously unreleased songs: "Big Meat Show", "Organ" and "Can You Feel Me", an outtake from previous sessions. The poster of the DAT called it "just a sampling of the type of songs the band was creating, showing any potential label that was interested …"