And the beat goes on for Leftfield
HOW long can you live in the past before it starts to feel as if you are trapped there? That’s the question Leftfield’s Neil Barnes found himself contemplating as his last tour wound down.
Veterans of the ‘90s electronic scene, Leftfield — essentially Barnes and some hired help — returned as a live entity in 2010 to much acclaim.
But there was no new material and the group confined itself to a creaky catalogue going on 20 years old. Initially this was fine: What’s wrong with celebrating a legacy as rich as Leftfield’s? Eventually, though, cashing in on old glories began to jar.
“I felt uncomfortable just doing the old material,” says Barnes, a combative 50-something who cut his teeth in the punk scene of the late ‘70s. “I was much happier going out there and doing new stuff.”
Leftfield were one of the most important electronica pioneers of their era and arguably of all time. Formed in 1989, their arrival coincided with dance music’s emergence from the underground and its elevation to serious art-form. Nominated for a Mercury Prize for 1995’s Leftism, they were contemporaries of The Chemical Brothers, Orbital, The Prodigy — outfits with whom they shared an edgy, outsider attitude and a determination to shape the future of music in their image.
But that was then. Now, Barnes had to reimagine Leftfield all over again. Recording a new album was no straightforward undertaking. The studio has always been a torturous place for the Londoner. The group’s second album, 1999’s Rhythm and Stealth, in particular, was an ordeal — its troubled creation contributing to a break-up with musical partner Paul Daley, whom Barnes recruited to Leftfield in the late ‘80s from the Brand New Heavies.
“It was very hard following up on the success of Leftism,” Barnes had told me in 2010, as the project came out of retirement. “We were perfectionists. The lines began to blur. We lost track. Being creative... It’s a difficult thing. We go through an awful lot of harder work to get to the end point. I’m amazed when people say something is easy. I always think, well they are not working hard enough.
“In my mind, there is an album between Leftism and Rhythm and Stealth. Don’t get me wrong. There are some wicked tracks on Rhythm and Stealth. There are also some tracks which, to be honest, aren’t so wicked. Overall, it’s an album I’m very proud of. We suffered the second album blues big time.”
He was understandably nervous about the possibility of blotting Leftfield’s legacy. Release a stinker of a third album and it would retroactively tarnish the music he had made in the ‘90s. At the same time, he couldn’t just toss out a facsimile of Leftism and Rhythm and Stealth.
He had to show Leftfield was a living entity, creatively speaking — that it had absorbed contemporary influences and refracted them into something worthwhile and unique. From this soul-searching and determination to push on came the group’s third long player, Alternative Life Source. It has already been hailed as the equal of anything in Barnes’s catalogue.
“It’s a modern record,” he nods. “It isn’t dub-influenced [as Rhythm and Stealth and Leftism were]. Some people have said it sounds ‘poppy’ — I don’t know. ‘Poppy’ isn’t what I aimed for. Sometimes the tracks turn out the way they do.
“Of course I felt pressure. You think — ‘how will people respond to it?’ Are you happy with it yourself? Making a record is not an easy process — you have to take care that it feels right.”
It is a curious time for the album as an institution. With record sales in free-fall, and younger artists preferring to release singles and EPs, some commentators have wondered whether the long-play record is on borrowed time. This was not on Barnes’ mind as he made Alternative Light Source. He believes that a body of music should have a start, middle, and end. He won’t object if people want to dip into and out of the record. However, that’s not how he intended it to be experienced.
“For me, when you take several tracks out it doesn’t work. That’s how it has always been. We’ve never been a singles act. You take things out of context and sometimes people get confused — you wish they had the rest of the album, so that they could understand it. The album takes you on a journey — it is put together so that is what it will do.”
From another perspective, it is the perfect moment to put out a new LP. Dance music is in the ascendancy, ruling the charts and increasingly the live realm too.
“Someone asked me ‘how does it feel to have won?’,” Barnes muses. “It’s true — we are in a very exciting time for dance music. There is a whole spectrum of really interesting stuff coming out. With so much out there, I wanted to make a difference. Try to move in a new way. That’s what the album represents.”
Barnes isn’t slow about staking Leftfield’s place in dance history. He once told me that Leftism’s hit ‘Open Up’, featuring a snarling John Lydon on vocals, inspired the Prodigy’s entire catalogue, more or less.
“The Prodigy, they basically copied us with some of their stuff,” he said. “You take our song, ‘Open Up’. I remember approaching my record label and telling them I wanted John Lydon to sing on it. They thought I was mad. A punk singer on a dance track! Soon everyone was doing it.”
He is looking forward to debuting new material at the weekend’s Body and Soul festival. Leftfield and Ireland have an interesting history. Older fans still speak in awe about a 1996 gig at Dublin’s The Point where the group’s sound system was so formidable it shorted the power.
“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,” he once said. “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. That could never happen with modern technology. Things are much too advanced.”
Thank goodness for that.
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