There’s no doubt that ‘Firestarter’ was the big, banging dance-rock crossover hit of 1996; but that song’s infamy probably means that it has unfairly overshadowed the year’s other big, banging dance-rock crossover hit…
Setting Sun, by The Chemical Brothers (their 1st of two #1s)
1 week, from 6th – 13th October 1996
Because ‘Setting Sun’ hits even harder than ‘Firestarter’, and it hasn’t been tamed by years of ubiquity. I hadn’t heard it properly for ages, and was genuinely taken aback by how nasty it sounds. Take the relentlessly monotonous, boldly uncommercial, one-minute long intro for a start. These are big beats with a capital ‘B’.
The shrieking klaxons and the gut-dropping bass hold the track together, and are very nineties. But in the droning sitar, and the vocals played in reverse, there’s also more than a nod to the original tape-looping, Eastern-looking, psychedelic game-changer: the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. At one point lawyers looked like getting involved, before a musicologist was brought in to prove that the song was merely inspired by, and didn’t sample, The Beatles. The fact that it was used as a template for a dance track thirty years later surely just proves how incredibly ahead of its time ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was.
And what could be more Beatlesy, back in 1996, than to have Noel Gallagher on vocals? Uncredited, and filtered through layers of feedback, but still recognisable from the off, he even manages to rip-off his own lyrics from ‘Half the World Away’… You said your body was young but your mind was very old… And I have to say that this is probably the best #1 single that he features on, as much as I do enjoy many of Oasis’s chart-toppers.
Other brilliant moments include the intense break half-way through, which sounds like a helicopter landing on your head. (I was going to call it the ‘middle-eight’ but I don’t think traditional terms like that apply to boundary pushers like this.) And then there’s the completely unhinged outro, in which the song disintegrates before our ears. The video I’ve attached below is the radio edit, but it’s worth hearing the full five and a half minute version, to drag out the exquisite nastiness…
Another thing that’s interesting about this record is that, unlike The Prodigy when they unleashed ‘Firestarter’, The Chemical Brothers had only a couple of minor hits to their name before ‘Setting Sun’. According to most sources, airplay was limited too. So it seems to have been a genuine underground, word of mouth smash (with Noel G for added clout) that set the duo up to become one of the biggest dance acts of the late-90s and early-00s.
The Chemical Brothers (yet again, like the Walkers, the Righteouses and the Outheres, they are not actually brothers!) had met at the University of Manchester in 1989, and had bonded over their love of rave culture. There can be few chart-topping DJs with a degree in late-Medieval history, but the Chem’s Ed Simons is one. They have one further chart-topper to come, but it will have to go some to match the power of this.