Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons origins were auspicious enough: A couple of students at Manchester University in the late '80s who shared a love of American dance music and hip-hop. As DJs for a party called Naked Under Leather who also enjoyed going out dancing, they developed a sense of what made for a great Saturday night dance floor smash.
Just eight years after they met, the duo formerly known as the Dust Brothers had rebranded as the Chemical Brothers and were conquering MTV with their second full-length album. Released on April 7, 1997, Dig Your Own Hole placed Rowlands and Simons at the forefront of a renewed American interest in dance music, which had been bubbling at underground clubs and raves since the early '90s and finally boiled over.
Though it draws from the divergent sounds of psychedelic rock, hip-hop and techno, Dig Your Own Hole advanced a cohesive and bombastic sound that was unexpected in many mainstream circles. It is sequenced to mimic a continuously mixed DJ set, with the end of one song flowing seamlessly into the beginning of the next. The album’s structure and music videos brought additional visibility to the way dance music is consumed: on the dancefloor, with a DJ and lots of body shaking energy.
Directed by buzzing producers like Spike Jonze and Michele Gondry, the album's slick and visually-arresting videos channeled a rousing club energy. Videos for lead singles "Block Rockin' Beats" (which samples rapper Schoolly D, among others) and the Noel Gallagher-voiced rager "Setting Sun" were featured heavily on MTV in show bumpers, and on a music video program called "Amp."
“These all offered a glimpse into a much more interesting world and culture that was extremely enticing and inviting to young Americans," says Errol Kolosine, then a manager at Astralwerks, the Chemical Brothers’ U.S. label.
Interest from MTV wasn’t confined to the Viacom high-rise. MTV staffers were an enthusiastic presence at label tours and parties: "They were legit fans of the music and so in that sense they were co-conspirators, with the videos being featured on 'Amp' seeping their way onto regular playlists,” Kolosine continues.
The Chemical Brothers also appeared on two successful Amp compilations, which pointed even more sales to Dig Your Own Hole. Just five months after its release, the album was certified gold by the RIAA — a remarkable achievement for an electronic music act. Among their contemporaries in the UK, only Fatboy Slim and Prodigy achieved Gold status in the United States.
Yet as their popularity rose, Rowlands and Simons preferred to keep a low profile — even in their own videos, with the exception of a brief cameo in "Block Rockin' Beats" — and weren't exactly comfortable being the poster children for a dance revolution.
"What do you think about MTV proclaiming techno music as the next big thing?" a fan nicknamed "Plexus" asked the Chemical Brothers during an online chat on MTV.com in 1997, not long after they released Dig Your Own Hole.
"Not a lot," they replied cheekily.
"We're in this weird position of being in America and being seen as the leaders of the dance music explosion that's happening there when most of the inspiration we've had has come from America, as anyone can hear on the new album," Simons elaborated later that year in a cover story for the trendy English magazine The Face. "It's ridiculous that they see the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers as the dance music."
Rowlands and Simons thought this adulation was absurd. They idolized visionary Black Americans like Chicago’s house music godfather Frankie Knuckles and Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins, who were major influences on U.K. dance music but hadn’t gotten their due in the States. They were also inspired by the power of beatmakers like Public Enemy producers the Bomb Squad.
As the duo had tapped America's dance craze, the Chemical Brothers also found favor with rock fans after Dig Your Own Hole was embraced by rock radio stations (their previous album, Exit Planet Dust, didn't receive the same airplay). As a result, a sector of rock fans tapped into their electronic vibe despite a lack of the genre’s central instrument.
"It's hard to think what components of rock music are actually in [Block Rockin' Beats]," Rowlands told the New York Times in 1999. "There aren't any. There's no guitar. There's no singer, yet somebody can hear in that record a spirit or sort of a looseness or sort of an energy or something that reminds them of rock music."
"We encountered our share of resistance," Kolosine tells GRAMMY.com. "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 'Setting Sun' is one of the most radical pieces of music to achieve that kind of success here, especially on the radio. But we all took a great deal of pride at achieving those successes with artists and songs we were told would never work here.
"I certainly saw it quite differently in that I considered this music to be a powerful force to bring people of different types together," he added, "so it did feel like we were moving the culture forward when we succeeded."
The success continued with a GRAMMY win and two nominations in 1998, taking home a golden gramophone for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Block Rockin' Beats." And Rowlands and Simons started finding out that they had a growing number of famous admirers: George Harrison, who was also sampled on "Setting Sun" and served as an inspiration for the album's Beatles tribute "The Private Psychedelic Reel," sent over a signed copy of his 1969 album Electronic Sound.
"We met Simon Le Bon," Simons told SPIN in 1997. The Duran Duran frontman was a fan, and he let them know. "He was out of his mind. He was singing us his new song, and saying he wanted a remix. He said 'Setting Sun' was the best thing he'd heard in the 1990s. Me and Tom were at a loss for words. We started mumbling about 'Rio' and 'Ordinary World.'"
Twenty-five years have passed since the release date, and Dig Your Own Hole continues to provide inspiration for crate diggers. Samples of "Block Rockin' Beats" have been officially detected in 18 newer songs, including popular tracks by Fatboy Slim, Frontline Assembly, the Hood Internet and 2K (aka The KLF). The actual number of songs that have sampled or interpolated these beats under the radar is likely to be much higher, though.
The album's seamless, DJ-minded sequencing also helped to change the outlook of electronic dance artists, who could now make cohesive albums without sacrificing experimentation (or potential for success). With Dig Your Own Hole, the Chemical Brothers opened the door for other English electronic dance acts like Groove Armada, Dirty Vegas and Basement Jaxx to set their sights on America in the late '90s and early aughts.
The album's siren songs still have the depth to set off dancefloors worldwide. And the Chemical Brothers are still winning GRAMMYs, most recently Best Dance Recording (for "Got To Keep On") and Best Electronic/Dance Album (for their ninth studio album, No Geography) at the 2020 GRAMMY Awards. Rowlands and Simons are currently in the studio working on new music, because it's still their job to find those Saturday night smash hits.
A 25th anniversary reissue of Dig Your Own Hole with five additional tracks will be released on CD as well as 1,997 copies of limited edition vinyl on July 29.
