Propellerheads: Drums Gone To Iceland

WE rattle into Reykjavik in a battered BMW, having spent half an hour on a freezing hard shoulder tying down its rusty bonnet with a bootlace. We breeze out two days later in a gnarly old taxi, the overloaded boot now held down with string. Inbetween we're stopped by police, quizzed about elves, abducted by mothers to see 'the real Iceland', fed fish soup and unfeasible amounts of alcohol, and driven at insane speeds in unsuitable vehicles along roughneck black dirt tracks to a space age lake where you can swim outdoors in the middle of Winter. Oh, and we also get to meet The Propellerheads, grinning all the while. They're at Number Three in the Icelandic charts and this is their second visit. They love it here. Two days later, despite a hangover from hell, I can see why. Crikey, I'm thinking of moving myself.

THE Props - tousle-haired Alex, 33 and suede-headed Will, 24 - are here for a short holiday, with a couple of DJing spots thrown in. We meet them at the wonderful little record shop that Kiddi, the promoter, owns on Reykjavik's minuscule main street. Kitted out in immaculate baggy jeans, big coats and trainers, they're buying records and laughing - about the police stopping our lift for driving with an unsuitable bonnet, the 70s porn film soundtracks and Prodigy bootlegs Kiddi has in his racks. Laughing at pretty much everything until they fall asleep on the plane home. The bastards have a lot to be cheerful about. 'History Repeating', their Shirley Bassey collaboration, is all over the place. Their version of the James Bond theme 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' soundtracks a crucial chase sequence in the film 'Tomorrow Never Dies'. Their debut album, 'Decksandrumsandrockandroll' is ready for release and despite intense pursuit by assorted major labels, they've remained part of the independent Wall Of Sound family of "underdog nutters" they clearly love so well. "It sounds really cheesy but it is a family thing," Alex says later. "Everyone on Wall Of Sound is working together to push this thing."

This thing being the dance music phenomenon known as 'big beat', but more about that later. But first, Kiddi buys us all a huge, lovely Icelandic meal of fish soup and lamb and beef, washed down with plenty of Viking lager. He takes the Props off to sort their records and points photographer Dean and I towards the Café Au Lait, which will close down tonight after local Beastie Boys soundalikes Quarashi have finished their set and trashed the place. Now we can understand why Reykjavik likes the Propellerheads so much. It's like London's Blue Note in here. Boys in hooded fleeces and kitsch 70s gear nod their heads to cool trip hop while pretty pixie chicks roll their eyes at each other. At least one is the spit of Bjork (she's in town, apparently). Both this, and Café Barrin (part-owned by Damon Albarn), are painfully trendy in that combat-trousered bohemian way, soundtracked by DJs who demonstrate superbly eclectic taste, flipping through Kraftwerk to Les Rhythmes Digitales and Joy Division. "It tends to be the case here that people don't give a shit about music unless it's good," says Will, later. And competition between DJs is fierce. We meet a tattooed young artist called Harpa who says she's sold pictures to Keith Prodigy and Skunk Anansie's Skin, and a Jarvis Cocker lookalike who says he stayed with the nylon bombshell for three weeks in London.

We get drunk and head for the Moon Club to hear the Props play a DJ set. At 1am it is empty. At 2.30 it's rammed and the entire club seems to be standing on the speakers screaming their tits off to 'Take California' and 'History Repeating' and other choice floorfillers from the Propellerheads back catalogue. At 4.30am a small blonde in a red plastic dress and Santa hat gives us a lift back to our hotel while local radio DJ Johnny Five points out the hundreds of drunk Icelanders who like to flood the main streets at this time. NEXT to the Chemical Brothers, who convincingly rule the roost, The Propellerheads are the sexiest band in the world of big beat. Deservedly. Their live shows - Alex DJing and playing keyboards, Will drumming out live breaks - generally blow the joint up. Singles like 'Take California' and 'Dive' are breakbeat classics: all minimal little squelches and crisp, rolling rhythms, skirting the brink of chaos with a charmingly funky feel. (They say they'd like to be the Parliament of big beat.) Then there's the Shirley Bassey collaboration which won't have harmed anyone's career, especially as Alex got to write the lyrics. Their remix of 808 State's 'Lopez', a rolling indie-breakbeat soundclash that starred Manic Street Preacher James Dean Bradfield on vocals, was astonishing and powerful. And if their debut album seems to be more of a collection of grooves and hits than an accomplished whole in its own right, it's still a whole lot of fun. Indeed, there is a very silly side to the Propellerheads, sniggering away in the kitsch vocal samples on 'Velvet Pants' (about a taut pair of male buttocks) and the Hendrix-style powerchord guitar of 'Bang On 1'. "Our tunes are very much party tunes," notes Alex. "It does seem to connect with happy people, rather than people who are anal about stuff." You mean the kind of people who stroke their chins while mumbling stuff like "interesting use of the bassline"? "Yeah. Senseless use of the bassline, that's more what we're about. Inadvisable use of the bassline."

The only problem facing the happy-go-lucky Propellerheads is that, like many bands under the big beat umbrella, they sound a little bit like an early Chemical Brothers track, say something off the '14th Century Sky' EP. Though 'History Repeating' and 'Winning Style', the album's 'Green Onions'-style 60s jam, hint at other potential directions. Alex readily admits to the "huge effect" the Chemical Brothers had on the Props first forming. Especially - yep - 1994's '14th Century Sky' ("such a groundbreaking record") and a party the Chems DJed at for Deconstruction Records during Manchester's In The City music conference that same year. Alex was playing with The Grid at the time, who'd just performed at The Academy. It was a great party. People were bouncing off the ceiling. I was there. So were Kylie Minogue, Boy George, and our fashion editor Kirsty, who was enjoying herself so much she forgot the editor of Los Angeles dance mag Urb was still locked in the boot of her car. "There's always amazing moments going on," says Alex, "and you don't really notice." Another pivotal moment for him was last year's Essential Festival in Brighton - dominated by the Skint/Wall Of Sound tent. "All these nutter underdogs who basically play at being really madcap and stuff," he grins, "in this little tent at the top of the hill. Of all the festival, it just had a neon sign on the top of it that just said 'FUN'."

THERE are two great myths in big beat. One is that the DJs will play anything. When actually, they'll play anything as long as it sounds like an early Chemical Brothers record. During two excellent DJ sets I hear the Propellerheads drop just two records that don't include a breakbeat and a dirty acid noise: Motörheads 'Ace Of Spades' and Beastie Boys 'Fight For Your Right To Party'. Big beat offers a refreshing, energetic alternative to house and techno, but surely its formulas are as rigid in their own way? Alex disagrees. "It's all loosely held together with a breakbeat. I think that's the only link," he says. "Musically it's very broad. Obviously the difference between us and The Prodigy is huge." Well maybe. Myth number two is that the Chemical Brothers started big beat because they were jaded with the metronome beat-fascism and do-anything-for-the-cash attitudes of the bloated house mainstream. This is easily proved: most major players on the big beat scene started out raving and clubbing, Chemicals and Propellerheads included. "I don't think there was any escaping it," recalls Will, who grew up in Frome in Somerset, surrounded by countless free parties and travellers' raves and who, like Alex, is clearly bitterly disillusioned with the superclubbing state of house today. "I don't wanna sound purist but experiencing the really early acid house parties," he adds, "and seeing just a lot of money moving in and completely raping what was..." His voice tails off in remembered disappointment. "If you're gonna do dance music then it should connect your hip bone and your knee bone to your ankle bone and all that shit," says Alex. "And not necessarily require some chemical link from your head to your hands so that you can make cardboard boxes. Because there's machines that do that [make cardboard boxes] really well." He also says something else about house music today. He says: "If you want music that sounds good on pills, you've got to have some decent pills..."

Propellerheads continue