[Liam]

Ah, I guess that a (somewhat late) explanation is due. Forgive me if I sounded snobbish in my last post. That was the day after my house was burgled -- laptop with over 30 gigs of music (including all my Underworld), DJ equipment, camera all gone. You can imagine that I wasn't in the best of spirits.

But allow me to explain a little more clearly what I mean. I don't actually want to convince anyone, as I would hate to spoil the great reactions people have been having to the recent shows (I mean that). I just want to explain myself a little more fully.

The few dozen bootlegs that exist of Underworld concerts from before 1998 are, with no exaggeration, the best music I have ever heard. On stage, Underworld achieved heights that have never elsewhere been realized in electronic music. Go and listen to the European Club gig from 1996, Red Box in Dublin from 1998, Leicester University from 1994 or I Love Techno from 1998. These concerts are as complex and detailed as symphonies. They have upwards of 20 loops flowing through the mixing desk at any one time: rhythm upon intricate rhythm that utterly defy the four-on-the-floor convention that defines pretty much every other techno act ever, melodies and sounds that were never put to album. (Often I listen to a concert that I have heard literally hundreds of times before and find rhythms that I have never heard before). And the music flows. There is hardly a period of two bars that goes by without a change – drums added or subtracted, fills, crescendos, lyrics, voices, etc, creating seamless rivers of improvised energy. Sometimes there are 10 minute spells between tracks of just drums and improvisation, but the music is no less enthralling than the tracks themselves (indeed, most of my favorite moments occur between tracks).

It’s this type of thing that I don’t hear in Underworld Live anymore. There are usually only two or three drum loops going on at once, most of which we knew from the album, and there isn’t the same flow from track to track. I admit that it’s not true to say that their material just sounds like it does on the albums, but nevertheless the focus is just on their songs, and I am left yearning for the depth and spontaneity of their older material that I love so much.

I am happy that people disagree with me and have enjoyed the US shows, because it means that it’s obviously just a matter of taste and hopefully I can get into it more. They’re still my favorite band of all time and a great live act, but when I feel disappointed when I remember how their live material used to sound.