Simon Price
Released 28/7/18
This genius on-the-fly collaboration is already being played loads on my HiFi, with Iggy Pop‘s stream-of-consciousness brilliance, bringing a set of crowd-pleasing underworld productions inimitably to life. This album was recorded for Trainspotting 2 on all accounts, but was not then used. The track ‘Get you shirt’ is a throwback to Underworld anthems of old. An album review and listen of Underworld and Iggy Pop’s ‘Teatime Dub Encounters’ is one I was really looking forward too.
‘Teatime Dub Encounters’ is the result of clandestine hotel room recording sessions rather than clinical studio dabbling, thriving on spontaneity. Iggy unleashes neurotic, weird, nostalgic, irresistible, unhinged narratives of concorde-smoking and shirt-losing, making the ordinary truly extraordinary. Underworld offer beats of gradually-building repetition culminating in ecstatic reveries – the effect the coolest and oddest combo you’ve ever felt compelled to dance to. “These encounters are a glorious collision — and a thrilling gift to fans — of two musical titans” 4.5/5 – the music’
While overseeing the soundtrack for T2 Trainspotting, Underworld’s Rick Smith arranged a meeting with Iggy Pop in a room at The Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand to discuss working on collaborative music for the film. Their respective tracks Lust for Life and Born Slippy (Nuxx) had perfectly bookended the first Trainspotting film two decades previously. On arrival, Iggy found a fully working studio set up and eagerness to get cracking.
Says Rick Smith “Iggy was staying at The Savoy and graciously said ‘yeah you know we we can meet and talk about something’ because we both felt a strong connection to Trainspotting and to Danny. I turned up thinking I’ve got one chance here to convince this gentleman that we should work together. So I turned up with basically half my studio, hired a hotel room, set up and sat waiting.”
Says Iggy Pop “When you are confronted with somebody who has a whole bloody studio there in the hotel room, a Skyped director who has won the Oscar recently and a fucking microphone in front of you and 30 finished pieces of very polished music, you don’t want to be the wimp that goes ‘uh uhhh’, so my mind was racing.”
Teatime Dub Encounters is the result of a few clandestine hotel room recording sessions, that began a few weeks after Underworld and Iggy Pop had each released their last albums (Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future and Post Pop Depression respectively) on the same day (18 March 2016). It is neither historical or a tribute to past work, it is the work of artists in motion, engaged in a process that they both bring to all of their work – one that uses spontaneity as a spur for creativity.
Best of downtempo Electronica 2010-2020 – see here.
