Leftfield back centre stage

Friday, June 01, 2012

Stars of the 1990s dance scene are as popular as ever, says Ed Power

LEFTFIELD’S Neil Barnes recalls his band almost bringing the house down. “We were playing the Paradiso in Amsterdam, a beautiful, historic venue dating back to the 18th century. The people responsible for installing our system had turned the sound up too loud. When we started, this antique bar at the back of the room fell apart. That’s how heavy it was. There were bottles flying and everything. It was chaos.”

So ferocious was the Leftfield live experience that local authorities across Europe banned them. At London’s Brixton Academy, in 1996, the bass was cranked so high that plaster fell from the ceiling. “What nobody realised is that we had no control over the volume,” says Barnes. “Up on stage, you can’t tell how loud it is. And it was intensely loud, just ridiculous. The idea wasn’t to deafen people. It was to give them a good quality sound system. We had a lot of arguments about it at the end. I felt the sound wasn’t representing our music particularly well. On our new tour, it is set to a decent level.”

Leftfield returned in 2010 after a decade-long hiatus. The dance scene had changed. Barnes fretted the comeback would fall flat. It’s been a huge success.

“That’s why I took so long to do it,” he says. “I wasn’t sure at all how great the demand would be. We were careful not to play too many gigs, to spread things out. What I discovered is that there’s a big fanbase out there.”

Along with Orbital, The Chemical Brothers and Prodigy, Leftfield were the face of British dance music in the ’90s. They went from headlining illegal raves to curating an event at the Point in Dublin. In 1995, they pushed new boundaries for the electronic genre when their debut, Leftism, received a Mercury Music Prize nomination. The shortlisting of a dance record was revolutionary then. “We wanted to make an album, rather than a collection of tracks,” says Barnes. “The goal was to create something that could be listened to from beginning to end. We used vocalists so that it would sound fresh and new.”

With guest turns from Curve’s Toni Halliday and Sex Pistol/PiL leader John Lydon, Leftism was a poke in the eye for those who dismissed electronic music as a fad. Mixing dub, dance-hall, rave and breakbeat, it was a critical and commercial success. Ironically, this sowed the seeds for Leftfield’s demise.

Both Barnes and his writing partner, Paul Daley (sitting out the reunion), were perfectionists. Working on the follow-up, they obsessed over the details. The years clipped by without new material. Rhythm and Stealth, finally released in 2001, proved to be engaged but flawed.

“Some things on it are not brilliant,” say Barnes. “That said, there are some things that still sound pretty good. I think it was ahead of its time. People are coming around to certain tracks now. There was a song called Swords, which people tended not to like. You listen to it now and it feels quite futuristic.”

The best-known track on Rhythm and Stealth is Phat Planet, which famously soundtracked the Guinness ‘surfer’ ad. “We learned a lot about how the advertising industry worked from that,” says Barnes.

“The advertisers tried to pretend for a long time that they had done the music. They did a whole programme about the ad and didn’t mention the Phat Planet once. I thought that was funny, how they always want to take the credit. Funnily enough, this did us a lot of favours. People wanted to know who had written the soundtrack and so they sought us out.”

The difference between touring now and in the ’90s is that technology is more reliable. An artist could perform a gig with tracks on their iPhone. Fifteen years ago, you prayed you made it through without anything going on-the-blink.

“I remember playing this huge Leftfield gig in the Point and the lights were so powerful they sucked up all the electricity, meaning the whole system went down. It stopped working in the middle of our set — schtump. You didn’t have any back-ups. We were pushing things as far as they could go and occasionally it overloaded the set-up.”

With the reunion a success, Barnes is thinking about original material. He’s been working on tracks and has guest vocalists (A-listers) in mind. He doesn’t want to say too much for fear of jeopardising their involvement. Barnes hopes to have a new Leftfield record out sooner rather than later.

“I’m not ready to play any of it yet,” he says. “I’ve been messing about a lot with stuff. There are tracks with hard beats, ambient things, a melancholy ballad.

“I’m the sort of person who is constantly mucking about with sounds. I don’t want to make too much of it, at this stage. But, hopefully, it is going to develop into something interesting.”

* Leftfield headline Forbidden Fruit tomorrow night at Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. Home