Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are indistinct within a looming ring of keyboards, drum machines, laptops and mixers. It isn’t clear, through darkness and dry ice, what precisely they are doing to conjure the mesmeric thunder of a Chemical Brothers live show. But they are busy as druids in a stone circle, working magic among the machines.
Nothing in this two-hour performance suggests the duo – now in their early 50s – are trading on past glories. Yes, the bassline of Block Rockin’ Beats is cheered like a returning hero, but the highlights actually come with less familiar songs, less straightforward moods. Wide Open is equal parts euphoric and elegiac. Goodbye is acid gospel in which bass pounds the chest – EDM as CPR – while a sampled vocal makes the heart ache.
A Chemical Brothers gig is no simple presentation of music that otherwise exists independently, it’s a theatrical work in which those songs become fully realised – the same difference between listening to a ballet score and seeing The Rite of Spring. Show designers Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall are alchemical brothers, transmuting sound into spectacle. A gigantic LED screen plays films featuring a bestiary of unchancy characters and creatures. Often, the tone is unsettling, notably Feels Like I Am Dreaming, a techno frenzy further intensified by a folk-horrorish video starring Benedict Wong. The bad-trip visuals evolve from tour to tour. Coulrophobes will be glad to learn that the sinister clown, a Chemical Brothers mainstay for years, has been retired – only to be replaced by a blue-faced Satan.
The aim of all this, as Rowlands explains in Paused in Cosmic Reflection, a new book about the band, is to make audiences feel overwhelmed. Well, job done, and never more so than during closer The Private Psychedelic Reel. Rapturous, almost devotional, its sitar riff and drum fills build against a flashing collage of medieval religious art. The guitar and woo-woos from Sympathy for the Devil drop in precisely when stained-glass demons appear on screen – the sort of purposeful detail that makes this show an admirable expression of choreographed awe.
