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So; like a lot of people of my age/general demographic, I can tell you with great certainty what the first Underworld song I ever heard was. I was 15 when Trainspotting came out, and I don’t know if the theatre in Kincardine ever showed it, but I do recall renting it on VHS shortly after it was available (my mom had a subscription to Rolling Stone at the time, and as much as I’ve grown to hate Peter Travers’ writing style, boy was he good at getting you excited to see something).

Like many things that wind up having a major impact on you, I can’t tell you whether my reaction to ‘Born Slippy” (technically “Born Slippy .NUXX,” I believe; like many other electronic/dance acts, the malleability of Underworld’s tracks and track titling was and maybe still is a little stressful for someone raised on rock and comfortable with the notion that when you buy the album you get the ‘real’ version of the song) was that extreme at the time. I know that I liked it; I’m not sure I was conscious of its role as a gateway drug.

I wonder how many people first realized that they loved techno (a nebulous term, but I’m using it nebulously) through the good offices of a hit like “Born Slippy.” Well, a hit back in the UK, at least; Europe has usually been kinder to this kind of music than North America (although maybe that’s changing now?). It’s certainly an easy song to love; the angelic sighing of those pads, opening things with ringing, piano-esque chords; the introduction of Karl Hyde’s frantic but effortless-sounding semi-gibberish, then the simple but pounding drums coming in, slowly (with Hyde) taking over the track and ratcheting up the intensity higher higher higher, until the closing “are you on your way to a new tension headache?” might not just be a rhetorical question. To return to a theme that I imagine I’ll be discussing a lot this week, “Born Slippy” performs the actually-quite-difficult-if-you-think-about-it trick of being both serene and busy, forward-moving yet imperially remote. It also snuck a fair amount of emotional impact (“come over, come over, she smiled at you” is actually kind of wistful as delivered, and I shamefully still maybe identify with “let your feelings slip, boy, but never your mask” a bit). None of this is revelatory now, but back in 1996 or 7 it sure was.

Outside of the movie, I think I first heard the version they played on MuchMusic, then probably the soundtrack version. At an age where my tolerance for longer tracks was still not great (most were so boring!), it was a wonderful surprise to find out that not only did I like the longer version, despite much of the added length being swift-moving instrumental music that bore little relation to the ‘pop’ parts everyone loved. Was this song my first non-Who experience with arpeggiating synths? Maybe. It’s definitely the song that got my friend Pete and I interesting in hearing more of this electronic stuff, which lead to Orbital, Aphex Twin, Laurent Garnier, and plenty of stuff later on. But we kind of lost track of Underworld; living in a small Ontario town in the pre-download era will do that for you. We had a Radio Shack that carried some CDs but that would not order in something for you, even if you offered to pay 100% of the price up front (god), so you were stuck with what the gods decided to bring you, on TV or on trips to actual cities.

And of course, like all great songs there’s some fairly mundane but interesting facts behind its creation. Here’s what Hyde had to say about the song to the Guardian:

Karl Hyde (vocalist, Underworld): We used to go out drinking in Soho and I ended up in the Ship on Wardour Street. All the lyrics were written on that night. A drunk sees the world in fragments and I wanted to recreate that. I was inspired by Lou Reed’s New York album and Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles. I was into flash photography as well, so I was walking around Soho with a notebook and camera, just observing things. In those days I’d open the book whenever a musical idea inspired me. Rick [Smith] came up with a rhythm and I started singing over it. The vocals were done in one take. When I lost my place, I’d repeat the same line; that’s why it goes, “lager, lager, lager, lager”. The first time we played it live, people raised their lager cans and I was horrified because I was still deep into alcoholism. It was never meant to be a drinking anthem; it was a cry for help. Now I don’t mind. Why Born Slippy? It was a greyhound we won money on.

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